If there’s one theme that defined last week, it’s choice. The frontier models keep arriving, and the interesting question is no longer just “how smart is it?” but “which model fits this step, at this cost, at this latency?” That’s exactly what landed on Amazon Bedrock over the past few days: GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna from OpenAI, giving you two new points on the intelligence-versus-efficiency curve, and Claude Opus 5.5 from Anthropic, the first of the Claude 5.5 family.

GPT-6 Sol is built for the demanding, recurring work of development and operations, while GPT-6 Luna makes focused, repeatable tasks practical at high volume, and both ship at significantly lower pricing than their GPT-5.6 predecessors. Claude Opus 5.5, meanwhile, does more with fewer tokens than Opus 5 and is tuned for agentic coding and long-running tasks. What I like about all three is that they push toward the same idea: match the model to the job instead of reaching for the biggest one every time. The other thread was observability catching up to this agentic world, including a launch I had the pleasure of writing about myself.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Omni – You can now observe your applications and AI agents together in a single, collaborative experience. Amazon CloudWatch Omni is built on OpenTelemetry, so your existing telemetry shows up with nothing to reconfigure, and your whole team reaches it through one URL with enterprise SSO — no console access required. It auto-discovers your services, maps dependencies, and brings AWS DevOps Agent into investigation sessions to correlate signals and trace root causes. There’s a companion post on the agent-observability side, a deeper dive on the AWS Cloud Operations blog on what observability for the AI era looks like, and the announcement on What’s New with the specifics. If you want the bigger picture, Matt Wood’s Wrong, not broken is a great read on why correctness now has to be measured at the level of the run.

• Enhanced custom event buses in Amazon EventBridge – Amazon EventBridge now offers an enhanced custom event bus purpose-built for organizations scaling event-driven applications across teams and accounts. You can now deploy a single centralized bus shared across every account in your organization through AWS RAM, with optional event ordering, a simplified Subscriber resource that bundles filtering, targets, and retries, content-based deduplication, and synchronous invocation for targets like AWS Lambda. A new ingress/egress pricing model replaces the compounding cross-account routing charges of multi-bus setups, and your existing buses keep working unchanged as “classic.”

• Amazon SageMaker HyperPod Inference Gateway – You can now front your LLM inference on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod with a Kubernetes-native, GPU-aware routing layer that deploys as a single Amazon EKS managed add-on with zero application changes. Instead of round-robin load balancing, it routes on real-time inference signals — KV cache utilization, queue depth, prefix cache hits, predicted latency, and more — cutting first-token latency by up to 82% in mixed-hardware and bursty scenarios. It works with any OpenAI-compatible model server, including vLLM and SGLang.

• AI agent skills for AWS End User Messaging and Amazon SES – You can now build and send messages by asking your AI coding agent in plain language. Amazon SES and AWS End User Messaging publish AI agent skills for the AWS MCP Server, giving your agent step-by-step, validated guidance for tasks like verifying a sending identity, sending a production email, or building a branded RCS agent with cards and buttons. The skills work with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Kiro, so you can complete messaging workflows without hopping between docs and console screens.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Introducing Strands harness – The Strands Agents team released Strands harness, a fully assembled, general-purpose agent harness you can run locally or deploy anywhere, under Apache 2.0. It takes one line of Python or TypeScript to wire up your model of choice across Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or a local Ollama model, and it ships with sensible defaults for prompt caching and context management (truncating bulky tool results, compacting when the context window fills up, and keeping memory across runs). The team reports it costs about 28% less than comparable harnesses on the same models while holding accuracy steady.

• Announcing the new AWS Reimagine report on AI – The AWS Executive in Residence team spent nine months interviewing 154 leaders across 27 countries about what separates organizations that turn AI into value from those that don’t. The report is candid (including where AI hasn’t worked at Amazon), and the recurring insight is that once building gets fast, the bottleneck moves to deciding, funding, and governing the work. Well worth a read if you’re thinking about how your teams adopt AI in practice.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS re:Invent – AWS re:Invent returns to Las Vegas from November 30 to December 4, and session times, locations, and speakers are live. Reserved seating opens October 6, so register now and be ready to claim your spot in chalk talks, workshops, and builders’ sessions.

• AWS Summits – With re:Invent on the horizon, the Summits are wrapping up for the year. The last stop is Dubai (September 30) at the Dubai World Trade Center, with 60+ sessions, an AWS Village, and hands-on workshops.

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events. That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Daniel Abib

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: GPT-6 Sol and Luna, Claude Opus 5.5 on Amazon Bedrock, Strands harness, and more (September 28, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Organizations building event-driven applications on Amazon EventBridge typically start with a single custom event bus in one account. This works well when a single team owns the architecture. As adoption grows across the organization, though, things get complicated. AWS best practices recommend a multi-account structure, which means each team runs in its own account. To route events between them, teams create multiple event buses connected through cross-account rules or bus-to-bus configurations. This workaround reintroduces the operational complexity that serverless architectures are meant to eliminate. Platform teams lose visibility into who is subscribing to which events, cross-account and bus-to-bus routing charges compound quickly, and teams that need capabilities like event ordering are forced to build complex workarounds or adopt entirely different technologies.

Today, we are announcing an enhanced custom event bus in Amazon EventBridge, purpose-built for organizations scaling event-driven applications across teams and accounts. With the new enhanced custom event bus, you can deploy a single, centralized event bus shared across all AWS accounts in your organization, with ordering guarantees, a simplified Subscriber resource, and a new pricing model that delivers improved economics at scale and cost allocation for publishers and subscribers.

Let’s try it out
To get started with an enhanced custom event bus, I navigated to the EventBridge console in the AWS Management Console and opened the Create custom event bus page. I selected Custom event bus, the recommended option labeled New. The page also offered Custom event bus – classic, which continues to receive events and route them with rules and targets. Below the selection, EventBridge showed how the new bus works. One shared bus serves every team in the organization. Publishers send events, subscribers consume only what they need, and EventBridge handles ordering, retention, routing, and delivery.

The Create custom event bus page. Custom event bus is the recommended new option, with ordered delivery, filter patterns, event replay, and sharing across your AWS organization. Custom event bus – classic remains available for existing workloads.

Next, I configured resource sharing. I turned on Enable event bus sharing and selected Allow sharing only within your organization. I chose AWS account ID as the principal type. I could also share with an organization, an organizational unit, or an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role or user. Sharing uses AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM), so I did not have to set up cross-account permissions or bus-to-bus routing myself.

Resource sharing on the new custom event bus. I enabled sharing within my organization through AWS RAM and selected an AWS account as the principal, which is how teams publish and subscribe on the same bus without extra routing.

Organization-wide sharing
With the new enhanced custom event bus, you can create a single event bus and share it across all AWS accounts in your organization. Platform teams deploy one bus and establish it as the central event backbone, eliminating the need to configure cross-account permissions or bus-to-bus routing. Application teams across your organization can publish and subscribe to events on the same bus without waiting for infrastructure provisioning.

Publishers send events without needing to know which teams consume them, and subscribers create their own Subscriptions independently. Platform teams maintain visibility into all event flows and fine-grained control over who can publish and consume events. The new enhanced custom event bus has a default quota of 10,000 Subscribers per bus, and you can request a higher quota. That reduces the fragmentation that occurs when subscriber limits force you to split across multiple buses.

Event ordering
Event-driven architectures work best when consumers are designed around asynchronous patterns, where the order of events does not matter. There are a few cases where order does matter. In a logistics application, driver location updates must arrive in sequence. Out-of-sequence events cause routing algorithms to make decisions based on stale data.

The enhanced custom event bus supports both patterns on the same bus. Publishers can include an EventGroupId when sending events. EventBridge delivers events that share the same EventGroupId in sequence to Subscribers that chose ordered delivery. Other subscribers on that bus can receive the same events without ordering. You can keep events for each driver in the correct order without building complex workarounds, while the rest of your consumers stay fully asynchronous.

To support ordered processing, the enhanced custom event bus includes synchronous invocation for targets like AWS Lambda. Synchronous mode confirms successful processing before acknowledging the event, eliminating the common pattern of placing Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) between an event bus and Lambda to ensure reliability.

Subscriptions
The enhanced custom event bus introduces the Subscriber resource, which combines event filtering, target configuration, retry policies, and dead-letter destinations into a single, manageable unit. Today, achieving the same outcome with EventBridge requires configuring separate rules, targets, and retry settings across multiple resources. Subscribers simplify this by giving each consumer one resource that defines what events they want, where to deliver them, and how to handle failures.

Subscribers also include variable start time options, making it easier for teams to onboard new consumers or replay events to recover from application errors or hydrate new applications.

Event evaluation
Publishers can turn on content-based deduplication so EventBridge detects and drops retries of the same event from the payload itself. You do not have to generate and track a deduplication ID when a timeout or a partial failure sends the same event twice. EventBridge hashes the meaningful parts of the event and collapses matches that arrive within five minutes, which gives those retries exactly-once delivery semantics instead of EventBridge’s usual at-least-once model. If you already stamp your own idempotency token, keep using it. Content-based deduplication is for sources that cannot reliably identify the same event on a retry.

Subscribers can use JSONata expressions to reshape an event before it reaches a target, extracting fields, renaming them, or computing new values when a downstream API expects a different shape. If you already produce Apache Avro or Protocol Buffers events, EventBridge can deserialize those payloads to JSON, allowing subscribers fine grained filtering and routing on the full event payload without having to consume, deserialize, and match or discard on their own.

New pricing model
The enhanced custom event bus uses a new ingress and egress throughput pricing model. Publishers pay for events ingested, and subscribers pay for events delivered. This replaces the per-event model where cross-account and bus-to-bus routing charges compound in multi-bus architectures. For pricing details, visit the EventBridge pricing page.

Existing EventBridge custom event buses continue to work as they do today with no changes required. They now appear as Custom event bus – classic. The enhanced custom event bus is a new resource that you adopt at your own pace. In the console, it appears as Custom event bus.

Now available
The enhanced custom event bus is available today in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Spain), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Thailand, Tokyo) Regions. You can create your first enhanced custom event bus through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or EventBridge APIs. To get started, visit the EventBridge documentation or try it out directly in the EventBridge console.

The post Introducing enhanced custom event buses in Amazon EventBridge for enterprise-scale event-driven applications appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Amazon CloudWatch now offers CloudWatch Omni, an AI-powered observability experience for the applications and AI agents you run together. You reach Omni through a dedicated URL for your organization and sign in with the identities you already manage, so working in Omni does not require access to the AWS Management Console. Omni is built on OpenTelemetry: the telemetry you already send to CloudWatch appears in Omni with nothing to reconfigure, and any other workload you instrument with OpenTelemetry sends its telemetry to an OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) endpoint.

CloudWatch Omni offers both agent observability and application observability in a single experience. In our companion post, we introduced the agent observability capabilities of Omni for generative AI and agentic workloads. In this post, we present the application observability experience.

Engineering teams spend a significant portion of their observability time maintaining dashboards, tuning thresholds, and switching between tools to piece together what happened during an incident. When an issue crosses team boundaries, context gets lost in Slack threads and screenshots rather than flowing naturally to the next engineer. CloudWatch Omni changes this by organizing observability around your applications rather than individual signals, and bringing your whole team into the same workspace.

What CloudWatch Omni brings
CloudWatch Omni addresses three problems that engineering teams told us they face today.

One collaborative experience for your whole team. Every engineer accesses CloudWatch Omni through a single URL with enterprise SSO (via IAM Identity Center, supporting Okta, Azure AD, and other providers). No AWS Console access is required. SREs, developers, database engineers, and managers share the same data and investigation context. When an investigation escalates, the next person joins the same session with full context already in front of them.

The system adapts as your applications evolve. CloudWatch Omni discovers your services, maps dependencies, and adjusts alarms automatically. Instead of manually curating dashboards and tuning thresholds, you declare what matters (availability targets, latency budgets, error rate thresholds) and Omni adapts as your system changes. When you deploy new services, Omni updates the application topology automatically.

AI-powered investigation with Amazon DevOps Agent. Amazon DevOps Agent participates alongside your team in investigation sessions, correlating signals and suggesting next steps. The agent works from the same telemetry your engineers see, so its suggestions are grounded in the actual state of your application. It identifies correlated events across services, traces root cause paths through your dependency graph, and maintains investigation history for post-incident review.

How an investigation works
When something breaks, CloudWatch Omni opens an investigation session pre-loaded with context. Here is a typical incident workflow:

An alarm fires on elevated error rates in your checkout service. Omni opens a session showing the service topology, correlated signals (a deployment 10 minutes earlier, increased latency from a downstream payment API), and DevOps Agent’s initial analysis.

Your on-call SRE confirms the deployment correlation, pulls in the trace view to identify failing endpoints, and checks if the payment API latency correlates with a capacity limit.

The SRE escalates to the payments team. The payments engineer joins the same session and sees everything found so far, plus DevOps Agent’s correlation with a configuration change in the payment provider’s API gateway. They identify the root cause and roll back.

The entire investigation history is captured automatically. No separate incident report needed.

Walkthrough: setting up your first Space
To set up CloudWatch Omni for your team, open the CloudWatch console and click “Try CloudWatch Omni.”

Figure 1. CloudWatch console — Omni setup page

Next, connect your identity provider through IAM Identity Center (supporting Okta, Azure AD, and other SAML 2.0 providers). Once connected, your team members access Omni directly at your dedicated URL without needing AWS Console credentials.

Create a Space for your team. A Space groups the applications your team owns and the telemetry associated with them.

Figure 2. CloudWatch Omni Home — your team’s workspace with application monitoring, analytics, and agent observability

Once created, Omni discovers your services automatically and maps the dependencies between them. You see your application topology immediately.

Figure 3. Application topology — services and dependencies mapped automatically

You can ask CloudWatch Omni any question about your applications in plain English, and Omni will analyze your telemetry data and surface insights.

Figure 4. Interact with your telemetry in natural language

You can also set up service health alerts, configure what matters to your team, and trigger an AWS DevOps agent investigation to identify the root cause and develop a mitigation plan.

Figure 5. Investigation session — DevOps Agent identifies root causes and suggests next steps

Application-centric organization
CloudWatch Omni organizes telemetry by application rather than by infrastructure component. The system automatically discovers services from the telemetry data and AWS Config resource discovery, maps dependencies, and lets you see your application as a connected system rather than a collection of isolated resources.

Each team gets a Space that contains the applications they own. A Space points at existing CloudWatch data (logs, metrics, traces, and alarms) with no additional data movement required. Dynamic views replace the maintenance burden of static dashboards, providing ongoing visibility into SLOs and application health.

Getting started
Getting started takes minutes and doesn’t require reconfiguration of your existing CloudWatch setup.

If you’re an existing CloudWatch customer: Click “Try CloudWatch Omni” in the CloudWatch console. All your existing telemetry (logs, metrics, traces, and alarms) is immediately available. Workloads are discovered automatically, and you can start an investigation or browse your application topology right away.

For organization-wide deployment: An administrator configures a domain, connects your identity provider via IAM Identity Center, defines Spaces for teams and environments, and invites users. Each Space points at existing CloudWatch data with no additional data movement required.

For applications in other environments: CloudWatch Omni provides connectors that make it easy to bring in telemetry from additional environments. All ingested telemetry appears alongside your AWS data in the same Spaces and investigation sessions.

For generative AI and agentic workloads: The same CloudWatch Omni experience delivers purpose-built observability for AI agents, including trace exploration, evaluation frameworks, and real-time monitoring. In our companion post, we introduced the agent observability capabilities of Omni; for that walkthrough, see Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Omni: AI-powered observability for generative AI and agentic workloads.

Things to know

• CloudWatch Omni extends CloudWatch. Existing alarms, dashboards, APIs, and console workflows continue unchanged.
• Access is through a dedicated web application with enterprise SSO. Engineers don’t need AWS Console access to use it.
• Once you setup, DevOps Agent is enabled by default in every Omni investigation session.

Pricing and availability
Amazon CloudWatch Omni is now available. Existing CloudWatch customers can try it directly from the CloudWatch console. For pricing details, visit the Amazon CloudWatch pricing page.

To get started, visit Amazon CloudWatch Omni or click “Try CloudWatch Omni” in the Amazon CloudWatch console.

If you want to call APIs, search documentation, find regional availability, and check troubleshooting about this feature, try using the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI tool. Share your feedback on AWS re:Post or reach out through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Daniel Abib

The post Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Omni: collaborative AI-powered observability for your applications appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Living in the Netherlands, I spend a fair amount of time on trains, and that is usually where I catch up on what the builder community is writing. Until now, that meant opening a laptop or squinting at a browser tab on my phone. This week I found myself scrolling through trending articles and checking a workshop from the AWS Builder Center mobile app while waiting for a delayed train, and it made those spare twenty minutes very useful. That is why I am glad to open this week with the Builder Center mobile app.

AWS Builder Center is now available as a mobile app on iOS and Android, extending the experience beyond desktop and web. Using your AWS Builder ID, you stay signed in across sessions and can browse trending articles, access 600+ AWS Skill Builder courses, and manage hands-on workshops with free sandbox environments from your mobile device. You can follow AWS Heroes, Community Builders, and User Group Leaders, check Builder Loft event calendars on the go, and receive push notifications for subscribed topics and communities. The app also supports the Wishlist feature for submitting product feedback directly to AWS teams. It is available worldwide on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Builder Center also added two features this week. Polls give you a way to ask the community a question from the Home feed: write a question, add 2 to 5 answer options, set a deadline, and people vote, with results updating live and discussion happening in the comments. Votes are anonymous, and creators see aggregate counts and percentages only. Separately, the Zero to Shipped hackathon is open from September 18 to October 2. You connect your coding agent to AWS, build a real application, and ship it live on AWS for a chance to win a share of a $28,000 prize pool. Five winning projects each receive $5,000 in AWS credits and an AWS Builder swag bundle.

Last week’s launches
Here is what else happened this week.

• Amazon Connect Talent is now generally available – Amazon Connect Talent is an AI-powered hiring solution for talent acquisition teams managing hiring at scale. Informed by decades of Amazon hiring science, it uses AI agents to conduct structured voice interviews, administer evidence-based assessments, and score candidates consistently, so recruiters can focus on final decisions. Candidates interview 24/7 from any device, and recruiters review scores, transcripts, and detailed evaluations the next morning. All candidate data is anonymized during AI evaluation, each competency is scored against a rubric with every score tied to specific evidence from the interview, and recruiters keep final decision authority over every hire. General availability includes competency-based assessments, AI-led voice interviews with adaptive questioning, a brand-customizable mobile-first candidate portal, and admin onboarding tools.
• Amazon Corretto 27 is now generally available – Amazon Corretto 27, a Feature Release version of the no-cost, multi-platform distribution of OpenJDK, is now available for download on Linux, Windows, and macOS, with support through April 2027. Notable features include G1 as the default garbage collector across all environments (JEP 523), post-quantum hybrid key exchange for TLS 1.3 (JEP 527), compact object headers by default for a smaller memory footprint (JEP 534), and JFR in-process data redaction to remove sensitive data from Java Flight Recorder recordings before they leave the JVM (JEP 536). It also continues previews of enhanced pattern matching, structured concurrency, and lazy constants, along with the Vector API incubator.
• Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock – Kimi K3 is now available on Amazon Bedrock for coding and knowledge work. According to Moonshot AI, Kimi K3 is its most capable model and the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters. It combines native vision capabilities with a 1-million-token context window, making it well suited to long-running coding sessions across large repositories, multi-document analysis, and extended agent workflows. Moonshot AI reports an approximate 2.5x improvement in scaling efficiency over Kimi K2. Kimi K3 is the first open-weight model on Amazon Bedrock to support explicit prompt caching, which helps reduce latency and input costs when reusing context across model calls.
• AWS reimagines the getting started experience – We announced a new simplified experience for builders starting a new project. Instead of completing configuration tasks first, you start with sensible defaults: sign up using an existing identity from providers including Google, GitHub, and Apple, and for most new customers no credit card is required, with $100 in free credits as part of the AWS Free Tier. AWS organizes your work in a project, which contains an AWS account and sharing settings, and applies security controls for you. You can invite collaborators by email without setting up IAM users, set a monthly spend limit starting at $20, and activate advanced AWS features later at no additional cost with no migration. The experience is gradually rolling out to new customers.
• New low-cost burstable Amazon EC2 T8i instances are generally available – Amazon EC2 T8i instances, powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Granite Rapids), are among the lowest-cost EC2 instances and deliver up to 30% better price performance over previous-generation T3 instances. They are designed for low-to-moderate CPU utilization workloads such as microservices, low-traffic websites, development and testing environments, and small databases. T8i instances deliver up to 70% higher compute performance, up to 1.25x higher network bandwidth, and up to 2.4x higher Amazon EBS bandwidth compared to T3, and they use the same CPU credit system, so upgrading from T3 is straightforward.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk introduces Cluster Mode – AWS Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode is a new fully managed option for teams running a portfolio of applications on shared infrastructure powered by Amazon EKS. Instead of operating each application in isolation, you run multiple applications through one experience with a single operational baseline, so per-application cost decreases as your portfolio grows. You can upload source code in Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, or Go, and Elastic Beanstalk handles containerization automatically through Cloud Native Buildpacks when needed. Cluster Mode includes production-grade deployment strategies with automatic rollback, event-driven autoscaling, AWS Secrets Manager integration, native OpenTelemetry observability, and AI-powered troubleshooting. Standard and Cluster Mode environments run side by side within the same application, so teams can migrate one environment at a time.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Building in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud – Two new posts cover building on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, an independent cloud for Europe that runs as a distinct partition with its own control plane, IAM, billing, console, and service endpoints, and its first Region in Brandenburg, Germany. The first post walks through architecting a secure landing zone, covering account structure and governance, identity as infrastructure as code, centralized logging, data protection, and partition-aware ARN construction that works across AWS partitions. The second announces the general availability of Gemma 4 open-weight models on the Amazon Bedrock next-generation inference engine in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, with inference staying entirely within eusc-de-east-1 under a zero data retention and zero operator access model.
• The new AgentCore runtime: elastic, optimized, and consistently fast starts – We announced a new version of the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime, the managed compute layer for running agents. The new runtime reclaims memory as a session releases it rather than holding it at the peak, so the bill tracks real usage over the life of a session. It also delivers consistent cold start times regardless of container image size or concurrency by preparing the environment once, snapshotting it, and restoring that snapshot for each new instance. In testing with an empty echo agent, the new runtime delivered a P75 cold start of about 2 seconds from a 200 MB image up to 2 GB, compared to roughly 5.4 to nearly 30 seconds for the original runtime.
• Introducing the updated AWS Well-Architected Streaming Media Lens – We published a revised Streaming Media Lens, which provides architectural best practices for video streaming workloads. The revision expands from the original 2021 version to cover five streaming scenarios, including interactive live streaming with Amazon IVS Real-Time Streaming for up to 25,000 concurrent viewers, low-latency live streaming, and ad-supported content monetization, alongside enhanced video-on-demand and live streaming guidance. It also adds new sustainability best practices focused on reducing carbon footprint, expanded observability and incident-response frameworks, and advanced content protection with multi-layered DRM and forensic watermarking. The lens whitepaper and custom lens are available now.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS re:Invent – AWS re:Invent returns to Las Vegas from November 30 to December 4. 2, 200+ session times, locations, and speakers are live. Reserved seating for AWS re:Invent opens October 6. Register now and be ready to claim your spot in chalk talks, workshops, and builders’ sessions when reserved seating opens.
• AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free in-person events covering cloud and AI. With re:Invent on the horizon, the Summits are coming to an end for the year. The last Summit is Dubai (September 30) at the Dubai World Trade Center, with 60+ sessions, an AWS Village, and hands-on workshops.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Lebanon (September 26), Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (September 26), Cebu, Philippines (September 26), Davao, Philippines (September 26), ComSum Manchester, UK (October 1), and Italy, Rome (October 2).

Summer has officially given way to September, but the weather where I am has not quite caught up. The days are still unusually warm, and I suspect these are the last mild afternoons before autumn settles in for good. I am making the most of them while they last. Come back next week for more!

— Esra

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center mobile apps, Amazon Connect Talent GA, Amazon Corretto 27, and more (September 21, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

The templates in this collection cover many common production needs, including titles, logo reveals, slideshows, video openers, intros, lower thirds, animated typefaces, and icons. Some provide a complete sequence, while others handle one specific part of a larger edit. Colors, typography, footage, audio, and timing can usually be changed to suit personal and client projects.

Free templates vary considerably in quality. Some are carefully organized and include helpful documentation, while others may require fonts, plugins, presets, or older versions of After Effects. Checking these details before downloading will save time later.

The best results come from treating an After Effects template as a foundation rather than a finished design. Small changes to the pacing, type, color, and movement can make a familiar animation feel far more appropriate for your content. The collections below offer plenty of options for different styles, skill levels, and video formats.

What to Look for in an After Effects Template

A polished preview does not tell you everything about a template. Before downloading, check how the project was built and whether it will work with your version of After Effects.

• After Effects compatibility: Confirm the minimum version required to open the project.
• Plugin requirements: Check whether the template relies on paid or third-party plugins.
• Included assets: See whether fonts, sound effects, music, footage, and images are supplied or need to be downloaded separately.
• Project dimensions: Check the resolution, frame rate, orientation, and duration.
• Layer organization: Clearly named compositions, layers, and placeholders will make editing much simpler.
• Documentation: Look for written instructions or a video showing how the main controls work.
• License terms: Confirm whether commercial and client work is permitted and whether attribution is required.

Titles After Effects Templates

A title sequence is often the first design element viewers see, so typography, timing, and movement all matter. Even a simple title can give a video personality and prepare the viewer for what follows.

Designing animated titles from scratch is rewarding, but it can also take hours of testing keyframes, transitions, and effects. A good template handles much of that groundwork while leaving plenty of room for your own creative choices.

This collection features free title templates for a range of styles and project types. Each can be customized in After Effects with your preferred text, colors, fonts, and timing to create an opening that fits your video.

800+ Text Effect Elements for After Effects

This extensive After Effects template includes over 800 animated text effect elements. Each element is easy to edit with simple text and color controls. These text elements are perfect for bold titles, clean openers, and social videos that need modern animated typography.

2001 Space Odyssey Movie Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This free title template recreates the 2001 Space Odyssey film’s familiar typography style and effects in After Effects. You can quickly adjust the text size and spacing for unique branding while honoring the original 2001 look.

Retro Movie Titles for After Effects

Try the Retro Movie Titles template if you’re looking for retro-style typography. The template comes with easily editable layers and full color control, making it easy to customize the title to match your brand.

Glitch Text Maker for After Effects

The glitch effect will help make your videos stand out. This template pack makes it easy to add your own text and is a perfect choice for anyone looking for a retro or vintage effect.

Switch To Text Box Titles After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free kinetic title template includes seven scenes with two media placeholders. Each element is labeled to help speed up the editing process, and the design is suitable for various purposes, including corporate slideshows and personal videos.

Liquid Animation Titles for After Effects

This well-organized title animation opener template is ideal for promoting anything. It contains 110 animated elements pre-rendered into .mov files with a JPEG + Alpha codec. It also includes nine pre-designed text scenes, and you can easily add more.

Flipped Titles After Effects Template

Free to Download

Flipped Titles is a clean and well-organized free template for After Effects. It includes seven unique full-screen titles with some cool and creatively animated effects.

Simplicity Title Pack for After Effects

This After Effects pack includes over 60 different titles. The titles are modern and minimal, making them suitable for most projects.

Swirling Letters Title Template for After Effects

Free to Download

Add a simple yet impressive title to your next video project with this free swirling letters titles template. Easily add a video, edit the text, and match your colors to make this title template your own.

Elegant Serif Titles for After Effects

If you’re looking for an elegant After Effects Title template, look no further than this template pack. It includes 16 different typography styles and a detailed help file to help you customize the project to your needs.

Poly Titles After Effects Titles & Graphics

Free to Download

These title templates will come in handy if you want to give your titles an abstract look and feel. The template includes nine different titles and graphics, and it is easy to customize with your own colors.

4K Rolling Titles for After Effects

This modular 4K After Effects template includes 10 title scenes with up-and-down rolling text animations. It offers editable timing controls and easy text customization. It is ideal for openers, title sequences, or social media videos that need modern kinetic typography.

Basic Animated Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template includes animated titles and lower thirds in a clean, minimal style. It’s simple to edit with text placeholders and color controls. Great for presentations, YouTube videos, or social content that needs clear and simple text animation with no extra setup.

4K Fullscreen Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This 4K After Effects template includes nine full-screen animated titles. Each title template is fully editable with text and color controls. These clean titles are ideal for openers, presentations, or promotional videos that need a clear, modern, and simple title animation.

Clean & Simple After Effects Titles

Free to Download

This free titles template has a modern aesthetic, with smooth animations and beautiful typography. The title is easy to customize with editable text and color controls. It is perfect for corporate videos or presentations that need a quick title animation with a professional look. It is compatible with After Effects 2023 and above.

Minimal Titles Pack for After Effects

Free to Download

This Free Minimal Titles pack includes 20 animation styles and titles and a royalty-free music track that can be used even in commercial projects. To use it, you just need to add your text and render the file.

Tagline Bold Title Template for After Effects

Free to Download

Make your headlines pop with this bold titles template. It is a collection of 25 free-to-download titles that can be quickly customized to match your brand.

Cinematic Title Style Library for After Effects

Free to Download

This style library for After Effects and Adobe Premiere is a great way to add style to your titles without wasting time creating them from scratch. You can quickly download and import this style library and use it in your projects.

Pop-Up Titles After Effects Templates

Free to Download

If you’re looking for stylish typography, use this free pop-up title template for After Effects. The template allows you to edit the text and customize your titles’ colors and duration.

Classic Kinetic Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

Free Classic Kinetic Titles is a universal and multi-purpose title template perfect for your company’s business presentations. The project includes a color controller for quick changes and editable text layers.

Modern After Effects Titles Template

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a smooth and elegant title pack, check out this pack of six free After Effects titles. The titles feature a fresh and modern style that’s perfect for young startups and small businesses.

Logo Reveal After Effects Templates

Logo reveals turn a static brand mark into a short animated sequence. By combining motion, sound, and visual effects, they give a logo more presence at the beginning or end of a video.

The best logo animations are usually brief. A few well-timed movements can say more than an overly complicated sequence, whether the logo belongs to a global company, a local business, or a personal creative project.

The free After Effects templates below cover styles ranging from restrained and minimal to energetic and cinematic. They can be adapted for promotional videos, presentations, social media, YouTube channels, and client work, subject to each template’s license.

Typographic Logo Intro for After Effects

This logo reveal or intro template uses bold typography and kinetic transitions to present your brand beautifully. It is easy to customize. Simply swap in your logo, edit the text, tweak the colors, then render. It would be an ideal template for app launches or brand reveals.

Click Three Logo Reveals for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects logo pack includes three reveals in a modern and minimal style. They include a simple circle reveal, a mouse click-to-reveal, and an animated button push.

White Scroll Logo Reveals for After Effects

If you’re looking for a more classic-style logo opener, try the White Scroll logo reveal. The template comes with three background versions and three different logo placement options.

Glitch Logo Reveal for After Effects Templates

Free to Download

This free After Effects logo reveal template uses pixelation and static noise to give your logo reveal a glitchy look and feel. This is a great template for gaming content or digital-themed videos.

Search Logo Reveal for After Effects

A unique way to reveal your logo is to use an animated search bar with a sample question. Your logo then shows up as the answer. You can customize the text and quickly drop in your logo.

4K Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This logo reveal template would be great for a startup or a small business. It is easy to use and includes detailed instructions on how to customize and render your logo reveal project.

Battle Logo Reveal for After Effects

The Battle Logo Reveal template would be perfect for a sports or gaming brand. It comes with a detailed help file, a logo placeholder, and an extensive set of backgrounds that you can use to customize your logo reveal.

Hi-Tech Logo Reveal for After Effects

This premium animated logo reveal features a dark blue background paired with light blue HUD elements. It’s a perfect logo template for any tech company looking to stand out online.

Super Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free logo reveal template features a clean and high-energy animation with bold transitions and dynamic light effects. It’s very easy to customize. All you have to do is drop in your logo and edit the colors or background. It is perfect for intros, brand openers, or YouTube channels that want a sharp, professional-looking logo animation without any extra setup.

Clean & Light Logo After Effects Template

Free to Download

This simple 4K logo reveal template is super-easy to make your own. All you have to do is swap out the logo placeholder and edit the text layer. It is compatible with After Effects CS6 and above.

MoGraph Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This logo reveal template uses MoGraph Lines. They are animated lines used to connect elements and add flow or rhythm to animated scenes. The template is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

MoGraph Logo Reveal Template

Free to Download

The MoGraph in this logo reveal templates are animated geometric elements used to create movement or transitions within a composition. This bold style is perfect for many business types. It is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

Another 2D Logo Introduction Template

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a 2D style logo reveal, try this 2D logo introduction Template. This template allows you to easily customize the colors and insert your own logo. It also includes a detailed help file.

Three Animated Logo Reveals for After Effects

Free to Download

This free template pack contains three different logo reveals suitable for any corporate video. This template is an excellent choice for a modern and professional logo reveal.

4K Logo Reveal v.1 After Effects Template

Free to Download

This elegant logo reveal would be perfect for a high-end fashion or luxury brand. The template includes logo placeholders, editable text layers, and an intelligent color controller.

Fast Flip After Effects Logo Reveal Template

Free to Download

The free Fast Flip After Effects logo reveal template is a great starting point if you’re on a budget. It uses stock photography, which you can replace with photos of your team or company to reveal an elegant logo at the end. All you have to do is customize the colors, replace the images, and add your logo.

Blue Action Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

Try the Blue Action Logo Reveal template if you’re looking for a minimalist logo opener. It features a dynamic animation style, and includes a logo placeholder and editable text layers. You can also easily adjust the colors.

Hiro Anime-Inspired Logo Reveal for After Effects

Free to Download

Try this logo reveal template if you’re looking for an action-packed, hi-tech animation style. To edit the project, drop your logo or text into the logo composition and then render the project.

Hi-Tech Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

If you want a logo reveal template designed in a Matrix-style, try the Hi-Tech Logo Reveal template. This template contains two color versions, logo placeholders, and two editable text layers.

Slideshow & Gallery After Effects Templates

A good slideshow depends on more than placing images in sequence. The order, timing, transitions, and music all influence how the work is presented. It can be used to showcase a portfolio, document an event, tell a visual story, or bring a set of photographs to life.

Galleries take a slightly different approach, displaying several images within the same composition. Grids, frames, and animated layouts allow related photos to be viewed together without making the screen feel crowded.

Building every layout and transition from scratch takes time. The free After Effects slideshow templates below have the structure, while giving you control over the images, colors, typography, pacing, and soundtrack.

Wall Gallery Photo Slideshow for After Effects

This After Effects template gives you a wall gallery-style photo slideshow with smooth camera moves and realistic lighting. It includes multiple image placeholders and editable text layers. It would be excellent for weddings, personal portfolios, or family photo collections.

Bold Slideshow for After Effects

Try the Bold Slideshow if you want a bold and colorful look. This template includes a detailed help file, editable placeholders and text layers, and full color control so you can easily customize the colors to match your brand.

Old Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Old Slideshow template is an excellent choice if you’re looking for a retro-style gallery or slideshow. The template comes with full-color control, so you can easily customize the color scheme.

Wall Slideshow for After Effects

Try the Wall Slideshow if you want a cool-looking, modern gallery to display your family photos and albums. The template is easy to customize and comes with full-color control.

Modern Zoom Telescopic Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This Modern Zoom Telescopic Slideshow Video features a unique zoom effect visualized through a telescopic transition. It also includes multiple light leaks and six image placeholders.

Slideshow Constructor for After Effects

This template features a vintage-style slideshow of polaroid photos. It’s a great choice if you want to combine all your photos and create a truly unique photo album.

Parallax Scrolling Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

Parallax is a popular animation effect used on many websites. Thanks to this template, you can also use the effect in your videos. This template contains nine image or video placeholders and nine text placeholders.

Creative Slideshow After Effects Template

This Creative Slideshow template features a dynamic, fast-paced animation style and bold typography. It would be perfect for a corporate video presentation and includes full-color controls and editable text layers.

Stylish Slideshow Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects slideshow template includes 23 image or video placeholders and six text layers. It has smooth transitions, clean animation, and allows for simple customization. Replace the media, edit the text, and render. It would be great for photo reels, travel videos, or quick promo videos.

Romantic Photo Slideshow Template for After Effects

This After Effects template creates a polaroid-style photo slideshow with a rustic aesthetic. It includes multiple media and text placeholders and would be perfect for wedding photoshoots, travel reels, or event highlights that need a vintage or a touch of romance.

Digital Film Strip for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template features a digital filmstrip animation with photo or video frames moving in sequence. It includes 18 media placeholders and 10 text layers. The layout is simple to edit and renders in full HD. It is compatible with After Effects CS4 and above.

Fast Slides After Effects Slideshow Template

Free to Download

Use this template if you’re working on a video that needs fast-moving animation. This slideshow would be perfect at the beginning of a video to introduce the different concepts.

Modern Tile Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Modern Tile Slideshow is an excellent choice for professional and corporate videos. The slideshow template features a unique, tiled look and a 3D tile drop-down effect to reveal your images and transition between them in 3D. The template also includes multiple light leaks.

Dynamic Colorful Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This dynamic template features a modern and colorful style paired with minimal typography. It’s an excellent choice for both business and personal video slideshows. The template includes 23 media placeholders, 19 editable text layers, and an intelligent color controller.

Stylish Spinning Columns Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

Consider the Stylish Spinning Columns Slideshow Template if you’re working on a high-end project. The template includes six image placeholders, a modern spinning column transition effect, and multiple light leaks.

Elegant Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This After Effects template is perfect for corporate and business slideshows. The template features elegant slide transitions and includes several placeholder images. You can easily add more and customize text and colors to match your brand.

After Effects Slideshow Templates

Free to Download

In this template, you will find 14 image placeholders arranged in a stunning grid layout. Thanks to the intelligent color controller, you can easily adjust the colors and replace the text with your own.

Clean Slideshow After Effects Templates

Free to Download

If you want a clean slideshow that you can use to present your family photos or if you need a clean slideshow for a corporate project, the Clean Slideshow template is the right choice. It features a stylish design, simple text animations, and smooth transitioning effects.

Opener After Effects Templates

Video openers have a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time. They combine footage, typography, graphics, and sound to establish the pace of a video before the main content begins.

Getting those elements to work together can involve detailed editing and plenty of keyframes. A pre-built template provides the timing and structure, while After Effects presets can help with individual animations and effects.

This collection includes free After Effects opener templates for YouTube videos, presentations, promotions, event films, and other creative projects. The styles range from quiet and minimal to fast, colorful, and effects-heavy. Replace the sample footage and text, adjust the colors, add your soundtrack, and shape the opener around your own content.

Colorful AE Opener Template

This creative and colorful opener template works well for travel, fashion, or kids’ brands. It’s also a great choice for simple video or photo slideshows, showreels, corporate presentations, or even a family album.

YouTube Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

This classic YouTube opener can be used in business and corporate projects. It comes with full-color control, and you can easily change the text and other elements to make it your own.

Glitch Media Opener for After Effects

Try this Glitch Media opener template for any grunge or retro-style video project. It comes with a detailed help file, animated fonts, and full color control

Mozaic Opener for After Effects

This mosaic opener template is versatile and works for many types of projects. It has a unique mosaic design, and you can easily add your own text and change the colors.

Colorful Sketch Speech Opener for After Effects

This After Effects opener has a fun, hand-drawn style with doodle textures and comic-style speech bubbles. It comes with six editable text spots, a logo slot, and a photo cut-out. It’s great for social media clips, creative presentations, or talk-show intros.

Good News Opener Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This After Effects opener uses bold text, smooth animation, and bright transitions to create a fresh news-style intro. The template is easy to edit with text and media placeholders. Replace the footage, update the titles, and render, and your intro will be ready.

Animated Slideshow Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

This slideshow-style opener template uses clean transitions, a simple layout, and subtle motion to present your photos or video clips. Just swap the placeholders with your media, edit the text and colors, then render. It is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

Dynamic Style Opener Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free 4K opener template provides a rapid editing setup for Adobe After Effects. It supports multiple aspect ratios (horizontal, vertical, and square). Use the horizontal format for YouTube, the vertical format for social media, and the square format for posts.

Dynamic & Fast After Effects Opener

This is another opener template that would work well for a company that targets a young audience. It features an energetic, fast-paced animation style. It comes with 16 image or video placeholders and six text placeholders.

Web Presentation Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template includes eight scenes and a logo reveal, making it ideal for promoting digital products or online services. It includes 45 text placeholders, 12 media placeholders, and a logo placeholder, along with color controllers for quick customization.

Parallax Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a stylish and elegant opener, look no further than this parallax opener. The template includes a stunning parallax animation with eight editable text layers, eight photo or video placeholders, and one logo placeholder.

Creative After Effects Opener

Try this template if you’re looking for a modern opener. It features a fast-paced animation in a slideshow style. You can easily change the colors and fonts, add your own elements, and render the project.

Elegant Corporate Intro AE Template

This elegant intro template can be used in corporate-style videos, weddings, or fashion projects. It includes eight text and image placeholders.

Short Opener After Effects Template

Free to Download

If you need something simple to quickly create a video opener, this is the free After Effects intro template you need. The template is as simple as possible, and you can easily customize colors and add your chosen text.

Glitch Effect Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

Looking for a sleek and edgy way to introduce your video? Check out this glitch template for After Effects. The best part is that no plugins are required – simply edit and render. Even if you’re new to After Effects, you’ll find this glitch intro template easy to customize to your needs.

Instagram Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

Use this opener to engage your Instagram or YouTube followers and stand out in their feed. The template comes with 27 image and video placeholders, 20 editable text layers, and one logo placeholder.

Modern Website Presentation AE Template

If you need a creative and unique way to present your design client work or portfolio, try this modern website presentation template. You can also use it to showcase your website templates or CMS themes.

Clean & Elegant After Effects Intro Templates

Free to Download

This free After Effects intro template comes with 15 image placeholders and can be used for corporate videos or any video promoting a fashion or jewelry brand.

Intro After Effects Templates

An intro gives recurring video content a consistent identity. It can combine a channel name, series title, logo, short clips, and music into a sequence that viewers soon recognize.

The most effective intros are usually short enough to avoid delaying the main content. Clear typography, purposeful movement, and well-timed sound can establish the visual style in just a few seconds. They work particularly well for YouTube channels, podcasts, tutorials, episodic content, and branded video series.

These free After Effects intro templates provide the animation and timing needed to build your sequence. Add your logo, replace the text and footage, adjust the colors, and choose music that fits the character of your content.

Boiled Down Intro After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Boiled Down opener template makes things bold and fast. It has six media placeholders, one logo slot at the end, and 17 text-replaceable comps. The resolution is 4K, and it is compatible with After Effects 2020 or later.

Big Bold Typography Intro or Opener

This free opener template, as the name suggests, features overly large, bold text and some lovely clip transitions. It would be perfect as the opener or intro of any travel or vacation-related video.

Retro Wave Intro AE Template

Free to Download

This free Retro Wave Intro template is perfect for any vintage or retro project. The template has a colorful design, two editable text layers, one logo placeholder, and a full-color controller.

Cyberpunk Intro for After Effects

If you’re a fan of the cyberpunk style, don’t miss this Cyberpunk Intro. This is an excellent choice if you want to have a cinematic look in your videos, and it would also be an ideal fit for a tech company.

Smooth After Effects Intro Template

Free to Download

This free intro template features bold titles and duotone colors. You will get five image or video placeholders, four text placeholders, one logo placeholder, and a custom color controller.

Scribble Logo Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template displays your logo with a hint of elegance. The animation starts by outlining your logo and gradually reveals the full design. The animation’s simplicity adds to its beauty, making it the ideal choice for anyone looking for a refined, polished way to showcase their brand.

Business Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

This bright, clean After Effects intro template features seven media and seven text placeholders. It features an elegant animation perfect for corporate or business video projects.

Lower Thirds After Effects Templates

Lower thirds may occupy a small part of the screen, but their design still requires careful thought. Names, job titles, locations, and other details need to be readable without drawing attention away from the footage.

Good lower thirds use clear type hierarchy, controlled movement, and enough contrast to remain legible against different backgrounds. They are useful for interviews, documentaries, news videos, presentations, YouTube content, and branded productions.

These free After Effects lower-third templates offer a range of layouts and animation styles. Each can be edited to match your visual identity by changing the typography, colors, timing, shapes, and displayed information. Some collections also include several coordinated designs for speakers, locations, captions, and social media details.

Lower Thirds B&W After Effects Template

The Lower Thirds After Effects template features a classic black-and-white style. Your text appears as a stylish box, and you can easily edit the colors and adjust the text and the duration.

4K Lower Thirds for After Effects

Free to Download

This huge template pack includes 24 lower third templates in a bold and colorful style. You can easily adjust the colors to match your brand and set your desired duration.

Titles & Lower-Thirds for After Effects

Another combo pack, this titles and lower-thirds After Effects template features a modern and minimal style that can be used in various video projects. This template comes with full-color control and a detailed help file.

20 Minimal Lower Thirds for After Effects

Free to Download

If you love minimalism, try this free lower third pack. The template includes 20 lower thirds and ten premade color schemes. Customize the colors, set the duration, replace the text, and render your project.

After Effects Titles & Lower Thirds

This After Effects template pack includes titles and lower thirds, so it’s an excellent choice for those who need both for their video projects. The template is incredibly easy to edit as it comes with text boxes that automatically adjust to your text size and width.

Sports Lower Thirds Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free sports-themed lower thirds template features a callout with a performance chart and space for a headline and profile picture. With its modern and classy design and customizable features, this template is a great way to add some extra flair to any sport-related video.

Image Lower Thirds & Titles After Effects Templates

Free to Download

This creative and colorful pack of lower thirds also includes images and cartoon-style icons that you can use for extra eye candy. The package comprises 15 titles, lower thirds, and a detailed help file.

Elegant Lower Thirds Templates for After Effects

Free to Download

Consider this template if you’re looking for an elegant lower thirds template. It comes with lower thirds, transitions, a logo reveal, and more. With five text placeholders and a spot for your logo and tagline, this template is an excellent choice for corporate videos.

Flat Lower Thirds After Effects Template

Free to Download

This simple lower thirds template has been designed in a flat and modern style. It features a circular call-out container that’s easy to use and customize. It’s an excellent choice for modern companies and businesses.

Stylish Lower Thirds After Effects Template

Free to Download

This is another elegant and stylish After Effects template with four different graphics. All the text layers and colors are easy to edit, and the project renders super fast, which makes it an excellent choice if you have a rush project.

Dynamic Lower Thirds AE Template

Free to Download

This dynamic template offers eight beautiful animations that you can fully customize with colors of your choice. With 24 text placeholders, you can quickly replace them and enjoy fast rendering. These lower thirds are a great way to add visual appeal to your next video.

Modern Call-Out After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free lower thirds template includes a left-to-right call-out with floating rating sliders underneath. It’s perfect for brands, businesses, and projects that want to add a touch of modern style to their videos and presentations.

Animated Box Entrance Lower Thirds Template

Free to Download

This modern, beautifully designed free lower thirds template features two call-out boxes, a flawless entrance animation, and a bounce effect.

Animated Text & Font Templates for After Effects

Animated typefaces give individual letters their own movement and character. Text can bounce, stretch, rotate, flicker, or appear one character at a time, making them a playful option for video titles, captions, and short promotional graphics.

Rather than animating every letter by hand, these After Effects templates include pre-built animations, text placeholders, and adjustable controls. You can type your own words, change the colors, refine the timing, and combine different letter movements to suit the project.

The free animated typefaces in this collection cover several visual styles, from clean geometric movement to rough, hand-drawn effects. They are particularly useful for music videos, social media clips, opening credits, and other projects where typography takes a leading role.

PolyNoise Alphabet Animated Typeface

This animated typeface features a glitchy look, so it’s perfect for videos that use glitchy animations. The colors are easy to customize, and you don’t have to worry about dropping each letter on a separate timeline with this typeface.

Alquimia Animated Font

Free to Download

The Alquimia Animated Font has a truly unique look. The font can be freely used in both personal and commercial projects, and you can easily modify the colors.

Paper – Grotesque Shady Animated Typeface

The Paper is a perfect choice if you’re working on a video that requires a creative touch. The font includes a full alphabet, numerical characters, basic currency symbols, and basic math symbols.

Neon Animated Typeface for After Effects

Free to Download

This free preset includes all 26 letters, numbers (0-9), and After Effects AEP file for quick customization. The preset’s glowing neon aesthetic will create an energetic and modern look and feel to any After Effects creation.

Helvetica Neue Free After Effects Template

Free to Download

Consider the Helvetica Neue animated font if your next project needs an elegant or classic touch. This After Effects template font has 43 unique letter, number, and punctuation compositions.

Sketch Animated Font After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Sketch Animated Font is perfect if you want a handwritten look and feel. It includes capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

Paint on Animated Typeface

The Pain On animated typeface is a must-have if you want to add a unique style to your videos. Each character paints white, black, and blue colors, which can easily be customized to match your own brand colors.

Animography Animated Font for AE

Free to Download

The Animography font is a full-featured animated font created as a collaborative project between 110 animators and one designer. It has a distinct, bold look and can be used for corporate videos.

Animated Icon Templates for After Effects

Static icons already communicate a lot with very little space. Add movement, and they can also show an action, change of state, or response. A loading symbol can rotate, a notification can pulse, and a button can confirm that it has been selected.

These small animations work well in app demonstrations, interface presentations, explainer videos, infographics, and social media content. Careful timing keeps the movement clear without distracting from the information around it.

The free animated icon templates below save you from keyframing every shape individually. They include coordinated icon sets in several styles, with controls for adjusting colors, scale, timing, and movement to match the rest of your project.

Technicons Animated Business Icons for After Effects

Free to Download

Technicons is a set of technical icons for After Effects. This icon pack comes with 30+ animated icons, and you’ll also find a variety of business icons, making this pack suitable for all kinds of projects.

Animated Icon Set for Video Editors

Free to Download

This free icon pack includes 20 different icons for business and personal projects. The icons are all pre-rendered footage, so you can use them in any video editing or motion graphics software. The project file is also included in the download.

390 Animated Icons for After Effects

This is another icon pack with a large selection of icons for business, technical, and other types of videos. The icons feature a modern, flat design, and you can change the size and color of each icon.

Animated Technical Icons for After Effects

Free to Download

This creative icon pack has 15 icons perfect for any technical niche. The template’s intelligent color controller makes it easy to customize the icons with your brand colors.

Social Media Icons for After Effects

Consider this social media icon pack if you’re looking for icons with a unique design. This icon pack is an excellent choice for any food-related business or brand that specializes in children’s products and uses video as part of its marketing strategy.

AE Animated Social Icons Pack

Free to Download

Check out this free icon pack if you need social media icons for your project. You’ll find icons for all major social media networks, and you can use the default colors or customize them with your own.

Flat Animated Icons Library for After Effects

This icon pack includes an impressive 1,000 icons covering almost any niche. You’ll likely use this library repeatedly in your projects, especially since it was designed using flat design.

Anicons: Customizable Icon Library for After Effects

Free to Download

Consider the Anicons icon pack if you want a complete icon library that can easily be customized. The icon pack allows you to quickly animate and adjust the icon parameters easily. The package contains 40+ icons.

How to Install an After Effects Template

Most After Effects project templates do not need to be installed. They are downloaded, extracted, and opened like any other project file. Keep all supplied folders together so After Effects can locate the linked assets.

• Download the template and extract the ZIP archive to a dedicated project folder.
• Read the included documentation before opening or moving any files.
• Check the required After Effects version, fonts, and plugins.
• Open the supplied .aep file through File > Open Project.
• If After Effects converts an older project, save the converted version as a new file.
• Relink missing footage, images, or audio when prompted.
• Open a .mogrt file through File > Open Project when it needs to be edited in After Effects. Templates intended for Premiere Pro should be added through its Graphics Templates panel.

How to Customize an After Effects Template

Template creators organize projects differently, but most use clearly labeled compositions and placeholder layers. Work on a duplicate of the original project so you can return to the untouched version if an edit causes problems.

• Open the main composition and identify the editable text, image, video, and logo layers.
• Replace placeholder media while preserving its position, scale, and timing.
• Edit the text, then check that longer words do not extend beyond the composition.
• Change the colors and fonts to match the project rather than the preview.
• Adjust keyframes or layer durations when the original animation feels too fast or slow.
• Review any controller, Essential Properties, or Effect Controls layers supplied by the creator.
• Preview the entire sequence before rendering to catch missing media, clipped text, or abrupt cuts.

Tips for Improving Performance

Templates can contain large footage files, complex effects, 3D layers, and many nested compositions. A few temporary adjustments can make editing and previewing them much more manageable.

• Reduce the preview resolution to Half or Quarter while editing.
• Use a Region of Interest when working on one small part of the composition.
• Keep source files and the disk cache on a fast local drive when possible.
• Close unused panels and other memory-heavy applications.
• Temporarily disable motion blur, depth of field, shadows, and demanding effects.
• Use proxies or pre-rendered compositions for large video files and complex scenes.
• Remove unused footage and compositions from a working copy of the project.
• Clear the memory and disk cache if previews become unreliable or storage space runs low.

Final Thoughts & Recommendations

The most useful After Effects template is rarely the one with the busiest preview. A simpler project with clear controls, organized layers, and restrained animation is often easier to adapt and more useful across different types of work.

Choose a template that suits the pace and purpose of the video. A rapid sequence may work well for an event promo but feel out of place in a documentary or portfolio presentation. Typography and movement should support the content rather than compete with it.

Before committing to a template, check its license, After Effects version, plugin requirements, and included assets. Open the project and test a short section before replacing every placeholder. This can reveal performance issues or missing dependencies early in the process.

Finally, spend time changing more than the sample text. Adjust the timing, type choices, colors, transitions, and sound so the finished sequence belongs to the wider project. Free After Effects templates can remove hours of setup, but thoughtful editing is what stops the result from looking like the original preview. Keep an untouched copy nearby, make deliberate changes, and give the animation enough space to do its job.

More After Effect Templates

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) started with a handful of foundational infrastructure services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), so that anyone with an idea could start building. As the world’s largest companies and governments adopted AWS, they asked for features to optimize their configuration for a range of global business contexts, security requirements, and operational needs. To meet these needs, AWS expanded globally through new Regions and added breadth and depth of services in security, networking, governance, and cost controls, so those customers could operate wherever they needed and at the scale they require. That combination of global reach, breadth, and depth remains essential for those customers, but if you are at the start of a new idea, every configuration option is effort standing in the way of shipping your dream product fast.

Today, we’re announcing a new simplified experience on AWS for builders who are working at the pace of AI. Instead of having to complete configuration tasks before you can work on your project, you start with sensible defaults and simple administration. You sign up using an existing identity from providers including Google, GitHub, and Apple. For most new customers, no credit card is required to start and you receive $100 in free credits as part of the AWS Free Tier. You can build immediately in your first project. As you continue to work, you can invite collaborators with just an email address, without learning about AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or AWS IAM Identity Center. When your project grows beyond the free credits, you can set a spend limit so you stay within your budget on the paid plan. If you grow to need additional customization, you can activate advanced AWS features to access the full breadth and depth of AWS without migrating.

How it works
When you sign up, AWS organizes your work in a project. A project contains an AWS account, where you create resources, and settings for sharing with team members. AWS creates that structure for you and applies additional security controls so you can start building your idea. After signing in, you get a prompt to paste into your coding agent that configures it to work with your new AWS environment. From there, your agent can deploy resources, run workloads, and iterate on your application following best practices for working with AWS.

You can create another project with a click. When you want to work with an additional team member, you send an invitation to their email address. Identity permissions are handled for you, so there are no IAM users to create; each person you invite only gets access to the projects you specify. Console workflows and coding agents also configure permissions between supported services and resources automatically, so you do not have to set up or troubleshoot resource permissions by hand.

When you’re ready to move beyond free credits, you can upgrade to a paid plan by entering your payment method. You can set a monthly spend limit on a project based on your usage trends, starting at $20 per month. The spend limit is the ceiling for that project’s costs, and you pay for what you actually use up to that amount. For example, if you set a $50 spend limit and your project incurs $32 in charges that month, you pay $32 (plus taxes). AWS will suggest a spend limit based on your usage, and you can accept that recommendation or set a custom amount if you are planning to further scale your usage. If your project approaches the limit, you first receive notifications. If spend reaches the limit, AWS pauses your project rather than accumulating charges, and you can resume working on it when you raise the limit. Each project has its own spend limit so you can give a larger budget to a workload that is gaining traction while keeping a smaller budget on an experimental idea.

Let’s try it out
To get started, I went to aws.amazon.com and chose Create account. I signed in with my Google account and within seconds had a new project ready to go, as shown in the following screenshot.

The Sign up for AWS page, with options to continue with email or sign in using Google, GitHub, Apple, or Amazon.

The first thing I saw was a prompt to configure my coding agent. I copied the prompt and pasted it into my agent. The agent set up the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and the Agent Toolkit for AWS, logged me into AWS, and created a CLAUDE.md file in my project with guidance for the new experience.

The Setup Agent Toolkit for AWS dialog, with a prompt to copy and paste into your coding agent.

With the agent connected, I gave it a short prompt: build an API that returns a new unique sequential ID on every request. The agent created an AWS Lambda function, an Amazon DynamoDB table, and an Amazon API Gateway API, then deployed them for me. I did not have to configure resource permissions by hand. Within a few minutes I had a public endpoint that returned a newly minted ID on each request. My project started with $100 in free credits, and I received an additional $20 when the Lambda function was deployed.

A coding agent prompt to build an API that returns a unique sequential ID on every request.

The coding agent presents architecture options for the sequential ID API, with AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB selected.

The coding agent confirms the API is live and lists the Amazon DynamoDB table, AWS Lambda function, and Amazon API Gateway API it deployed.

From the project, I could manage settings, invite team members by email, and monitor billing, as shown in the following screenshots.

The Projects page, showing remaining free-plan days, credits, and a project.

The project Members page, with the option to invite a new team member by email.

The Billing page, showing a $0.00 balance on the free plan, remaining credits, and cost by project.

Activating advanced features
If you reach the point where you need multiple Regions, or governance features like custom policies in AWS Organizations, you can activate advanced features at no additional cost. You’ll find yourself in a fully configured AWS Organization built according to best practices, with no migration and no downtime. Everything you configured previously is preserved and reflected in the underlying AWS services.

Now rolling out
We’ve heard from builders that they do not want to spend their first hours configuring an AWS environment. They want to build what they came to build, and we listened. AWS began as a place where anyone with an idea could start building, and this new simplified experience brings that starting point back, with sensible defaults so you can begin immediately, and with the global reach, breadth, and depth of AWS still there when your idea needs it. We are gradually rolling this experience out to new customers. We cannot wait to see what you build, and we want your feedback on the experience.

To try the new experience, create a new AWS account. To learn more, see Sign up for AWS (new).

The post AWS reimagines the getting started experience appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Yes, you could create a few versions of the branding materials and call it a day, letting your client pick the ones they like the most. But let’s be real: it’s one thing to see your design on a computer screen, and it’s another to see it in real life.

What would your design look like on stationery? Would the logo fit on the pen your clients are planning on giving away to their customers? Does the business card carry the weight of expertise, backed by professional design and structured information?

If you’re a designer, you know how much a single branding identity material can say. It’s a game-changer. So the next time you prepare branding identity materials, look into mockups.

Realistic representations of what your designs would look like in 3D and when placed in various settings, branding identity mockups help you assess your own designs and convince your clients.

From business cards and coffee cups to stationery and contextual mockups, there’s something for every project you’re passionate about in this beautiful collection of branding identity mockup templates for Photoshop.

You might also like our collection for free InDesign branding templates.

What are Branding Identity Mockup Templates?

Branding identity templates are pre-designed files that allow you to showcase your branding elements in a real-world context. Whether it’s your logo playing the solo on a business card, your color palette painting the background of a website, or your typography setting the rhythm on a letterhead – mockup templates let you visualize the symphony in action!

1. Logos & Colors: See how your visual elements interact and harmonize on various platforms and materials.
2. Typography & Imagery: Visualize the rhythm and flow of your text and images across different mediums.
3. Business Collateral: Business cards, letterheads, envelopes – see your brand melody resonate in every piece.
4. Digital Presence: Witness the harmony of your brand’s digital footprint – websites, social media, and more.

It’s not just about seeing; it’s about experiencing your brand from the audience’s seats, feeling the vibes, the beats, the highs, and the lows of your brand’s symphony.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Simple and professional, these branding identity mockup templates are perfect for companies and corporations. You can pick from 3 different styles for phone, envelope, business card, and other mockups. You can hide the ones you don’t want and easily win over your audience with a photorealistic presentation!

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

The Stationery Cards Mockup Scene is a template that allows you to showcase your branding elements in a natural and minimalist setting. With customizable objects and high-resolution images, you can create a stunning presentation that beautifully showcases your brand identity.

Free to Download, in Figma Format

Spark is a free collection of branding and corporate identity mockup templates for Figma that can help you showcase your design in a professional and polished way. With various templates for different branding elements, you can create a diverse range of presentations.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

The Stationery Branding Identity Mockup is a customizable, realistic, and professional presentation template for your brand identity. You can showcase your branding elements in different contexts and ensure your brand identity is consistent and impactful.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This Stationery Branding Mockup will help showcase your branding elements professionally and realistically. And with its various objects, including documents, business cards, pencils, stamps, notebooks, and more, you can create a stunning presentation.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Minimalist and incredibly professional, these isometric corporate branding identity mockups for Photoshop are perfect for B2B audiences! Composed of crucial mockups such as stationery, business cards, small boxes, and envelopes, this set offers a simple way to showcase your design. Add it to your branding toolkit, and wow your clients!

In Photoshop PSD Format

Elegant and sophisticated, this stationary branding mockup template set is perfect for your next presentation. Pick from various elements, from standard branding mockups such as business cards and letterheads to leather files and CDs. You’ll also get five different PSD scenes – there really is something for everyone!

Free to Download, in Figma Format

This free Figma file is a branding mockup template with an extensive collection of items, including a mug, clock, pen, pencils, notepads, tote bag, flag, and more. This mockup template will allow you to create diverse branding presentations for clients.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This free dark branding mockup is a photorealistic template that allows you to showcase your branding elements in a professional and modern way. With easy-to-use smart object layers, you can customize the template to fit your brand identity and create an impressive presentation.

In Photoshop PSD Format

If you want your branding identity to shine, choose this corporate identity mockup set. With plenty of elements (which also include lanyard straps, flash drives, lighters, and more), you can make sure that your design fits your clients’ needs. Easily add your work in Photoshop, and delight your audience!

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This free photorealistic stationery branding mockup set is a collection of eight Photoshop PSD templates that can help you showcase your branding elements realistically and professionally.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This free corporate branding identity mockup is a customizable template that can help create stunning presentations for your corporate brand identity and showcase your branding elements professionally.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Photorealistic and elegant, this minimal stationery branding mockup template comes with everything you need to share your vision with the world. From flash drives and business cards to letterheads, and pens, you’ll get plenty of options to showcase your design. You can even edit background textures and colors!

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

For an elegant corporate identity, check out this business stationery mockup set. The template is free for commercial and personal use and can be edited via smart objects in Photoshop.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This free PSD stationery scene creator comes with 18 different items that you can place on the canvas as you please to create a unique presentation for a corporate identity.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Perfect for tech brands, this corporate branding identity mockup set for Photoshop has everything you need: 8 photorealistic PSD scenes, elements such as business cards and letterheads, as well as shopping bags and diaries with decorative elements. Mix and match to get beautiful results that seamlessly combine professional and practical!

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This classic branding identity mockup includes a set of stationery items as well as product tags that you can use to present a complete brand identity. The mockup includes smart layers and individual items that you can arrange to your liking.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

Try this free mockup if you’re looking for a unique way to present a brand identity. With it, you will be able to show your client how his brand will look on laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Make your branding stand out with this corporate branding identity set! It’s a perfect fit if you’re working on a corporate project and want to showcase bold logos in colors complementary to black and yellow. Add your branding to mugs, lanyards, envelopes, flash drives, and more!

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

Thanks to this branding and corporate identity mockup, you will be able to easily present any brand that needs a classic presentation. A number of different items are included that you can arrange as you like.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

Check out this stationery branding mockup if you’re looking for a dark and elegant mockup file. The template includes a variety of stationery items and smart objects for easy editing.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Photorealistic and effective, these branding and stationery mockup templates for Photoshop are perfect for putting your designs in the spotlight. Featuring elements such as business cards, pencils, and tablets, this branding identity set offers incredibly photorealistic results. You’ll get seven distinct mockups and replaceable backgrounds for beautiful presentations!

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This colorful branding mockup is an excellent choice for a vibrant and bold brand with a retro feel. Thanks to smart objects, the template is easy to edit, and you can even customize the shadows for a more realistic look.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

Use this corporate identity mockup to give a holistic overview of your brand design. The template is easily editable with smart objects and includes a complete stationery set as well as a stamp, shopping bags, USB keys, and more.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Fun yet professional, these branding stationery mockup templates offer everything you need to amaze your clients! With 7 PSD files, and plenty of elements such as papers, folders, envelopes, badges, tubes, and pencils, you’ll love showcasing your designs. You can easily change the color of backgrounds and elements!

In Photoshop PSD Format

With an already set scene and endless combinations, these branding identity mockup templates are easy to customize in Photoshop. Pick from a plethora of elements such as coffee cups, letterheads, tubes, and flash drives. Then, combine them as you see fit, replace the background texture, and have fun while presenting!

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This stationery mockup set includes a complete stationery set designed with a minimalistic approach. The template includes smart objects for easy editing, and you can even edit the shadows and the backgrounds.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

Take a look at this modern corporate identity mockup. It features a complete stationery set with a modern design and includes smart objects that make it easy to customize.

In Photoshop PSD Format

With photorealistic scenes and over 60 elements, this versatile stationery branding identity mockup creator is an absolute dreamboat. Add your designs, change the background textures and colors, add layer styles (unlimited foil stamp colors), and more! Add this set to your kit – you can use it for every project!

In Photoshop PSD Format

Realistic and personable, these office stationery branding mockup templates are perfect for friendly, down-to-Earth brands that want to emphasize their personality. With elements like letterheads and CDs and five different scenes, you can easily bring your designs closer to your audience. All it takes is a few clicks in Photoshop!

In Photoshop PSD Format

A professional flat-lay business stationery mockup set, this asset is perfect for presenting your branding identity designs in a simple and straightforward manner. You’ll get a few key elements set against a blue backdrop, such as letterheads, business cards, and envelopes, all easily customizable with Photoshop smart objects.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

This template is an excellent choice if you need a simple CV mockup. You can easily place your design via smart objects and then customize fonts, colors, and other aspects of the CV.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

Try this corporate mockup template if you need an elegant way to present your brand. The template includes a light and a dark version with a complete stationery set.

Free to Download, in Photoshop PSD Format

With this retro business card mockup, you will be able to showcase your retro business card designs with ease. The template can be edited via smart objects, and it includes two different business card sizes.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Coffee branding and merchandising have never looked this good! This gorgeous set of photorealistic coffee branding mockups comes with all the elements you need: coffee and sugar bags, cups, shopping bags, brochures, and more! And with five beautiful PSD scenes, your audience will really wake up and smell the coffee!

In Photoshop PSD Format

You’ve never seen a set of branding identity essentials as comprehensive as this one! With five different PSD mockups, and every element under the sun (from lanyards and tubes to professional business cards and journals), you’ll get everything you need for a perfect corporate branding presentation!

In Photoshop PSD Format

If you’re working with a beer brand, it’s time to display your designs in an informal setting. And nothing works better than this mockup template featuring two people clinking beer mugs. You can customize the tablet illustration, as well as the beer bottle labels. Have fun!

In Photoshop PSD Format

Elegant and depicted in earthy tones, Athena branding identity mockup templates are a perfect fit for fashion, beauty, and other aesthetically-conscious brands. You can completely customize the 11 branding mockups: adjust colors, replace the background, and add foil stamping. Make your designs shine with these stunning, photorealistic branding identity templates!

In Photoshop PSD Format

A pristine 2D and 3D corporate identity mockup templates for Photoshop, this set comes with all the essentials (tablet, phone, letterhead, business cards, envelopes, and more). You can easily customize these branding identity mockup templates with Photoshop smart objects to create professional and photorealistic presentations your corporate clients will adore.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Nothing says luxury more than this branding identity mockup set! With six high-quality background textures and 11 Photoshop elements, you can paint an atmospheric picture with your designs depicted on leather file covers, crisp envelopes, and business cards that send a clear message: this is a brand you can trust.

In Photoshop PSD Format

This simple, photorealistic branding identity mockup template set will help you create a convincing presentation! Pick from 9 incredible mockups, change the background color, and add your designs to lanyards, envelopes, business cards, and other corporate identity essentials. Save time, and showcase your work with these phenomenal corporate identity mockups!

In Photoshop PSD Format

Let your audience get up close and personal with your design through this atmospheric branding mockup kit. The scene is staged – and it’s time for your designs to shine! Change colors and backgrounds, experiment with foil stamping, and make this mockup work for you and your brand.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Envision your designs in their true environment: a desk. This corporate branding mockup allows you to add your logos and other graphics to elements such as screens (laptop, tablet, phone, and Mac), letterheads and envelopes, coffee cups, tubes, and more! Add designs in Photoshop, and your clients will love you!

In Photoshop PSD Format

Dynamic and interesting, these branding identity mockup templates are a perfect fit for engaging brands! Easily add your designs to letterheads, tri-fold brochures, calendars, hangers, and more! You’ll definitely get plenty of options, including two photorealistic scenes. Not even the sky is the limit with these branding mockups!

In Photoshop PSD Format

Create a stunning brand presentation with these beautiful branding identity mockups. Copperstone branding templates for Photoshop contain 10 PSD files, as well as plenty of options such as selective foil stamping, customizable backgrounds and colors, and more! Professionally lit, these mockups offer incredibly photorealistic results that your clients will love.

In Photoshop PSD Format

Working with a coffee brand, or just designing a visual identity for coffee lovers? These coffee branding mockup templates are the perfect choice! With plenty of elements (including coffee bags, shopping bags, and labels), and customization options for shadows, backgrounds, and colors, you’ll love creating your next branding presentation!

In Photoshop PSD Format

Can school actually be cool? You bet! These back-to-school and office supplies mockups prove that everything is possible with a design as gorgeous as yours. Pick from plenty of elements (notebooks, screens, envelopes, erasers, glue, and more), adjust the background and colors, and get ready to amaze with your presentation!

Show Your Brand’s Personality!

Your design is the first gateway to your brand. And when you’re creating branding identity materials, you have to make sure that they’re enticing and keep the prospect interested in your products.

Fortunately, you no longer have to rely on your hunch. Instead, pick one of these beautiful mockups, and show your clients how they’ll win over their customers. From coffee cups to stationery mockups, you’ll get plenty of incredible options.

More Logo Templates

Read more articles by Paul Andrew

The post 40+ Best Branding Identity Mockup Templates appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Every website is at its best the day it ships. The final branch merges, the site goes live exactly as designed, and it is briefly perfect. It will never be this good again.

Not because anything breaks. The site keeps working. But the market moves, the messaging shifts, a competitor launches something, and the careful thing you built slowly stops matching the company it represents. A year later, it is a period piece. Not broken, just behind. Every team knows this decay, and almost everyone treats it as a law of nature.

It doesn’t have to be that way. A website could keep improving after launch instead of drifting away from its best day, quietly optimizing itself while the team that built it works on something else.

Picture it working: while you sleep, an agent catches that last week’s design-system change never propagated to the pricing page, and fixes it. Another finds a set of images shipped uncompressed in a rushed release and optimizes them. A third flags an accessibility regression a new component introduced, and either fixes it or leaves it for you to check. You wake up to a site that is measurably better than the one you left, and a short list of the few decisions the agents wanted your eyes on. That is the version worth wanting.

And the moment you take that promise seriously, you run into a problem that has nothing to do with the technology:

Almost nobody actually wants a website that changes entirely on its own.

Why “Just Make It Autonomous” Is The Wrong Goal

The obvious move, once you have capable agents, is to hand them the whole site. Let them write, edit, optimize, and publish, and get out of the way. It sounds like the natural endpoint, and it is the first thing most people picture when they hear “autonomous website.”

It is also the thing almost nobody wants once it is real in front of them.

We learned this the way you learn most things worth knowing: by building the opposite first. Building Fimo, an autonomous website platform, we set out to make websites fully autonomous, assumed that was the goal, and then watched what people actually did with it. What they did was hesitate. Not because they distrusted the agents, but because a website has no single owner. Different parts belong to different people, and each one wants a different amount of autonomy. So the question was never whether to trust the agents. It was where to draw the line, and for whom.

Once you ask it that way, the work splits cleanly into three kinds.

Most Of It Is A No-brainer

Start with the largest pile, because it is bigger than people expect. Most of what keeps a website healthy is rule-bound, repetitive, and completely joyless. Keeping accessibility compliant as pages change. Propagating a design-system update once a token moves. Catching a broken meta tag, an unoptimized image, a link that rotted when a URL changed three sprints ago.

None of this is where anyone’s talent lives. Nobody was hired because of their gift for spotting a missing alt attribute. This is the work you are actively relieved to hand off, and it is the work agents are best at, because it is defined by rules rather than taste. An agent that quietly keeps this layer correct across a whole site, unattended, is not a threat to anyone’s job. It is the tedious eighty percent finally taken care of.

Naming how much of the maintenance load actually lives in this pile is what makes the whole idea of an autonomous site feel less like a leap. You are not handing over judgment. You are handing over chores.

Some Of It You’d Never Hand Over

At the other end sits the work you would not delegate at any price. It is a small pile, but it is the reason you exist.

An agent can check a new page against every rule you have given it. It can confirm the contrast passes, the heading order is right, the tokens are correct, the copy matches the style guide. What it cannot do is decide what the page should feel like, or whether the thing you are shipping is, in the taste sense, good. That judgment is exactly what you were hired for, and no amount of capability moves it off your desk.

This is the part people reach for first when they resist autonomy, and they are right to protect it. The mistake is thinking the whole site is made of this kind of work. Almost none of it is. But that small part matters more than all the rest, which is why automating everything feels so wrong.

And A Lot Of It Depends On Who You Are

Between the chores and the untouchable sits the part no product can settle for you, because the line runs through different places for different people.

Take one real change: making dark mode the default theme when someone lands on the site. An agent can do it in seconds. The question is who gets to decide it should happen at all. For the designer who owns the site’s identity, the default theme is not a setting; it is a statement about how the brand wants to be seen first, and they want that call. For the developer shipping the change, it is a one-line default with a clear rationale, the kind of thing they would happily let an agent apply and move on. Same change, same site, and the two of them draw the line in opposite places.

Notice what is happening there. It isn’t that one of them is cautious and the other reckless. It is that the same task carries different amounts of judgment for each of them. For one person it is a decision; for the other it is a chore. There is no default a product could ship that would be right for both, because “right” is a function of where your value sits, not of the task itself.

This is why the control has to be per-task and per-person, and why we stopped trying to find the setting that would work for everyone. There isn’t one. There is only the line each person draws, and the tools to draw it precisely.

You Don’t Just Set The Autonomy: You Build The Agent

Once you accept that the line is personal, a toggle between “approve” and “delegate” stops being enough. Where the line sits depends on what the agent is actually doing, so the real unit of control is the agent itself.

This is where it stopped being a settings problem, and it is the shape Fimo took. You don’t pick from a fixed menu of behaviors. You compose the agents, deciding what each one is even allowed to touch. You can build one from scratch, or take one close to your needs and shape it to your own line: an accessibility agent you trust to run unattended, a content agent you keep close to anything brand-facing.

And they don’t stay fixed. They learn from their tasks and from what you teach them, so the boundary you set last month isn’t the one you’re stuck with. What you had to approve then, you can delegate now, not because you lowered your guard but because the agent earned it. The line is not a setting you configure once. It moves as trust is earned, in the direction of less work for you.

Start Narrow, and Widen As You Trust It

None of this means flipping a site to autonomous on day one. In practice it goes the other way. You delegate a little, watch how it does, and loosen.

And you can actually watch. Every agent’s runs, its history, its logs, and a before-and-after of what it changed are there to inspect. Trust doesn’t grow because you got used to the idea; it grows because you can see what happened and compare. The first time an agent quietly fixes something you would have missed, and you can see exactly what it did, the next delegation gets easier.

Deadlines keep you from becoming the bottleneck on what you have already handed over. If you don’t weigh in, the agent proceeds. You set the terms once, and you stop being the thing the whole site waits on.

The Frozen Site Is The Real Risk

The worry people voice first is that an agent will change something on their site without them. Turn it around: the real risk is a site that never changes at all. A frozen site doesn’t stay safe. It just falls behind, slowly, in a way nobody notices until it represents a company that no longer exists.

The point of autonomy was never to remove you from your website. It was to remove the decay.

The point of autonomy is to keep the launch-day version from being the best version, and to let you spend your judgment on the handful of things that actually deserve it, while the rest takes care of itself. Draw the line where your value is. Let the agents hold everything on the other side of it. And let the line move as they prove they can.

(yk)

The post Why Your Website Should Never Stop Changing appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

During my time at AWS, I have always looked for opportunities to work with students. I have delivered over 50 talks at universities across the region, and watching the potential in the room is always a strong motivator. It reminds me of why I do this work, and that the students I meet today may well become our customers and collaborators tomorrow. That is why I am happy to open this week with Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center.

Rick Suttles published Introducing Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center, a new benefit for verified higher education students. When you verify your enrollment through SheerID and complete your Builder Center profile, you unlock 12 months of premium AWS Skill Builder access (900+ courses, hands-on labs, certification exam prep, and game-based learning). From there, you earn badges through actions on Builder Center: publishing articles, commenting, and maintaining engagement. At 7 badges, you unlock $10 in AWS Credits. At 14 badges, another $20 in credits. At 21 badges, you earn an AWS Foundational Certification exam voucher ($100 value).

This represents a commitment of over $500 million in resources during this back-to-school season, providing students with the training, tools, and certification needed to start building their careers in cloud and AI. Student Rewards is available to students 18 years or older and enrolled at accredited higher education institutions worldwide, subject to verification and applicable terms.

Verify your student status and start learning, earning badges, and unlocking rewards!

Last week’s launches
Here’s what else happened this week.

• A new AWS Local Zone in Las Vegas, Nevada – This new Local Zone supports Amazon EC2 C7i, M7i, R7i, and C8gn instances, Amazon EBS, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Direct Connect. AWS Local Zones are now available in more than 30 metropolitan areas worldwide. In addition, AWS added a fourth Availability Zone to the Europe (London) Region, delivering next-generation AI and ML capacity with Trn3 and P6 accelerated instances alongside general-purpose compute.
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports batch instance termination – You can now pass up to 100 instance IDs to the TerminateInstanceInAutoScalingGroup API to terminate them as a batch, reducing the number of API calls needed to scale down your Auto Scaling groups. Batch termination is designed for workloads that need to rapidly scale down, such as AI/ML training jobs, container orchestrators, or event-driven architectures that spin up large fleets temporarily.
• AWS CloudShell now includes a built-in visual file editor – CloudShell now includes a visual file editor that you can launch directly from your shell session using a single edit command. The editor supports syntax highlighting, find-and-replace, multi-line selection, copy-paste, and undo-redo in a single browser session. Whether you are updating a deployment script, modifying an agent steering file, editing a CloudFormation template, or fixing a Lambda function, the editor provides a seamless edit-and-run experience without leaving CloudShell.
• Amazon Bedrock now supports SpaceXAI Grok 4.6 with cross-Region inference – Grok 4.6, a frontier model built for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, is now available on Amazon Bedrock. The model runs on the bedrock-runtime endpoint with support for the Responses, Chat Completions, and Converse APIs, and works with existing account-level controls including model invocation logging, Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and cost itemization in AWS Cost Explorer.
• Amazon Bedrock expands API support and introduces cross-Region inference for OpenAI models – Amazon Bedrock now supports OpenAI GPT-5.6 models (Sol, Terra, and Luna) with the Responses, Converse, and Chat Completions APIs, and adds cross-Region inference. Geo cross-Region inference routes requests within a predefined geography (including new US Geo support with this launch), while Global cross-Region inference serves requests from any commercial AWS Region at a lower per-token cost.
• AgentCore payments is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore – At general availability, AgentCore payments includes Quick Create for Coinbase credential provisioning directly within the AgentCore console, a curated Coinbase Bazar MCP server of pay-per-use x402 endpoints via AgentCore gateway, support for the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), and the “upto” scheme in the x402 protocol for pay-per-inference and dynamic pricing use cases. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• AWS Glue 6.0 delivers 30% price reduction and Iceberg v3 support – AWS Glue 6.0 is built on a fully modernized runtime, Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.13, and Scala 2.13, delivering 30% lower pricing than previous AWS Glue versions. With Iceberg v3, Glue 6.0 adds the VARIANT data type with automatic shredding for faster reads on semi-structured data, deletion vectors for high-performance row-level updates, geometry and geography data types for spatial processing, and flexible schema evolution.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Updates to your AWS Sign-In experience – AWS is gradually introducing updates to the sign-in and sign-up experience. The redesigned sign-in page introduces a unified email entry point for root users and customers using the new email-based sign-in method, while IAM users continue signing in with their account ID, username, and password. The page also includes sign-in options for customers whose AWS account was created using a supported identity provider (Google, GitHub, Apple, or Amazon.com). A redesigned session selection page simplifies viewing and managing multiple active account and role sessions. If your organization relies on browser automation or scripted workflows that interact with the sign-in page, review the post to understand how these changes might affect your configuration.
• In the works: AWS Builder Lofts in Berlin, Hyderabad, and São Paulo – My colleague Channy announced plans to open new Builder Lofts in three cities. Since the first Builder Loft opened in San Francisco in July 2025, it has welcomed more than 22,500 developers through its doors. Each new location will be a permanent community space offering free workshops, networking events, pitch nights, content creation spaces, and co-working areas. Berlin will focus on digital sovereignty and security-readiness, Hyderabad on AI and cloud-native architecture, and São Paulo on supporting Latin America’s developer ecosystem.
• AWS and Amazon WorkSpaces recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service – AWS has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for the third consecutive year, evaluated on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Gartner noted strengths in operations, geographic strategy, and overall viability. This is also the first year the evaluation includes Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents, a capability that runs AI agents within the same desktop environment, security perimeter, and audit trail as human users.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – Free in-person events for builders and innovators to learn, connect, and explore the latest in cloud. Coming up: Zurich (September 2), São Paulo (September 3), Tel Aviv (September 10), and Dubai (September 30). You can also watch keynotes and sessions on the AWS Summits Global Livestream + On-Demand Hub. To access live and on-demand content for a particular Summit, you need to be registered for that event.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Bolivia, Santa Cruz (August 29), Toronto, Canada (August 29), JAWS SONIC, Tokyo (September 5), Warsaw, Poland (September 8).

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building.

Summer is slowly coming to an end, and I am already planning a few days off in the coming months to keep me motivated through the rainy autumn ahead. I hope you are doing the same. Come back next week for more!

— Esra

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center, Local Zone in Las Vegas, and more (August 24, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

When you move AI agents from prototype to production, the infrastructure challenges multiply. Your agents need to persist state across multi-step workflows that run for hours or days. They need to coordinate with other agents, share context, and sometimes access GPUs for specialized tasks. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime microVMs provide a fully managed environment for invocations that can run for up to 8 hours and support stateful workflows through managed session storage. Some workloads also benefit from dedicated, larger-capacity environments — for example, when agents need to run continuously for multiple days, access GPUs or the underlying OS, or run multiple collaborating agents on the same host.

Today, I’m happy to announce runtime instances, a new complementary compute option in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime that gives your agents persistent, managed infrastructure purpose-built for complex agent workloads.

What you get
Runtime instances provides AWS-managed EC2 infrastructure where you deploy multiple agents in a single runtime, each with their own dependencies and artifact types. Your agents can collaborate on the same host within shared sessions that persist for up to 14 days. The service supports GPU acceleration for compute-intensive tasks, session stop/restart to save costs during idle periods, and containerized deployments for teams that want to ship independently. For knowledge that needs to survive beyond a session, runtime instances pairs naturally with Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and AgentCore Memory, which gives your agents long-term recall across sessions and environments.

Before today, if you wanted to keep your agents running for days or they needed GPU access, or multi-agent coordination, you had to build and manage that infrastructure yourself. You provisioned EC2 instances, configured networking, set up session management, handled scaling, and stitched together monitoring. Runtime instances handles all of that for you while integrating with the same AgentCore APIs, identity controls, and observability you already use with AgentCore Runtime microVMs.

A few things that should make agent developers smile: your agents can call each other as tools within a shared session, iterating autonomously until the job is done. You bring any framework (CrewAI, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Strands) and any model. Packaging is minimal, a @app.entrypoint decorator and a zip file or container image. And if your workflow spans days, hibernate Monday night and resume Wednesday morning with everything intact.

Runtime microVMs and runtime instances are complementary compute options that you can use independently or together through the same AgentCore runtime APIs. A lightweight orchestrator agent on runtime microVM can coordinate and dispatch work to specialized worker agents running on instances. The orchestrator handles API calls, task routing, and result aggregation using runtime microVM’s fast scaling, while workers on Instances perform compute-intensive tasks like code compilation, security scanning, or GUI automation that require persistent state and direct OS access.

Let me show you how it works
I built two agents for this demo: a code writer agent that generates Python code from natural language descriptions, and a code reviewer agent that analyzes the generated code for bugs, security issues, and style improvements. Both agents share the same file system, so the reviewer can read whatever the writer produces without any data transfer or API calls between them.

Here is the code writer (simplified, no error handling):

writer = Agent(
    model="us.anthropic.claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929-v1:0",
    system_prompt=(
        "You are a senior Python engineer. "
        "Given a task, return ONLY a single Python code block — no prose."
    ),
)

@app.entrypoint
def handler(event, context):
    task = event.get("task") or event.get("prompt")
    session_id = getattr(context, "session_id", None) or event.get("session_id")
    session_dir = SHARED_DIR / session_id
    session_dir.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

    code = str(writer(task))
    (session_dir / "code.py").write_text(code)

    return {"agent": "writer", "wrote": str(session_dir / "code.py"), "code": code}

Here is the code reviewer agent (simplified, no error handling):

reviewer = Agent(
    model="us.anthropic.claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929-v1:0",
    system_prompt=(
        "You are a strict Python code reviewer. "
        "Given code, return 3 bullet points: bugs, style, suggestions."
    ),
)

@app.entrypoint
def handler(event, context):
    session_id = getattr(context, "session_id", None) or event.get("session_id")
    code_path = SHARED_DIR / session_id / "code.py"
    code = code_path.read_text()
    review = str(reviewer(f"Review this code:nn{code}"))

    return {"agent": "reviewer", "read": str(code_path), "review": review}

Each agent is a Python application using Strands Agents with an @app.entrypoint decorator and a model of its choice. I package each one as a zip file. For this demo, I use the AWS Management Console. You can also use the AgentCore CLI, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) or infrastructure as code.

Step 1: Create a capacity provider.

A capacity provider defines the EC2 infrastructure your agents run on. In the AgentCore console, I select Runtime in the left navigation, then select the Capacity providers tab and Create capacity provider.

I give it a Name, select Linux (64-bit ARM) as the Operating system, and choose c7g.2xlarge as the Allowed instance types. This gives me 8 vCPUs and 16 GiB of memory, enough for both agents to run comfortably side by side.

Further down, I configure the VPC, subnets, and security groups for network access. Under Storage configuration, I keep the default gp3 volume. Under Service access, I select Create a new service role and let the console create the infrastructure role that manages EC2 instances on my behalf.

I select Create capacity provider and wait a few seconds. The status moves to Active.

Note the capacity provider configuration summary: operating system, instance type, subnets, security group, instance profile, and infrastructure role. Once created, only the description can be edited, so verify your settings before you proceed.

Step 2: Create a runtime and deploy the first agent.

Back on the Runtime page, I select Create runtime. I give it a Name, select Instances as the Compute type, and choose the Capacity provider I created in the previous step.

Under Agent source, I select S3 Source, then Upload to S3. I choose my agent zip file (ACIDemoWriter.zip), set the Language runtime to Python 3.13, and specify agent.py as the Agent entry point. This is the file that contains my @app.entrypoint decorated function. Under Permissions, I select Create default role to let the console provision the IAM role my agent needs.

I select Create runtime and wait for the status to become Ready.

I repeat the same process for my code reviewer agent. I create a second runtime, select the same capacity provider, upload my reviewer agent zip file, and wait for it to become Ready. Both agents now share the same underlying EC2 infrastructure.

The console shows me a View invocation code section with ready-to-use Python, TypeScript, and JavaScript snippets to invoke my agent programmatically. But for this demo, I use the built-in test feature. I select Test on the writer agent’s page.

Step 3: Invoke agents and observe collaboration.

The Runtime playground opens. At the top, I see three fields: Runtime agent, Endpoint, and Session ID. The console generates a session ID automatically. I take note of it because I will reuse it with the reviewer agent.

In the Input field, I type a JSON payload asking the writer agent to generate code:

{"prompt": "write a fibonacci suite"}

I select Run. After a few seconds, the Output panel shows the agent’s response. The writer agent generated a Python module with two implementations of a Fibonacci sequence (a list-based function and a generator) and wrote it to /tmp/agentcore-session/ca5ec24d-07f5-4eeb-add1-5ba416bf9eb2/code.py. Notice the session ID in the file path. That directory is the shared file system for this session.

Step 4: Invoke the reviewer agent in the same session.

Now I switch the Runtime agent dropdown to ACIDemoReviewer. The important part: I paste the same session ID (ca5ec24d-07f5-4eeb-add1-5ba416bf9eb2) in the Session ID field. This is what connects the two agents.

I type a simple prompt:

{"prompt": "review the code"}

I select Run. The reviewer agent reads the file the writer produced from the shared session directory and returns a detailed code review. It finds no critical bugs but suggests adding type hints, input validation, and simplifying the edge case handling.

The two agents never exchanged messages or called each other’s APIs. They collaborated through the shared file system that runtime instances provide within a session. You can extend this pattern to any number of agents: a test agent that runs the code, a documentation agent that generates README files, a security agent that scans for vulnerabilities, all sharing the same working directory.

Key details
Here are a few things to know as you get started:

• Supported OS: Linux (ARM64 and x86_64) at launch.
• Session persistence: Sessions persist for up to 14 days.
• Runtimes: Python 3.11-14 with native code support. Container images also supported.
• GPU: Support for GPU-accelerated instance types.
• Integration: Uses the same AgentCore APIs, identity, observability, and policy controls as AgentCore Runtime.
• Pricing: Standard EC2 pricing plus a management fee for AgentCore orchestration.
• Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland)

To get started, visit the runtime instance in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore documentation and create your first capacity provider.

— seb

The post Runtime instances: persistent compute for production AI agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week I had the joy of participating in Amazon’s “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” with my 7 year old son. We commuted together into the New York City office, his first real rush hour train ride, and spent the day exploring how Amazon uses AI, machine learning, and robotics to deliver packages to customers all over the world. Watching his eyes light up as he saw robots navigating a fulfillment center reminded me why so many of us got into technology in the first place. There’s nothing quite like seeing that sense of wonder when something complex clicks.

That same energy carried into the week’s launches. We’ve got updates across AI pricing, observability, multicloud networking, and data management. Let’s dive in.

Headlines

Amazon Bedrock announces up to 80% lower prices for OpenAI GPT‑5.6 models – If you’re using OpenAI’s GPT‑5.6 family through Amazon Bedrock, your costs just dropped significantly. Effective July 30, on-demand inference prices for GPT‑5.6 Luna are reduced by 80%, while GPT‑5.6 Terra prices are reduced by 20%. Luna now costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, making it one of the most affordable frontier-class models available. These price reductions apply automatically — no action required on your part. Read more

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Amazon CloudWatch announces managed Prometheus collectors – Amazon CloudWatch now supports collecting Prometheus metrics from your AWS infrastructure using fully managed collectors, enabling you to monitor Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon MSK, and Amazon OpenSearch Service workloads without deploying or managing any agents. If you’ve been maintaining your own Prometheus scraping infrastructure, this removes a significant operational burden. Read more
• AWS Interconnect — multicloud connectivity with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is now generally available – AWS Interconnect is the first purpose-built multicloud connectivity product of its kind, allowing you to quickly provision resilient, scalable private connections between AWS and other cloud providers. With this GA launch for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), you can establish private cross-cloud networking without traversing the public internet, making it easier to run multicloud architectures with the security and performance your workloads demand. Read more
• AWS IAM Identity Center extends multi-Region support to Identity Center directory – You can now replicate IAM Identity Center from your primary AWS Region to additional Regions when using the Identity Center directory as your identity source. If IAM Identity Center is affected by a disruption in the primary Region, your users continue to have access to their AWS accounts using provisioned entitlements in additional Regions. This feature was previously available only for instances connected to external identity providers. Read more
• Amazon S3 Tables now supports the Variant data type for Apache Iceberg V3 – Amazon S3 Tables adds support for the Variant data type, introduced in the Apache Iceberg V3 table format specification. Variant provides a high-performance, native solution for managing semi-structured data within your data lake — think IoT sensor data, application logs, and other schema-flexible payloads — without resorting to JSON blobs. Read more

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free events that bring the cloud and AI community together to connect, learn, and explore the latest technologies. Browse the full calendar to find a Summit near you in the second half of 2026.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders.

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Price reduction of GPT models in Bedrock, CloudWatch managed collectors for Prometheus metrics, and more (August 3, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

AWS Builder Center turned one year old last week. Launched on July 9, 2025, the platform has grown from a community hub with Wishlist voting, community profiles, and a toolbox into a full ecosystem with sandbox environments, workshops, Spaces, and a Builders’ Library. To mark the anniversary, Rick Suttles published a full feature timeline covering everything shipped over the past year: AWS Capabilities by Region (1,500+ services across 37 Regions), Spaces for community-created groups, workshops with category and complexity filters, badges and streaks, article series, view counts, saved items, student status, availability notifications, sign-in with GitHub and Amazon, and sandbox environments.

Jeff Barr published a retrospective summarizing Builder Center’s first year. Since launch, 5,548 authors have published 6,448 articles with more than 10.4 million page views combined. Builders have earned 99,226 badges since the badge system launched in March 2026. Community members have submitted 565 wishes, 10 of which have shipped with another 20 on the near-term roadmap.

The top community article Building an AWS Study Buddy with MCP + Strands Agents SDK by Dineshraj Dhanapathy reached 50,000+ views. Chris Miller’s Migrating an EOL Linux Server to AWS in 8 Hours with Kiro followed at 45,000+, and Yash Aggarwal’s AIdeas: NeuroVoice – Multimodal AI for Early Screening of Neurological Diseases article reached 38,000+.

The week’s headline addition is Sandbox Environments by Rick Suttles. Sandboxes give you a free, pre-provisioned AWS account to complete a workshop exercise. Each environment is active for 8 hours, after which the account and all its resources are automatically de-provisioned. You can have one active sandbox at a time and request one per week. No personal AWS account, credit card, or manual cleanup required.

Last week’s launches

Here’s what else happened this week.

• AWS Security Hub introduces Network Scanning – Security Hub introduced Network Scanning, a capability that identifies resources in your environment that are reachable from the public internet. Network Scanning probes your resources from the internet to detect actual reachability, complementing the existing network reachability findings in Security Hub that identify configurations that could make a resource reachable. It discovers public IP addresses, virtual machines, and load balancers across your AWS and Azure environments, identifies reachable ports, and determines what services are running behind them. Each reachable port generates a Security Hub finding with evidence of the port and service discovered. Security Hub Exposures then automatically correlates these findings with other findings and resource configurations to determine broader risk. Existing customers can enable Network Scanning in individual accounts and Regions, or across an organization through a configuration policy. For new customers, Network Scanning is on by default. It is included with Security Hub Essentials at no additional cost.
• Security Hub also extends unified security management to Microsoft Azure – Security Hub now monitors Microsoft Azure resources, providing unified posture management, vulnerability management, and security response across both clouds. It automatically discovers Azure VMs, container images, Function Apps, and identities, and evaluates them for misconfigurations, internet exposure, and software vulnerabilities. AWS and Azure findings appear in the same prioritized view with the same formats and automation workflows.
• Amazon SageMaker Studio integrates with Hugging Face for one-click model deployment and customization – You can now go from discovering a model on Hugging Face to working with it in SageMaker Studio in a single click. Select any supported model on Hugging Face and choose “Customize on SageMaker AI” or “Deploy on SageMaker AI” to land directly on the corresponding workflow page with the model pre-loaded. New customers receive a Studio environment created in seconds with pre-configured permissions for serverless model customization (including fine-tuning with custom reward functions for reinforcement learning), model evaluation, and deployment to SageMaker or Bedrock endpoints. Verified customers receive default GPU access to G5, G6, and G4dn instances without requesting quota increases, and quota utilization is visible directly inside the Studio environment.
• Amazon EKS Auto Mode and Amazon ECS Managed Instances reduce GPU management fees by up to 60% – Beginning July 1, 2026, EKS Auto Mode and ECS Managed Instances reduce management fees for accelerated instance types: G-series fees are down 35%, and P-series and AWS Trainium fees are down 60%. The reductions apply automatically to existing clusters and require no action from customers. Both services include capabilities built for accelerated workloads. EKS Auto Mode provides automatic parallel image pulling on GPU instances with local NVMe storage and accelerator-aware node repair. ECS Managed Instances provides GPU metrics through Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and automatic health monitoring for GPU hardware failures.
• Amazon Aurora DSQL change data capture (CDC) is now generally available – Aurora DSQL CDC streams the results of insert, update, and delete operations as change events to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. You can use it to synchronize data across microservices, trigger Lambda functions, or deliver changes to S3, Redshift, and OpenSearch Service through Amazon Data Firehose. CDC streaming is designed to have zero impact on database workload performance and requires no infrastructure to manage.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Building secure AI agents at scale: Introducing Loom for AWS – Loom is an open-source enterprise platform for building agents with AWS Strands Agents and deploying them on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. It provides a unified management UI and backend API with identity provider integration, scope-based authorization, multi-persona navigation, and full lifecycle management for agents, memory, MCP servers, and agent-to-agent integrations. Loom enforces automated resource tagging for cost attribution, implements RBAC and ABAC for multi-tenant security, uses paved-path blueprints for agent deployments, manages identity propagation through delegated actor chains, integrates with AWS Agent Registry for discovery and governance, and supports human-in-the-loop review before sensitive actions. The project is available in AWS Labs on GitHub.
• Introducing Claude apps gateway for AWS – The Claude apps gateway is a self-hosted control plane that gives organizations centralized control over access, cost, and policy for Claude Code and Claude Desktop. It connects to any OIDC-compliant identity provider, enforces managed settings on every request, routes inference to Amazon Bedrock or Claude Platform on AWS, and supports per-user and per-group spend caps. The gateway runs as a stateless container in your private network, backed by a PostgreSQL database for short-lived sign-in state. No long-lived secrets are stored on developer machines. Deploy it through Amazon Bedrock to keep data within the AWS security boundary, or through Claude Platform on AWS for the native Claude platform experience.
• Introducing OAuth support for AWS MCP Server – You can now connect agents to the AWS MCP Server using browser-based OAuth with the same credentials you use for the AWS Console or CLI. The new sign-in path supports IAM federation, AWS IAM Identity Center, and root or IAM users. AWS Sign-In issues short-lived access tokens and refresh tokens, with automatic token management so developers stay authenticated across restarts. For headless use cases, a non-interactive flow lets applications with existing AWS credentials obtain OAuth access tokens through the create-oauth2-token-with-iam API. New governance controls include OAuth-specific IAM condition keys, token introspection and revocation, dynamic client registration, and CloudTrail audit elements.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – Free in-person events for builders and innovators to learn, think big, and make new connections. Coming up: Taipei (July 15), Bogotá (July 30), Jakarta (August 6), Ciudad de México (August 12), Johannesburg (August 19), and Zurich (September 2).
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Yaoundé, Cameroon (July 25), Ahmedabad, India (July 25), Belo Horizonte, Brazil (August 22), Ottawa, Canada (August 22), Tulsa, USA (August 22), and Toronto, Canada (August 29).

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building.

Wishing everyone a restful and enjoyable summer. Whether you’re building, learning, or recharging, I hope you find time for all three. I’ll be heading to Scandinavia for a few weeks to trade the heat for some cooler weather and longer evenings. Come back next week for more news!

— Esra

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center at 1 year, Network Scanning in Security Hub, Loom for AWS, and more (July 13, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.