There’s something genuinely energizing about working with startups — something I’ve been doing intensely for more than two years now. Startups operate at a different frequency: the urgency is real, the constraints are tight, and the stakes are personal. Helping them navigate the challenge of proving their business model requires not just technical depth but a willingness to move fast, challenge assumptions, and make bets on the right architecture before the perfect data exists.

What I love most is that the work is never abstract: every decision I help a startup make has a direct impact on whether they ship on time, stay within budget, and earn the next round of confidence from their investors.

Let’s dive into this week’s AWS news.

Headlines

Now Open — AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, Türkiye — AWS has opened a new Local Zone in Istanbul, Türkiye, bringing AWS compute, storage, and networking services to one of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas. AWS Local Zones place AWS infrastructure much closer to large population and industry, enabling organizations to store and process data within specific jurisdictions to meet data residency requirements, while delivering single-digit millisecond latency for applications that need to run closer to end users. This supports compliance needs across financial services, government, telecoms, and healthcare.

A Local Zone is a significant infrastructure investment: it requires the same level of operational excellence as a Region, with consistent hardware, power, and networking infrastructure, and reflects AWS’s continued expansion into underserved markets.

For builders in Türkiye, this opens up a new set of architectural possibilities. You can now store and back up data within Turkish borders to help meet data residency requirements, and run latency-sensitive workloads in the Istanbul Local Zone while connecting seamlessly to the AWS Region—giving you the flexibility to architect hybrid applications without managing your own data center infrastructure.

To learn more about our decade-long commitment, available services, customers and partners in Türkiye, visit the launch blog post.

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches and updates that caught my attention:

• Security Hub Extended expands to 21 curated partner solutions across 9 categories — AWS Security Hub Extended now integrates with 21 curated partner security solutions spanning 9 categories, including endpoint protection, cloud security posture management, threat intelligence, and more. You can now get consolidated, prioritized security findings from a broader ecosystem of tools directly within Security Hub, without requiring custom integrations. This is particularly valuable for enterprise security teams that want a unified view of their security posture across AWS and third-party tooling.
• Amazon SageMaker AI now supports OpenAI-compatible APIs for inference endpoints — You can now call Amazon SageMaker AI inference endpoints using OpenAI-compatible APIs, making it significantly easier to migrate AI workloads from OpenAI to SageMaker — or to build applications that work across multiple providers — with no SDK changes required. This lowers the migration barrier for teams that started prototyping with OpenAI and are now looking to move to a more scalable, cost-controlled infrastructure on AWS. Your existing application code works as-is; you simply point it at your SageMaker endpoint.
• Introducing pre-fetching and IAM role assumption for AWS Secrets Manager Agent — The AWS Secrets Manager Agent can now pre-fetch secrets at startup and assume IAM roles to retrieve them, eliminating the cold-start latency associated with on-demand secret retrieval in latency-sensitive applications. You can configure the agent to preload the secrets your application needs before it starts serving traffic, reducing the risk of secrets-related latency spikes in production. IAM role assumption support also makes it easier to share the agent across workloads with different permission boundaries.
• AWS announces ExtendDB, an open-source DynamoDB-compatible adapter — AWS has open-sourced ExtendDB, a DynamoDB-compatible adapter that allows you to use the DynamoDB API and data model on top of alternative backend storage systems. This is particularly useful for local development and testing workflows — you can write against the DynamoDB API without requiring a live AWS connection. It’s also valuable for scenarios where you need DynamoDB-compatible semantics with more control over the underlying storage layer. It’s a practical tool for teams that want to build portability into their data access layer.
• AWS SAM CLI adds AWS CloudFormation Language Extensions support to accelerate local serverless development — The AWS SAM CLI now supports AWS CloudFormation Language Extensions locally, meaning you can use transforms, dynamic references, and other CloudFormation language features directly in your local development and testing workflows. This closes a long-standing gap between what you can test locally and what runs in production, making local serverless development faster and more reliable. If you build serverless applications with SAM and encounter edge cases in local testing, this update will meaningfully improve your experience.

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:

• Amazon Bedrock introduces new advanced prompt optimization and migration tool — This post covers the newly launched Advanced Prompt Optimization and Migration Tool in Amazon Bedrock, which helps you automatically tune your prompts for better model performance and assists you in migrating prompts across different foundation models. It’s a must-read if you’re iterating on prompt quality for production AI workloads.
• Introducing Kiro Web — Kiro, AWS’s AI-powered development environment, now has a web-based interface. Kiro Web lets you access Kiro’s spec-driven development, AI chat, and agent capabilities directly from your browser, without needing to install the desktop IDE. This is a great step toward making AI-assisted development more accessible — whether you’re doing a quick review, prototyping from a new machine, or introducing your team to the Kiro workflow.
• Announcing updated retry behavior for AWS SDKs and Tools — AWS has updated the default retry behavior across its SDKs and CLI tools, improving resilience for transient errors without requiring configuration changes from developers. The updated behavior includes smarter backoff strategies and better handling of throttling responses. If you’re running production workloads that occasionally hit API rate limits or transient failures, this update improves reliability out of the box. It’s worth reading to understand what changed and how it affects your applications.
• Bitnami image removal from ECR Public — AWS has announced that Bitnami container images will be removed from Amazon ECR Public. If your workloads pull Bitnami images from ECR Public, you should review this post to understand the timeline and migration path. The Bitnami images remain available directly from Bitnami’s own registry, and this post explains how to update your image references to continue pulling them without interruption.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for these events:

• AWS Summit Amsterdam — Join us in Amsterdam on May 27 for a full day of cloud and AI sessions, hands-on labs, and networking with builders and AWS experts from across Europe. Registration is free.
• AWS Summit Bangkok — AWS Summit Bangkok takes place on May 28. It’s a fantastic opportunity for builders and customers across Southeast Asia to connect and explore the latest in cloud innovation.
• AWS Summit Milan — Also on May 28, AWS Summit Milan brings the AWS community together in Italy. If you’re in Southern Europe, this is your event.
• AWS Summit Mumbai — Also on May 28, AWS Summit Mumbai brings cloud and AI content to builders across India. Check the link for the full agenda and registration.
• AWS Summit Los Angeles — Mark your calendar for June 10 in Los Angeles. The AWS Summit LA is coming up and it’s a great opportunity to connect with the West Coast builder community.
• AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. If you’re in Latin America, don’t miss AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte on August 22 — registration is open at awscommunityday.com.br.

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

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, open-source ExtendDB, Kiro Web, and more (May 25, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

This past week, I’ve been deep in the trenches helping customers transform their businesses through AI-DLC (AI-Driven Lifecycle) workshops. Throughout 2026, I’ve had the privilege of facilitating these sessions for numerous customers, guiding them through a structured framework that helps organizations identify, prioritize, and implement AI use cases that deliver measurable business value.

AI-DLC is a methodology that takes companies from AI experimentation to production-ready solutions by aligning technical capabilities with business outcomes. If you’re interested in learning more, check out this blog post that dives deeper into the framework, or watch as Riya Dani teaches me all about AI-DLC on our recent GenAI Developer Hour livestream!

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

OpenAI and Amazon announced a multi-year strategic partnership to accelerate AI innovation for enterprises, startups, and end consumers around the world. Amazon will invest $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met. AWS and OpenAI are co-creating a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI models, available through Amazon Bedrock, which allows developers to keep context, remember prior work, work across software tools and data sources, and access compute.

AWS will serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, enabling organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents. OpenAI and AWS are expanding their existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over 8 years, with OpenAI committing to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, spanning both Trainium3 and next-generation Trainium4 chips.

Last week’s launches

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

• AWS Security Hub Extended offers full-stack enterprise security with curated partner solutions — AWS launched Security Hub Extended, a plan that simplifies procurement, deployment, and integration of full-stack enterprise security solutions including 7AI, Britive, CrowdStrike, Cyera, Island, Noma, Okta, Oligo, Opti, Proofpoint, SailPoint, Splunk, Upwind, and Zscaler. With AWS as the seller of record, customers benefit from pre-negotiated pay-as-you-go pricing, a single bill, no long-term commitments, unified security operations within Security Hub, and unified Level 1 support for AWS Enterprise Support customers.
• Transform live video for mobile audiences with AWS Elemental Inference — AWS launched Elemental Inference, a fully managed AI service that automatically transforms live and on-demand video for mobile and social platforms in real time. The service uses AI-powered cropping to create vertical formats optimized for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, and automatically extracts highlight clips with 6-10 second latency. Beta testing showed large media companies achieved 34% or more savings on AI-powered live video workflows. Deep dive into the Fox Sports implementation.
• MediaConvert introduces new video probe API — AWS Elemental MediaConvert introduced a free Probe API for quick metadata analysis of media files, reading header metadata to return codec specifications, pixel formats, and color space details without processing video content.
• OpenAI-compatible Projects API in Amazon Bedrock — Projects API provides application-level isolation for your generative AI workloads using OpenAI-compatible APIs in the Mantle inference engine in Amazon Bedrock. You can organize and manage your AI applications with improved access control, cost tracking, and observability across your organization.
• Amazon Location Service introduces LLM Context — Amazon Location launched curated AI Agent context as a Kiro power, Claude Code plugin, and agent skill in the open Agent Skills format, improving code accuracy and accelerating feature implementation for location-based capabilities.
• Amazon EKS Node Monitoring Agent is now open source — The Amazon EKS Node Monitoring Agent is now open source on GitHub, allowing visibility into implementation, customization, and community contributions.
• AWS AppConfig integrates with New Relic — AWS AppConfig launched integration with New Relic Workflow Automation for automated, intelligent rollbacks during feature flag deployments, reducing detection-to-remediation time from minutes to seconds.

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:

From AWS community

Here are my personal favorite posts from AWS community:

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS at NVIDIA GTC 2026 — Join us at our AWS sessions, booths, demos, ancillary events in NVIDIA GTC 2026 on March 16 – 19, 2026 in San Jose. You can receive 20% off event passes through AWS and request a 1:1 meeting at GTC.
• AWS Summits — Join AWS Summits in 2026, free in-person events where you can explore emerging cloud and AI technologies, learn best practices, and network with industry peers and experts. Upcoming Summits include Paris (April 1), London (April 22), and Bengaluru (April 23–24).
• AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include JAWS Days in Tokyo (March 7), Chennai (March 7), Slovakia (March 11), and Pune (March 21).

Browse here for upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events.

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

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: OpenAI partnership, AWS Elemental Inference, Strands Labs, and more (March 2, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

At re:Invent 2025, we introduced a completely re-imagined AWS Security Hub that unifies AWS security services, including Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Inspector into a single experience. This unified experience automatically and continuously analyzes security findings in combination to help you prioritize and respond to your critical security risks.

Today, we’re announcing AWS Security Hub Extended, a plan of Security Hub that simplifies how you procure, deploy, and integrate a full-stack enterprise security solution across endpoint, identity, email, network, data, browser, cloud, AI, and security operations. With the Extended plan, you can expand your security portfolio beyond AWS to help protect your enterprise estate through a curated selection of AWS Partner solutions, including 7AI, Britive, CrowdStrike, Cyera, Island, Noma, Okta, Oligo, Opti, Proofpoint, SailPoint, Splunk, a Cisco company, Upwind, and Zscaler.

With AWS as the seller of record, you benefit from pre-negotiated pay-as-you-go pricing, a single bill, and no long-term commitments. You can also get unified security operations experience within Security Hub and unified Level 1 support for AWS Enterprise Support customers. You told us that managing multiple procurement cycles and vendor negotiations was creating unnecessary complexity, costing you time and resources. In response, we’ve curated these partner offerings for you to establish more comprehensive protection across your entire technology stack through a single, simplified experience.

Security findings from all participating solutions are emitted in the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) schema and automatically aggregated in AWS Security Hub. With the Extended plan, you can combine AWS and partner security solutions to quickly identify and respond to risks that span boundaries.

The Security Hub Extended plan in action

You can access the partner solutions directly within the Security Hub console by selecting Extended plan under the Management menu. From there, you can review and deploy any combination of curated and partner offerings.

You can review details of each partner offering directly in the Security Hub console and subscribe. When you subscribe, you’ll be directed to an automated on-boarding experience from each partner. Once onboarded, consumption-based metering is automatic and you are billed monthly as part of your Security Hub bill.

Security findings from all solutions are automatically consolidated in AWS Security Hub. This gives you immediate and direct access to all security findings in normalized OCSF schema.

To learn more about how to enhance your security posture with these integrations for AWS Security Hub, visit the AWS Security Hub User Guide.

Now available

The AWS Security Hub Extended plan is now generally available in all AWS commercial Regions where Security Hub is available. You can use flexible pay-as-you-go or flat-rate pricing—no upfront investments or long-term commitments required. For more information about pricing, visit the AWS Security Hub pricing page.

Give it a try today in the Security Hub console and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Security Hub or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post AWS Security Hub Extended offers full-stack enterprise security with curated partner solutions appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Billing Transfer, a new capability to centrally manage and pay bills across multiple organizations by transferring payment responsibility to other billing administrators, such as company affiliates and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partners. This feature provides customers operating across multiple organizations with comprehensive visibility of cloud costs across their multi-organization environment, but organization administrators maintain security management autonomy over their accounts.

Customers use AWS Organizations to centrally administer and manage billing for their multi-account environment. However, when they operate in a multi-organization environment, billing administrators must access the management account of each organization separately to collect invoices and pay bills. This decentralized approach to billing management creates unnecessary complexity for enterprises managing costs and paying bills across multiple AWS organizations. This feature also will be useful for AWS Partners to resell AWS products and solutions, and assume the responsibility of paying AWS for the consumption of their multiple customers.

With Billing Transfer, customers operating in multi-organization environments can now use a single management account to manage aspects of billing— such as invoice collection, payment processing, and detailed cost analysis. This makes billing operations more efficient and scalable while individual management accounts can maintain complete security and governance autonomy over their accounts. Billing Transfer also helps protect proprietary pricing data by integrating with AWS Billing Conductor, so billing administrators can control cost visibility.

Getting started with Billing Transfer

To set up Billing Transfer, an external management account sends a billing transfer invitation to a management account called a bill-source account. If accepted, the external account becomes the bill-transfer account, managing and paying for the bill-source account’s consolidated bill, starting on the date specified on the invitation.

To get started, go to the Billing and Cost Management console, choose Preferences and Settings in the left navigation pane and choose Billing transfer. Choose Send invitation from a management account you’ll use to centrally manage billing across your multi-organization environment.

Now, you can send a billing transfer invitation by entering the email address or account ID of the bill-source accounts for which you want to manage billing. You should choose the monthly billing period for when invoicing and payment will begin and a pricing plan from AWS Billing Conductor to control the cost data visible to the bill-source accounts.

When you choose Send invitation, the bill-source accounts will get a billing transfer notice in the Outbound billing tab.

Choose View details, review the invitation page, and choose Accept.

After the transfer is accepted, all usage from the bill-source accounts will be billed to the bill-transfer account using its billing and tax settings, and invoices will no longer be sent to the bill-source accounts. Any party (bill-source accounts and bill-transfer account) can withdraw the transfer at any time.

After your billing transfer begins, the bill-transfer account will receive a bill at the end of the month for each of your billing transfers. To view transferred invoices reflecting the usage of the bill-source accounts, choose the Invoices tab in the Bills page.

You can identify the transferred invoices by bill-source account IDs. You can also find the payments for the bill-source accounts invoices in the Payments menu. These appear only in the bill-transfer account.

The bill-transfer account can use billing views to access the cost data of the bill-source accounts in AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Report, AWS Budgets and Bills page. When enabling billing view mode, you can choose your desired billing view for each bill-source account.

The bill-source accounts will experience these changes:

• Historical cost data will no longer be available and should be downloaded before accepting
• Cost and Usage Reports should be reconfigured after transfer

Transferred bills in the bill-transfer account always use the tax and payment settings of the account to which they’re delivered. Therefore, all the invoices reflecting the usage of the bill-source accounts and the member accounts in their AWS Organizations will contain taxes (if applicable) calculated on the tax settings determined by the bill-transfer account.

Similarly, the seller of record and payment preferences are also based on the configuration determined by the bill-transfer account. You can customize the tax and payments settings by creating the invoice units available in the Invoice Configuration functionality.

To learn more about details, visit Billing Transfer in the AWS documentation.

Now available

Billing Transfer is available today in all commercial AWS Regions. To learn more, visit the AWS Cloud Financial Management Services product page.

Give Billing Transfer a try today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for AWS Billing or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post New: AWS Billing Transfer for centrally managing AWS billing and costs across multiple organizations appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.