Amazon Prime Day 2026 was exclusively for Prime members and ran June 23–26, 2026 with millions of deals across more than 35 categories.

As part of our annual tradition of sharing how AWS powered Prime Day (2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025), I want to share the services and chart-topping metrics from AWS that made your amazing shopping experience possible.

Prime Day 2026 – all the numbers
As always, Prime Day was powered by AWS. Here are some of the most interesting and/or mind-blowing metrics:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and AWS Graviton – During Amazon Prime Day 2026, AWS Graviton powered up to 49% of the Amazon EC2 compute used by Amazon.com.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon EBS, our high-performance block storage service, peaked at over 24.8 trillion I/O operations, moving over an exabyte of data daily.

AWS Lambda – AWS Lambda handled over 2.3 trillion invocations per day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Fargate – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon ECS launched an average of 158.3 million tasks per day on AWS Fargate, representing a 47.7 percent increase from the previous year’s Prime Day average.

Amazon CloudFront – Amazon CloudFront delivered over 2.1 trillion HTTP requests during the global week of Prime Day 2026, a 5 percent increase in total requests compared to Prime Day 2025.

Amazon DynamoDB – Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless, fully managed, distributed NoSQL database, powers multiple high-traffic Amazon properties and systems including Alexa, the Amazon.com sites, and all Amazon fulfillment centers. Over the course of Prime Day 2026, between June 23 and June 26, 2026, DynamoDB processed over 59 trillion requests. DynamoDB maintained high availability while delivering single-digit millisecond responses and peaking at 192 million requests per second.

Amazon Aurora – On Prime Day, Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system (RDBMS) built for high performance and availability at global scale for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and DSQL, processed hundreds of billions of transactions, stored 5,491 terabytes of data, and transferred 1,194 terabytes of data.

Amazon ElastiCache – During Prime Day, Amazon ElastiCache peaked at serving over 2.3 quadrillion daily requests and 2.1 trillion requests in a minute.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a fully managed serverless data streaming service, processed a peak of 988 million records per second during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) – Amazon SNS, a fully managed pub/sub messaging service for application-to-application and application-to-person communication, delivered 5 trillion messages in a single day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) – Amazon SQS, a fully managed message queuing service for microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications, received a peak of 213 million messages per second during Prime Day 2026

AWS CloudTrail – AWS CloudTrail processes billions of API activity events per day for governance, compliance, and operational auditing. During Prime Day 2026, that volume surged to 3.6 trillion events in just four days, a 44% increase over Prime Day 2025.

AWS CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch processed over 2.15 quadrillion metric observations per day during Prime Day 2026.

Amazon GuardDuty – During Prime Day 2026, Amazon GuardDuty monitored an average of 14.08 trillion log events per hour, a 59% increase from last year’s Prime Day.

AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) – We ran over 44,000 AWS FIS experiments – more than six times what we conducted in 2025 – to help ensure Amazon.com remains highly available on Prime Day.

Prepare to scale
If you’re preparing for similar business-critical events, product launches, and migrations, I recommend that you take advantage of AWS Countdown Premium. From retail peak seasons to major sporting events, elections, and healthcare enrollment periods, we help you deliver flawless experiences when it matters most. Our experts help you manage your infrastructure to handle massive traffic spikes while maintaining security and performance. We work alongside your team to scale infrastructure, optimize costs during demand surges, strengthen security measures, and monitor real-time demands. To learn more, visit AWS Countdown Premium for business critical events.

I look forward to seeing what other records will be broken next year!

— Channy

The post All the numbers: Amazon Prime Day 2026 powered by AWS appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, we announced a public preview of Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, built on a customized version of OpenAI’s Agents API engineered to be AWS-native and integrated with AWS resources. You can now build agents optimized for OpenAI models that run entirely inside AWS with the identities, permissions, and governance controls you already use.

You can choose an execution environment: self-hosted compute to use an existing development machine, container, or compute environment or Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, for managed runtime sessions and configurable storage in your AWS account. To learn more, visit the Amazon Bedrock documentation.

In addition, we are adding new frontier models on Amazon Bedrock to expand your model choices:

• OpenAI GPT-6.1 Sol: An upgrade to GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6.1 Sol delivers exceptionally strong performance on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work. According to OpenAI, it approaches GPT-6 Astra across demanding evaluations at roughly one-fifth of the cost, giving developers more room to build and run capable agents at scale. To learn more, visit the GPT-6.1 Sol model card.
• OpenAI GPT-6 Astra UltraFast mode: Ultrafast is a premium speed tier for GPT-6 Astra, built for workloads where speed matters most. According to OpenAI, Ultrafast delivers up to 6x faster inference in the API, with up to 300 tokens per second. The Amazon Bedrock inference engine delivers the performance, security, and reliability required for production workloads. To learn more, visit the GPT-6 Astra model card.
• Anthropic Claude Sonnet 5.5: Claude Sonnet 5.5 is a smarter, more efficient Sonnet and a step up from Sonnet 5, making it a natural upgrade for teams already building on Sonnet. It’s stronger for coding, completing well-scoped tasks as part of a larger coding strategy such as building and fixing features with Claude in the same session or verifying output against requirements. To learn more, visit the Claude Sonnet 5.5 model card.
• SpaceXAI Grok 4.7: Grok 4.7 builds on Grok 4.6 with better mixed-document handling, more dependable repo-scale coding with planning and error recovery, and enhanced browser-use agents for form fills and portal navigation. To learn more, visit the Grok 4.7 model card.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

• AWS Well-Architected Agent (preview): You can use an AI-powered agent service that analyzes your AWS environment to deliver targeted, contextual recommendations for improving your applications’ cost, security, performance, and resilience. The agent analyzes your infrastructure, understands your unique business goals, and delivers contextual recommendations.
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports direct querying of Apache Iceberg and Parquet data: You can directly query operational data together with data stored in data lakes in Apache Iceberg and Parquet formats using your existing PostgreSQL applications and tools, without extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines or data duplication.
• Amazon S3 Tables support all Apache Iceberg V3 data types: Amazon S3 Tables add support for geometry, geography, unknown, and nanosecond timestamp data types, along with column default values, as defined in the Iceberg V3 specification. You can now store geospatial coordinates and nanosecond-precision event times natively instead of encoding them in strings or integers.

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

AWS service availability updates
When the availability of an AWS service or feature changes, we provide customers guidance in AWS Product Lifecycle Changes on available alternatives and support for migration so that disruptions to your operations are minimized. The following lifecycle changes were updated on September 29, 2026.

Services moving to Maintenance (no longer accessible to new customers starting October 29, 2026):

Services entering Sunset:

Services reaching End of Support (as of September 29, 2026):

• Amazon Mechanical Turk

We understand that changes in availability can impact your operations. For specific guidance, consult the relevant service documentation or contact AWS Support.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects and news items you may find interesting:

• Introducing Kiro workflows: Kiro workflows enable you to carry out complex tasks from start to finish with multiple agents and less supervision. We’ve been building Kiro itself with workflows, including the new cloud configuration, cloud sessions, and most of the workflow experience.
• Introducing Strands Decider: Strands Decider is one of a new class of decision models or system one models, a type of model that has been gaining significant attention since TypeSafe AI’s launch of Jev earlier this month. Strands Decider 2B is a small, open source, decision model optimized for fast experimentation, local development, and innovation.
• New FDE pathways for AWS Partners: On June 30, AWS announced the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization, backed by a $1 billion investment, and extended this hands-on delivery approach to AWS Partners through the Partner-Led FDE motion. Now, AWS Partners have a structured way to build and validate that depth with three new Partner FDE pathways and credentials that recognize the applied proficiency required to deliver production agentic AI.

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

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events, including upcoming AWS re:Invent and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

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

— Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, Q3 service availability updates, Kiro workflows, and more (October 5, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Amazon S3 Tables now support all data types in the Apache Iceberg V3 specification. You can create V3 tables or upgrade existing V2 tables to take advantage of V3 features like deletion vectors, row lineage, and new data types such as variant, nanosecond timestamps, unknown, geometry, and geography.

Apache Iceberg has become the open standard for managing large analytics datasets. It lets you manage petabyte-scale tables with features like schema evolution, hidden partitioning, and time travel queries, while keeping your data in open Parquet files in data lakes on object storage like Amazon S3. Amazon S3 Tables offer storage purpose-built to keep Iceberg tables performant and cost-effective as they grow, with fully managed features like automatic compaction, maintenance, replication, and Intelligent-Tiering.

Teams running analytics on Apache Iceberg V2 tables often hit the same limits as their data grows. A compliance request to delete 50,000 user records from a 2-billion-row table leaves behind positional delete files that slow queries until compaction runs. Semi-structured events land as JSON strings that every query has to parse. Geospatial coordinates and nanosecond-precision timestamps get encoded as strings or integers. Each workaround adds storage cost, query latency, and pipeline code. With V3, Iceberg solves these challenges by offering native support for semi-structured and geospatial data, faster row-level operations, and built-in row lineage for data governance.

Starting today, Amazon S3 Tables support all V3 data types, including variant, nanosecond timestamps, geometry, geography, and unknown, along with deletion vectors and row lineage. You can create new V3 tables or upgrade existing V2 tables in place, and S3 Tables continue to run compaction and maintenance for you.

Apache Iceberg V3
V3 is the latest version of the Iceberg specification. Among its many improvements, V3 introduces capabilities that address the most common pain points in V2. This includes:

Deletion vectors replace V2’s positional delete files with a compact binary format. That 50,000-row compliance delete now writes a single deletion vector file instead of thousands of small deletes, significantly reducing compaction time and delete file overhead.

Row lineage adds _row_id and _last_updated_sequence_number to each record automatically. Your downstream pipelines can query these fields to find changed rows without scanning the full table.

New data types let you store semi-structured, geospatial, and nanosecond-precision data natively instead of encoding it as strings or integers:

• Nanosecond timestamp(tz) for nanosecond-precision timestamps
• Geometry and geography for geospatial data
• Unknown for columns with no known type

Variant data type stores semi-structured data in columnar format. During writes, the engine shreds variant data into hidden columns and collects statistics. At query time, those statistics enable file pruning that significantly reduces I/O compared to parsing JSON strings.

The following sections walk through how to use these V3 capabilities in practice, with examples that show how to create tables, work with the new data types, and manage data at scale.

Getting started
A retail analytics team tracks user behavior across web and mobile apps. Each event has a different structure: page views include URLs and duration, purchases include items and amounts, and searches include query terms and result counts. With V3’s variant type, you store all event shapes in one table without predefined schemas:

CREATE TABLE my_catalog.namespace.clickstream (
  event_id bigint,
  event_time timestamp,
  user_id string,
  payload variant
)
USING iceberg
TBLPROPERTIES ('format-version' = '3')

Insert events with different payload shapes without worrying about schema evolution:

INSERT INTO my_catalog.namespace.clickstream VALUES
  (1, current_timestamp(), 'user-42',
   PARSE_JSON('{"action": "purchase", "amount": 99.99, "items": ["laptop_stand"]}')),
  (2, current_timestamp(), 'user-17',
   PARSE_JSON('{"action": "page_view", "url": "/products/webcam", "duration_ms": 4200}'));

Now query the variant column directly, without PARSE_JSON at read time. With Amazon EMR Spark, use variant_get:

SELECT
  event_id,
  user_id,
  variant_get(payload, '$.action', 'string') AS action,
  variant_get(payload, '$.amount', 'double') AS amount
FROM my_catalog.namespace.clickstream
WHERE variant_get(payload, '$.action', 'string') = 'purchase'
  AND variant_get(payload, '$.amount', 'double') > 50.00

To enable deletion vectors for write operations, configure merge-on-read mode:

ALTER TABLE my_catalog.namespace.clickstream
SET TBLPROPERTIES (
  'write.delete.mode' = 'merge-on-read',
  'write.update.mode' = 'merge-on-read',
  'write.merge.mode' = 'merge-on-read'
)

Now when you run a compliance delete, V3 writes a small deletion vector instead of rewriting data files:

DELETE FROM my_catalog.namespace.clickstream
WHERE user_id = 'user-42'

S3 Tables compaction handles these deletion vector files automatically on the next maintenance cycle.

Upgrading from V2
AWS provides backwards compatibility for both versions to minimize disruption during migration to V3. Existing V2 readers continue to work on upgraded tables until you’re ready to fully adopt V3 features. For more details, see the S3 Tables Iceberg V3 documentation.
Upgrade an existing table atomically without rewriting data:

ALTER TABLE my_catalog.namespace.existing_table
SET TBLPROPERTIES ('format-version' = '3')

On the next compaction cycle, S3 Tables remove old V2 delete files. New modifications use deletion vectors automatically. Row lineage fields initialize on the first data modification after the upgrade.

This is a one-way operation. The Apache Iceberg specification does not support downgrading from V3 to V2. Verify that all engines accessing the table support V3 before upgrading.

Using row lineage for incremental pipelines
After your table has V3 data, use row lineage to build efficient incremental pipelines:

SELECT *, _row_id, _last_updated_sequence_number
FROM my_catalog.namespace.clickstream
WHERE _last_updated_sequence_number > 42

This returns only rows modified after sequence number 42. Your downstream jobs can checkpoint this value and process only new changes on each run, instead of scanning the full table.

Compatibility across AWS analytics services
AWS offers the broadest native Apache Iceberg support of any major cloud provider, with Iceberg-compatible services at every layer of the data stack: ingestion, storage, catalog, and analytics. You can store and automatically optimize V3 tables in Amazon S3 Tables, write data with Amazon EMR Spark, integrate and manage data with AWS Glue, and run analytics with Amazon Redshift. To learn more about AWS analytics support for V3, see the Apache Iceberg on AWS prescriptive guidance.

Both S3 Tables and AWS Glue Data Catalog support the Iceberg REST Catalog (IRC) API, enabling interoperability across engines regardless of the catalog endpoint.

Things to know

• S3 Tables compaction fully supports V3 deletion vector files and preserves row lineage metadata.
• The new V3 data types (variant, nanosecond timestamps, geometry, geography, and unknown) require an engine built on Apache Spark 4.0 or later, such as AWS Glue 6.0 or later, or Amazon EMR release 8.1 or later.
• You can create V3 tables from the Amazon S3 console, AWS CLI, or any engine that supports the Iceberg REST Catalog API.
• The new V3 data types are supported only for tables that use the Parquet file format (not ORC or Avro).
• Columns of type variant, geometry, geography, or nanosecond timestamp can’t be included in a table’s sort order for compaction. Tables containing these columns still compact under the sort and Z-order strategies when the sort order uses columns of other types.

Now available
Amazon S3 Tables support for all Apache Iceberg V3 data types is now available in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables are supported. Apache Iceberg V3 support is available at no additional charge; standard S3 Tables pricing applies.

To get started, visit the Amazon S3 Tables documentation or create a table bucket from the Amazon S3 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. Send feedback to AWS re:Post or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

– Daniel Abib

The post Amazon S3 Tables now support all Apache Iceberg V3 data types appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing metadata pre-filtering for Amazon S3 Vectors, which delivers higher recall on filtered queries by evaluating your metadata filter before the similarity search. You can filter on attributes such as tenant, category, status, or time, and pre-filtering adds prefix matching with $startsWith for paths, URLs, and hierarchical keys. Each vector carries up to 2 KB of filterable metadata, and a single query supports up to 100 filter constraints. There is no additional cost, no re-ingestion, and no change to your queries.

Most applications never search a whole index. They search the part of it that belongs to a particular user, account, or category, and they express that scope as a metadata filter. Semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic applications all need the same thing from a filtered query: a similarity search that covers the vectors matching the filter, and returns the closest of them. With pre-filtering, a filtered query returns more of the relevant matches your index contains, giving you higher recall on filtered searches.

Common use cases
Pre-filtering applies wherever results have to be both relevant and correctly scoped:

• Legal and professional services: A law firm or e-discovery platform searches documents scoped to a single client, and with $startsWith narrows further by matter number, folder path, or document ID prefix. A single client is a small share of a firm-wide archive, and filters this narrow are where pre-filtering improves recall most.
• Financial services: An investment research platform searches analyst notes, filings, and call transcripts scoped by issuer, document type, and publication date.
• Media and entertainment: A streaming service filters by content rating and regional licensing before the semantic search, finding similar titles restricted to G and PG content licensed in one territory.
• Agentic applications: An agent working within a user’s session filters on fields such as owner, document set, and timestamp so its searches cover the material relevant to the task at hand. Higher recall means more of that material reaches the agent, which improves task reliability

How pre-filtering works
Each vector in an S3 Vectors index can carry application-defined metadata, and a query can filter on those fields.

Every vector index has an index mode. On an index whose index mode is ENHANCED, S3 Vectors resolves your filter first, then searches only the vectors that match. On an index whose index mode is CLASSIC, S3 Vectors performs the vector search and filter evaluation in tandem, validating each candidate vector against your filter as it searches. Existing indexes use CLASSIC until you update them.

Consider a support knowledge base of 8 million tickets, where an agent searches one customer’s history for a recurring error. If that customer accounts for 400 of those tickets, resolving customer_id first means the similarity search runs across all 400 of them, so the agent sees that customer’s prior occurrences. Before the index was updated, the same query drew its candidates from the full 8 million, and the result set contained fewer of that customer’s matching tickets.

On highly selective filters, pre-filtering returns up to 5x more of the matching vectors than the same query returned before on CLASSIC indexes.

Getting started
Before you start, make sure your IAM policy grants permissions for the new actions.

You can get started in three steps. The walkthrough below builds a small product-catalog index and runs a selective filter against it, the same pattern you would use for a multi-tenant RAG store or a document search scoped to one client.

First, create a vector index:

aws s3vectors create-index  
  --index-name product-catalog  
  --vector-bucket-name my-vector-bucket  
  --dimension 1536  
  --distance-metric cosine

The dimension must match the output size of your embedding model, and distance-metric should match how that model was trained (cosine is common for text embeddings). Second, write vectors with the PutVectors API, attaching up to 2 KB of filterable metadata to each vector:

aws s3vectors put-vectors 
  --index-name product-catalog 
  --vector-bucket-name my-vector-bucket 
  --vectors '[{
    "key": "doc-001",
    "data": {"float32": [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ...]},
    "metadata": {
      "tenant_id": "t-10428",
      "category": "legal",
      "created_date": "2026-03-15",
      "active": true
    }
  }]'

Each vector carries the attributes your application filters on. In this example, tenant_id scopes results to a single customer, category narrows by document type, created_date records when the document was created, and active is a boolean flag. By default every metadata field is filterable, so you can query on any of them without declaring a schema up front.

Third, run a filtered similarity query with the QueryVectors API. The filter uses a compact JSON syntax where a bare key-value pair is an equality match, and operators such as $and, $or, and $gt combine or refine conditions. Pass --return-metadata so the query returns each vector’s metadata:

aws s3vectors query-vectors 
  --index-name product-catalog 
  --vector-bucket-name my-vector-bucket 
  --query-vector '{"float32": [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ...]}' 
  --top-k 50 
  --return-metadata 
  --filter '{"$and": [
    {"tenant_id": "t-10428"},
    {"category": "legal"},
    {"active": true}
  ]}'

The expected result is a single vector, doc-001, the only one matching all three filter conditions (tenant_id, category, and active):

{
  "vectors": [
    {
      "distance": 0.9717477560043335,
      "key": "doc-001",
      "metadata": {
        "tenant_id": "t-10428",
        "category": "legal",
        "created_date": "2026-03-15",
        "active": true
      }
    }
  ],
  "distanceMetric": "cosine"
}

S3 Vectors first narrows the search space to vectors matching all three filter conditions, then returns the 50 most similar vectors from that subset. Because the filter is applied before the search, those results are drawn from across all the vectors that match it.

Prefix matching with $startsWith
Pre-filtering adds a prefix match operator for filtering on paths, URLs, and hierarchical keys. A document store that encodes case and folder structure into a document ID can scope a search to a subtree in one condition:

--filter '{"$startsWith": {"document_id": "matter-4417/exhibits/"}}'

$startsWith joins the existing operators: equality, numeric range, set membership, existence checks, and boolean logic with $and and $or.

Turning on pre-filtering for existing indexes
Call UpdateIndexMode on an existing index to turn on pre-filtering:

aws s3vectors update-index-mode 
  --vector-bucket-name my-vector-bucket 
  --index-name product-catalog 
  --index-mode ENHANCED

Pre-filtering takes effect in place. Your existing vectors are not re-ingested, your queries do not change, and the new filter operators are available immediately.

Here is the difference on the same index and the same query. Before the update, a query scoped to one tenant returns two of the ten results requested:

aws s3vectors query-vectors 
  --vector-bucket-name my-vector-bucket 
  --index-name product-catalog 
  --query-vector '{"float32": [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, ...]}' 
  --top-k 10 
  --return-metadata 
  --filter '{"tenant_id": "t-10428"}'

{
  "vectors": [
    { "key": "doc-114", "distance": 0.41 },
    { "key": "doc-322", "distance": 0.55 }
  ],
  "distanceMetric": "cosine"
}

After the update, the same query returns a full result set drawn from across that tenant’s documents:

{
  "vectors": [
    { "key": "doc-018", "distance": 0.09 },
    { "key": "doc-207", "distance": 0.13 },
    { "key": "doc-114", "distance": 0.41 },
    ... 7 more
  ],
  "distanceMetric": "cosine"
}

Rolling out across your indexes
Once you have validated pre-filtering on an index, set the default index mode on the vector bucket so that new indexes use ENHANCED without a follow-up call:

aws s3vectors put-vector-bucket-default-index-mode 
  --vector-bucket-name my-vector-bucket 
  --default-index-mode ENHANCED

To bring the rest of your existing indexes across, list them and check the index mode on each one, then call UpdateIndexMode on the ones still using CLASSIC:

aws s3vectors list-indexes 
  --vector-bucket-name my-vector-bucket

aws s3vectors get-index 
  --vector-bucket-name my-vector-bucket 
  --index-name product-catalog

Things to know 

• Indexes created in vector buckets created on or after September 30, 2026 use index mode ENHANCED. Indexes in buckets that existed before that date use CLASSIC until you set the bucket default, including indexes created in those buckets afterward.
• A single query supports up to 100 filter constraints, counted per value the filter evaluates. If a query exceeds that, you can usually consolidate the filter, replacing a 300-value $in over legal cases with a single caseId field, for example, or split it into smaller queries, run them in parallel, and merge the results by distance.

Now available
Metadata pre-filtering is available at no additional cost in all commercial AWS Regions where Amazon S3 Vectors is available, and in the AWS China Regions. You pay standard S3 Vectors pricing for storage, PUT requests, and queries. For full pricing details, visit the Amazon S3 pricing page. For regional availability, visit Amazon S3 Vectors Regions and quotas.

Whether you’re scoping a RAG application to one tenant, scoping an agent’s searches to one user’s documents, or narrowing a catalog search to a licensing window, pre-filtering lets you apply those filters without trading away recall. To learn more and get started, visit the Amazon S3 Vectors documentation. Send feedback to AWS re:Post for S3 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Daniel Abib

The post Amazon S3 Vectors now supports metadata pre-filtering for higher recall on filtered searches appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, Amazon CloudWatch introduces CloudWatch Omni, a unified observability experience for application and AI workloads that is app-centric, AI-powered, built on open standards, and delivered off-console. CloudWatch Omni is a purpose-built observability, evaluation, and experimentation solution for AI agents. It helps teams design, evaluate, and operate AI agents across any model provider, framework, or runtime, with an eval-driven workflow, support for the tools you already use, and observability delivered where you work: directly in your IDE and through a standalone web experience, separate from the AWS Management Console.

Organizations deploying agentic AI systems face observability challenges that traditional monitoring can’t address. Agent behavior is non-deterministic: a prompt change can degrade response quality even when standard metrics show no errors. Teams spend hours manually reviewing logs across multiple systems, unable to pinpoint what changed or why. Existing tools force teams to choose between siloed generative AI monitoring or fragmented solutions requiring constant context-switching between their coding environment and browser-based dashboards.

CloudWatch Omni captures every trace and includes built-in evaluators for correctness, coherence, retrieval quality, and tool selection, among others. You can compare prompt versions side by side in the playground, build test datasets from production traffic, run experiments across different configurations, and detect regressions automatically.

Two surfaces for development and operations
CloudWatch Omni delivers observability through two complementary surfaces. Developers get a native extension inside VS Code and Kiro (the currently supported IDEs), where traces appear as you run your agent with a playground and evaluators a click away. Operators get a standalone web experience, separate from the AWS Management Console to monitor the fleet, accessible through SSO with no AWS console needed. Both share the same data: the trace a developer debugs is the trace an operator investigates.

The Cloud Login feature connects your local IDE environment to your AWS account, enabling you to send telemetry data to Amazon CloudWatch for persistent storage, share traces with your team, and access production dashboards. This connection is optional. You can use CloudWatch Omni entirely locally during development, then connect to the cloud when you are ready to monitor agents in production.

Getting started
CloudWatch Omni offers two ways to get started: through the IDE extension (for VS Code and Kiro) or directly through the cloud experience, where you can start sending telemetry data to CloudWatch without installing any IDE extension. In this walkthrough, I install the extension, create an agent, run it, and explore the traces and evaluation tools from my IDE.

After installing the CloudWatch Omni extension from the VS Code Marketplace, the CloudWatch Omni icon appears in the Activity Bar. From the welcome screen, I selected Get started with Sample Project to load a pre-configured agent with sample trace data or use shortcut to Command Palette using Command + Shift + P (on macOS) or Ctrl + Shift + P (on Windows/Linux) and select Omni: Create a new Project

Figure 1. CloudWatch Omni welcome screen & create new project in VS Code

The sample project comes with an agent implementation and example datasets. Part of the getting-started experience is adding OpenTelemetry instrumentation, and CloudWatch Omni guides you through each step. You can also create a new agent from scratch. CloudWatch Omni walks you through the process using an interactive chat where you define the agent’s purpose, select a model provider, and configure tools. All data is stored locally by default. You can optionally connect to AWS to send data to Amazon CloudWatch.

After verifying the configuration, I started the local dev server and sent a question to the agent. What makes this different from a typical chatbot interface is what happens next: selecting View Trace shows exactly how the agent processed the request.

Figure 2. CloudWatch Omni guides your AI code assistant to configure the local development environment for testing

CloudWatch Omni integrates with AI code assistants such as Kiro, Claude Code, and Codex to streamline the setup process. These assistants can configure the Dev Server, install dependencies, and set up instrumentation on your behalf, so you can go from installation to running your first traced agent session in minutes without manual configuration.

Figure 3. Interacting with the agent and viewing traces

Traces are essential for understanding AI agent behavior. Unlike traditional request-response systems, agents make multiple decisions per invocation: choosing tools, composing prompts, and chaining sub-calls. Without full trace visibility, diagnosing why an agent produced an incorrect answer or took an unexpected path becomes guesswork. CloudWatch Omni records every step in a structured timeline so you can pinpoint exactly where behavior diverged.

The Trace Explorer shows a detailed breakdown of every step the agent took (LLM calls, tool invocations, and reasoning steps) in a structured, hierarchical timeline. I could drill into any span to inspect inputs, outputs, token usage, and latency.

Figure 4. Trace Explorer showing the agent’s execution timeline

The Trace Explorer also supports Compare mode, which places two traces side by side to see how different prompts or configurations affect behavior. Compare mode is especially helpful when debugging regressions. And with Ask Assistant, an AI agent analyzes your traces to surface patterns and anomalies, answering questions like “Why did the agent call this tool twice?”

Figure 5. Comparing two traces side by side

Evaluation is what turns observability into actionable quality improvement for generative AI. Traditional metrics like latency and error rate cannot tell you whether an agent’s response was helpful, coherent, or factually correct. Evaluators score each response against quality dimensions, letting you measure what users actually experience and catch regressions that standard monitoring misses entirely.

CloudWatch Omni includes 17 built-in evaluators for metrics like coherence, helpfulness, faithfulness, and routing correctness. I selected traces from the Trace Explorer, chose evaluators, and ran an evaluation, getting per-example scores and aggregate metrics without building any custom evaluation framework.

Figure 6. Running evaluations on traces

From there, I used the Playground to test different system prompts side by side, comparing multiple model and prompt configurations in real time to see how each variation affects output quality before committing changes. With the Experiments view, I could run the same dataset against two agent variants and compare their evaluation scores, latency, and token usage side by side to pick the best-performing configuration.

Figure 7. Comparing evaluations across agent variants in the Omni Experiments console

With Prompt Management, you can version and track prompt configurations over time, making it easy to roll back when a new version underperforms.

CloudWatch Omni also provides a Session Explorer to review full conversation histories and understand how agents handle multi-turn interactions, along with an Agent Topology view that visualizes the architecture of your agent system, including sub-agents, tools, and their interconnections. You can drill into any node to inspect performance and identify bottlenecks.

CloudWatch Omni also offers a dedicated web experience accessible from any browser without an IDE. Teams can access all capabilities collaboratively, including application monitoring, analytics, agent observability, and AI-powered investigations.

Figure 8. CloudWatch Omni web experience with application monitoring, analytics, and agent observability

I curated traces into golden datasets for structured experimentation. The Experiment function runs the agent against a dataset and automatically scores results, creating benchmarks for regression testing whenever prompts or agent logic change.

If you already have an agent built with a supported framework, CloudWatch Omni provides two paths to add instrumentation: Auto-instrument with Kiro, which detects your framework and configures tracing automatically, or manual instrumentation with ready-to-use code snippets for Python and TypeScript. For detailed instrumentation guides, see the CloudWatch Omni documentation.

Supported frameworks and open standards
The walkthrough above uses the sample project, but CloudWatch Omni works with the agent frameworks teams are already using: LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI SDK, Strands, Vercel AI SDK, and more, in both Python and TypeScript. It also provides native observability for agents built with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and uses AgentCore’s evaluation capabilities to assess agent quality directly within the Omni workflow.

Instrumentation uses open standards (OpenInference and ADOT), whether your agents run on Lambda, ECS, EKS, or other clouds. For evaluation, Omni integrates with third-party evaluators including AutoEval and DeepEval alongside built-in datasets, a playground, and batch experiments. No re-platforming required.

CloudWatch Omni brings agent observability and application observability together in a single experience. For the application observability experience, read the companion post Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Omni: collaborative AI-powered observability for your applications.

Pricing and availability
Amazon CloudWatch Omni is now generally available. The IDE extension is free to use. You don’t need an AWS account to get started. You only need AWS credentials for Amazon Bedrock models, or API keys for other providers like OpenAI or Anthropic. Get started today by installing the extension from the VS Code Marketplace.

To explore all capabilities and get started quickly, visit CloudWatch on AWS Builder Center.

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.

Happy building!

— Daniel Abib

The post Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Omni: AI-powered observability for generative AI and agentic workloads 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

Read more articles by Paul Andrew

The post 80+ Best Free After Effects Templates in 2026 appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

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.

There’s a particular energy to mid-September in New York. Pumpkin spice lattes are flowing, temperatures are dropping, and it’s nearly sweater weather. The city is back at full speed, and so is the AWS launch calendar. This week that energy showed up in a new frontier model on Amazon Bedrock, a desktop app for Amazon Quick, and a reminder that the developers seeing the biggest gains from AI agents aren’t just using better tools — they’re working differently.

Let’s dive in.

Headlines
OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock – GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI’s latest and most capable model to date, and you can now run it on Amazon Bedrock. It brings deeper reasoning and judgment, professional-quality writing and design, and advanced computer and browser use to demanding business workflows. The model supports a context window of up to 1 million input tokens, so you can send it large codebases, long contracts, or extensive document collections and ask it to reconcile competing inputs.

You can call GPT-6 Astra through supported Amazon Bedrock APIs, or configure ChatGPT Work and Codex to use the model on Amazon Bedrock. Alongside the launch, OpenAI is introducing new enterprise plugins for ChatGPT Work that extend Astra’s browser-use capabilities across common business applications. Established AWS controls help you secure workloads, govern access, and audit model invocation activity, and your inference data isn’t used for model training. Read more

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

• Amazon Quick desktop app is now generally available on macOS and Windows – The Amazon Quick desktop app brings Amazon Quick to your computer, where it can work with local files and stay connected to your calendar, email, and business apps in the background. Conversations, context, and agents stay synchronized across desktop and mobile, so work you start on one surface carries over to the other. With this release, Quick agents also keep running after you close your computer, which means you can start a long-running task before you leave the office, add input from the mobile app on the way home, and review the result when you get there. Existing Quick users can download the desktop app, and the mobile app is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Read more
• AWS Lambda now supports a 90-minute function timeout on Lambda Managed Instances – You can now configure a function timeout of up to 90 minutes for asynchronous and event source mapping (ESM) invocations on Lambda Managed Instances, a 6x increase from the previous 15-minute limit. That opens the door to data processing, media transcoding, financial calculations, AI inference, and batch jobs that need longer continuous execution, without splitting the work across multiple functions. Synchronous invocations keep the existing 15-minute maximum. The longer timeout also applies to steps inside Lambda durable functions, which can still run for up to a year when invoked asynchronously. Read more
• Amazon EBS Volume Clones now copies volumes across accounts – Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume Clones can now copy a volume into another AWS account and re-encrypt it with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account. If you keep production and development in separate accounts, you can share a volume with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) and let the target account create a fresh copy in the same Availability Zone, for example, cloning a production database volume into an isolated development account. Cross-account copy works for all volume types, including unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with customer managed keys. Read more
• Second-generation single-rack AWS Outposts is now generally available – The new single-rack AWS Outposts is a self-contained 42U rack that puts compute, storage, and networking into one compact unit for locations that need low latency, local data processing, or data residency, and don’t have room for a larger footprint. A single rack delivers up to 2,688 vCPU and 100 TB of Amazon EBS storage, and supports the latest x86-powered Amazon EC2 instances, including general purpose (M7i, M8i), compute-optimized (C7i, C8i), memory-optimized (R7i, R8i), and Outposts accelerated networking instances. You get the same APIs, console, automation, governance, and security controls as multi-rack Outposts and AWS Regions. Read more
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available on v0 by Vercel – You can now describe a search or AI application in natural language inside v0 by Vercel and get a full-stack app backed by Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. v0 provisions a collection, indexes your data, and uses the OpenSearch Serverless endpoint for full-text search and vector search for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads, without leaving the v0 interface. OpenSearch Serverless scales capacity up and down for you, so you can focus on the application instead of cluster management. You can provision under a new AWS account or link an existing one. Read more
• AWS Transform for .NET modernization is now generally available via CLI – You can trigger an AWS-managed .NET modernization in AWS Transform custom with a single CLI command, then run it interactively or script it into an existing pipeline. The CLI sits alongside the existing AWS Transform for .NET experiences in the web application, Visual Studio IDE, Kiro Power, and MCP agents. Use it to upgrade language versions, migrate frameworks, optimize performance, and analyze codebases with transformations you can run as-is or customize. The .NET modernization transformation includes 50,000 free agent minutes per month. Read more

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:

• Clare Liguori on frontier engineering – If you already use an AI coding assistant but don’t feel like you’re shipping much faster, start here. Clare Liguori, Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, published a practitioner’s manifesto on frontier engineering: ten principles, drawn from teams across Amazon, for changing how you build software with AI agents. The argument is direct. Software development has split in two, people who changed how they work with agents, and people who only changed their coding tools. Frontier engineering is not vibe coding. You spend the first weeks writing steering files, refactoring the codebase, and learning to decompose work for agents. Those weeks feel slower. The weeks after feel dramatically faster, because you’re no longer building the software directly — you’re building the agent setup that builds the software.
• A free year of Kiro for students around the world – The Kiro Students program is expanding from 11 universities to 121 new schools across 16 countries. Eligible students get one year of Kiro with 1,000 credits per month and full access to paid features such as premium models and Kiro Web, no credit card and no trial timer. You can work in the IDE, the CLI, Kiro Web in a browser, or Kiro Crew. If you’re a student, sign up with your university email.
• The state of AI for security: measuring what matters for trust – Security teams are using AI for triage, threat modeling, incident response, and code review, but a tool that flags everything doesn’t save time. In The state of AI for security, Anshumali Shrivastava and Neha Rungta introduce Deception Benchmark, a new evaluation that tests whether a model can tell a real vulnerability from code that looks risky but is actually safe. The benchmark includes 14,822 samples across 16 languages and more than 70 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) categories. Under standard prompting, precision landed in the mid-50s, about as likely to be inaccurate as accurate, and none of the 12 models tested kept both false positives and false negatives below 10 percent. The post links to the dataset, whitepaper, and submission workflow for verified scoring.
• Build full-stack AWS applications in minutes with AI-powered scaffolding – Version 1.0 of the Nx Plugin for AWS is an open source toolkit of deterministic generators for APIs, websites, databases, and AI agents, plus the AWS infrastructure to run them. Each generator writes working, deployable code with security, observability, and type-safety already in place, so an AI assistant can assemble the foundation and spend its effort on your application logic. Bingo Industries used it to take a multi-agent operations chatbot from idea to production in less than 3 weeks. The plugin is open source on GitHub. Create a workspace with pnpm create @aws/nx-workspace and point your coding agent at the included MCP server.
• The oldest architecture in computing – On All Things Distributed, Werner Vogels starts from a question customers always ask “Will AI take my job?”, and lands on memory. After spending time with Kiro Crew, he traces a line from Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains to how Crew stores, consolidates, and forgets across markdown files, a vector database, and a key-value index. His conclusion: the brain is the oldest architecture in computing, and the people who think hardest about how it works will build the next tools. Now, go build.

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:

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!

— Micah

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: OpenAI GPT-6 Astra on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Quick desktop GA, Kiro for students, and more (September 14, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Historically, part of this ritual includes installing a ton of apps. I add the requisite Adobe design tools, the Microsoft Office suite for productivity, and a host of other software. Apps for email, FTP, media conversion, and a local web server environment remain staples.

My current system is now a few years old, and I have dozens (hundreds?) of these apps. They still serve their purpose. But it recently dawned on me that most of what I use could be replaced by a web browser. That will likely mean fewer apps to install on my next computer.

These are words I never thought I’d utter. My web design career began before the first release of Netscape. As such, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with browsers. For every benefit, there have been limitations and quirks to deal with.

These days, you can do pretty much anything within your chosen browser. That got me thinking: are traditional design apps still relevant? Should we abandon them for browser-based tools? I’m not so sure, but let’s figure this out together.

Modern Web Apps Break Boundaries

It used to be that most browser-based apps were inferior to their desktop counterparts. Common workflows like text and media editing felt clunky and minimally useful. I used them in a pinch and usually came away frustrated.

Meanwhile, desktop powerhouses like Excel, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver were infinitely more flexible. They were built for those who care about quality and require high-level functionality. Such professional-grade tools have always been worth the cost.

That narrative has been turned on its head by a combination of more powerful web standards and server technologies. There are now online video editing platforms that can produce top-notch results. Design tools like Figma make it easy to create and share interactive mockups. Google’s suite of productivity tools offers all the bells and whistles without compromise. Even Photoshop has an online version these days.

Collaboration might be the biggest selling point of all. You can keep clients and colleagues in the loop with minimal effort. This improves efficiency and saves us from the never-ending email chains of yesteryear.

And the appeal of these apps goes beyond functionality and convenience. They’re also cross-platform and device-agnostic. It used to be that you’d need a desktop app built specifically for your operating system. Using a browser means it works on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, and more.

Then there are the hardware requirements. Granted, you should still have a system with plenty of memory and a modern graphics processor. However, having a massive hard drive isn’t necessary when storing files in the cloud.

The old boundaries of software have vanished. Doing all the things within a browser isn’t a chore like it used to be. And these apps may be enough for most web designers.

Trust and Content Ownership Are Concerns

Software is always an investment, regardless of how you access it. There are also privacy and security risks to consider. Browser-based tools often amplify those concerns.

Companies like Adobe and Microsoft have some level of tracking within their desktop apps. And they do connect to the internet. So, this is nothing new. But working in a browser opens up a different (or, at least, a bigger) can of worms.

For instance, cloud storage is quite convenient. But what happens if the provider gets sold or goes out of business? Will you lose access to your data? Are policies in place to maintain account security in the event of a breach or server crash? The answers aren’t always clear, and you may not find out until something bad happens.

Then there is the matter of artificial intelligence (AI). It seems like every tool on the planet has an AI integration of sorts. How are these features used on your content? Does the provider train their models with your work? Could your sensitive information become exposed online?

Working online also opens you up to third-party tracking. It may be something relatively innocent, like an analytics suite. But ad networks and similar companies could be watching you – and there is no guarantee they’ll abide by the rules.

These are important questions to answer when thinking about your (and your client’s) data. Again, desktop apps aren’t immune to these issues. But an online app that shows up overnight deserves an honest assessment. The risks could far outweigh the benefits.

Desktop Apps Are Still Relevant When Control Matters

It’s truly amazing to see how far web technologies have come in the past decade. You can see it in both commercial and open-source software. Functionality once reserved for powerful desktop devices can now exist in the palm of your hand (and with responsive design, for that matter).

I still believe there’s a tradeoff, however. The work-from-anywhere tools we use have plenty of benefits (provided you really do want to work from your lawn chair). But you lose a measure of control along the way.

There’s something to be said for storing files locally (with routine backups, of course). Not to mention the ability to customize an app’s layout or tool set to match your workflow. There’s a level of personalization you don’t seem to get in a browser.

The reality is that you don’t need desktop software for every purpose. There are plenty of online tools that will do the job. But there are scenarios where these old-school beasts make sense.

For example, I can’t imagine Disney making their next hit movie solely within a browser. And web designers who want full control of their workflow might want to keep a few items installed on their hard drives. I know I will.

here. He recently started a writing service for WordPress products: WP Product Writeup. He also has an opinion on just about every subject. You can follow his rants on Bluesky @karks.com.

Read more articles by Eric Karkovack

The post Are Browser-Based Apps Enough for Web Designers? appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last year, we introduced Volume Clones of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a new capability that lets you create instant point-in-time copies of your EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone.

Today, we are extending Volume Clones with cross-account copy, so you can create copies of your EBS volumes into other AWS accounts and optionally re-encrypt them with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account.

With this new feature, you can use your latest application data to develop, test, and experiment in a secondary environment, while protecting and isolating the information in the production environment. For example, you can create copies of a production environment to refresh test and development environments set up in separate accounts with the desired EBS encryption.

Copy EBS volumes across AWS accounts in action
To create a copy of an EBS volume across accounts, the owners of the volume can first grant the target account access to their volume in AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), which provides a way to share resources across AWS accounts or within an AWS Organization. Then, from the target account, they can locate the volume they have access to create a copy of it.

To get started, choose Share volume for the volume you want to share with the target account in the Amazon EBS console.

Share the volume with other AWS accounts by adding it to existing resource shares, or create a new resource share in the AWS RAM console. For more details, refer to the AWS RAM User Guide.

You can now see confirmation that the volume has been shared in the Volume sharing tab of the volume detail page.

A target account must accept the resource share on the RAM console.

Once they accept the resource share, they can see the volumes in the EBS volume page of the target account. Choose Copy volume for any shared volume.

To share and copy EBS volumes across AWS accounts programmatically, including calling APIs and searching documentation, try the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI coding tool. To learn more, visit the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Things to know
Let me share some important technical details that I think you’ll find useful.

• Encryption: You can share unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with a customer managed key (CMK). Volumes encrypted with the default AWS managed key (AMK) cannot be shared. When copying a shared volume encrypted with a CMK, the CMK must also be shared with the target account. You can specify a different CMK to re-encrypt the copy in the target account.
• Monitoring: You can monitor SharedVolumeCopyInitiated through AWS CloudTrail event in your account. You will also receive events in Amazon EventBridge at the start of the copy operation when the state of the copied volume is initializing, and at the end of the operation when the state of the copied volume changes to completed. You can see the shared volume ID, consuming account ID, and event time.
• Pricing: Once a copy is initiated, you’ll pay a one-time fee based on your volume size, charged to the account where the copy will reside. There’s no cost for sharing EBS volumes through AWS RAM. The copied volume will incur regular EBS volume charges upon creation.
• Availability Zone: The volume copy must be created in the same Availability Zone as the source volume. Use Availability Zone IDs (such as use1-az1) to identify the same physical location across accounts.

Now available
Cross-account volume clones for Amazon EBS are available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon EBS Volume Clones. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region.

Give this feature a try in the Amazon EC2 console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon EBS or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post Introducing Amazon EBS Volume Clones across AWS accounts appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are generally available, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. R9g instances are memory-optimized and deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based R8g instances, powered by the most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built.

R9g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads including databases, in-memory caches (Valkey, Redis, MemCached), real-time big data analytics, Linux-based workloads including containerized and micro-service-based applications (e.g. Kubernetes, Docker, EKS, ECS), as well as applications written in popular programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP.

R9gd instances include local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage, ideal for memory-intensive workloads requiring fast, low-latency local storage such as open-source databases, distributed real-time big data analytics, large in-memory databases, and large caching workloads.

If you’re running workloads on R8g instances today, R9g gives you more performance per vCPU with faster memory, higher network and Amazon EBS bandwidth, and a larger L3 cache, all while using less energy.

What makes R9g different
Graviton5 processors bring several hardware improvements over Graviton4:

• Up to 25% higher compute performance per vCPU
• DDR5 8800 MT/s memory (up from 5600 MT/s in Graviton4), the fastest memory available in the cloud
• 5x larger L3 cache for better data locality
• Up to 2x higher network and EBS bandwidth for the largest instance sizes (up to 100 Gbps network, up to 72 Gbps EBS on the 48xlarge)
• Up to 3x higher packet-processing performance

R9g and R9gd instances support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC), which lets you adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networking by 25%. This helps optimize performance for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements such as databases and caching.

All R9g and R9gd instances run on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads virtualization, storage, and networking to dedicated hardware. This gives your applications near-bare-metal performance while maintaining strong security isolation between instances.

R9g and R9gd instances feature the Nitro Isolation Engine (NIE), the same enhancement to the Nitro System introduced with C9g and M9g instances earlier this year, which enforces isolation of instances and harnesses formal verification to provide assurances of isolation with mathematical precision. Nitro Isolation Engine is a purpose-built component that is responsible for enforcing isolation between virtual machines, including mediation of all access to virtual machine memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs. Nitro Isolation Engine leverages formal verification, a technique to mathematically demonstrate that the hardware or software behaves as intended, and not just in specific test cases. This intensive verification technique establishes Nitro as the first formally verified cloud hypervisor, pioneering a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security. To learn more about the Nitro Isolation Engine, visit the blog post. For details on the formal verification results, including scope and assumptions, see the technical white paper.

EC2 R9g and R9gd instance specifications
R9g and R9gd instances are each available in 11 sizes, from medium to metal-48xl. The following tables show the full specifications for each size.

R9gd instances offer the same compute and networking performance as R9g, with the addition of local NVMe-based SSD storage for workloads that need fast, low-latency scratch space or temporary caches.

Getting started
You can launch R9g and R9gd instances from the Amazon EC2 console using any supported Arm-based AMI. R9g instances support Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 22.04+, RHEL 8.4+, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3+, Debian 12+, and other major Linux distributions.

If you’re migrating from R8g, no code changes are required for most applications. Select the equivalent R9g instance size and your application runs with better performance. For containerized workloads, R9g works with Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and standard Kubernetes deployments. Multi-arch container images built for Arm64 run without changes.

Several resources help you get started: the AWS Graviton Getting Started Guide covers how to build, run, and optimize workloads on Graviton-based instances. The Graviton Savings Dashboard helps you track cost savings. AWS Transform automates code transformations for migrating Java applications from x86 to Graviton. To learn more, visit AWS Graviton Processors or Level up your compute with AWS Graviton.

Pricing and availability
Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions.

R9g and R9gd instances are available for purchase through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts. For detailed pricing, visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page.

Ready to get started? Launch R9g instances from the Amazon EC2 console. For more details, visit the Amazon EC2 R9g instances page.

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 for Amazon EC2 or reach out through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Daniel Abib

The post Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors are now generally available appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

There are also big differences between hosting providers. Some focus on low-cost shared hosting, while others offer managed WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, or plans built for businesses and agencies. The tools included with each plan can vary just as much. Backups, staging sites, caching, security, migrations, CDN access, and developer tools may be included, limited, or cost extra.

This comparison looks at six popular WordPress hosts: WordPress.com, Bluehost, Pressable, Cloudways, Kinsta, and SiteGround. Each provider has been tested and compared across the areas that matter when running a WordPress website.

The goal isn’t to name one host that works for everyone. A personal blog, WooCommerce store, client website, and busy online publication have very different hosting needs. Instead, the results should make it easier to see where each provider works well, where it falls short, and which type of WordPress website it suits best.

Best WordPress Hosting: Quick Recommendations

Not everyone needs to compare every plan and technical detail. These recommendations offer a quick starting point based on common WordPress projects. Each host has been selected for a different type of user, with performance, management tools, support, pricing, and the overall hosting experience taken into account.

Best Overall WordPress Host: WordPress.com

WordPress.com is our best overall host because it combines managed WordPress hosting with the flexibility and ease of use many websites need. It works well for blogs and business sites, with plans suitable for larger publications and WooCommerce stores.

Much of the technical work is handled for you, including caching, security, updates, SSL, and CDN access. All paid plans now support third-party plugins and custom theme uploads. Business adds daily backups, staging, SFTP, SSH, database access, WP-CLI, and other developer tools.

WordPress.com is run by Automattic, a company with deep ties to the WordPress open-source project and WordPress.org. That experience carries through to its managed hosting and support, which is useful when a problem involves both WordPress and the hosting platform.

There is less server maintenance to handle, while developers can choose Business when they need more advanced access. Those needing full server control may prefer cloud or VPS hosting.

Pricing varies between plans, so always compare promotional rates with the normal renewal price.

Further Information:

WordPress.com Plans & Pricing

• Personal: Supports third-party plugins and themes, custom CSS and code, along with security, support, and migration tools.
• Premium: Includes everything in Personal, with additional design, analytics, SEO, advertising, and monetization tools.
• Business: Adds daily backups, staging, SFTP, SSH, WP-CLI, database access, GitHub deployments, and other developer tools.
• Commerce: Includes the tools available with Business and adds WooCommerce and online selling tools.

All data correct as of August, 2026.

Best WordPress Managed Host: Kinsta

Kinsta is our choice for the best managed WordPress host. It is built for WordPress sites that need strong performance, reliable hosting, and useful management tools without the site owner having to manage the server.

Every WordPress site runs in its own isolated container, with access to Kinsta’s cloud infrastructure and a choice of 30 data center locations. Server caching, edge caching, a Cloudflare-powered CDN, security, daily backups, and performance monitoring are included.

Kinsta also provides a strong set of developer tools, including DevKinsta. SSH and SFTP are included with all WordPress hosting plans, WP-CLI is installed by default, and staging gives developers a separate platform to test changes. MyKinsta also offers database management, logs, analytics, and Kinsta’s APM performance tool.

The main drawback is price. Kinsta costs more than budget WordPress hosting, so it is harder to justify for a small personal site. But for businesses, busy publications, stores, and other sites where performance and support matter, the extra cost makes sense.

Further Information:

Kinsta Plans & Pricing

• Single Site Plans: Built for one WordPress website, with several levels based on traffic or bandwidth. All include CDN, edge caching, daily backups, staging, security, migrations, SSH, SFTP, and WP-CLI.
• Multiple Site Plans: Designed for users who manage several WordPress installations. These plans increase the number of sites and available resources while keeping them under one Kinsta account.
• Agency Plans: Made for agencies that manage larger collections of client sites. They provide higher limits and more capacity while retaining the same managed WordPress platform and development tools.
• Custom Plans: Available for WordPress projects that need more resources than the standard plans provide. These are better suited to very busy sites and projects with unusual hosting requirements.

All data correct as of August, 2026.

Best WordPress Blogger Host: Cloudways

Cloudways is our choice for the best WordPress blogger host, particularly for established blogs and publications that have grown beyond basic shared hosting. It provides managed cloud hosting while still giving site owners more control over server resources than most managed WordPress platforms.

With Cloudways Flexible, WordPress can run on cloud infrastructure from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, or Google Cloud. You choose the provider, server size, and location, while Cloudways handles much of the server setup and management. Resources can also be increased as traffic grows.

WordPress tools include server caching, staging, cloning, automated backups, SSL, migrations, security tools, SSH, SFTP, Git, and WP-CLI. Multiple WordPress sites can also run on the same server, provided it has enough resources.

This flexibility is why Cloudways works well for established bloggers. A growing publication can increase its hosting resources without moving to another platform. The tradeoff is complexity. There are more server settings to understand than with WordPress.com or Kinsta. But for bloggers comfortable managing WordPress, that extra control can be useful.

Further Information:

Cloudways Plans & Pricing

• DigitalOcean: The most practical starting point for many WordPress blogs. Plans provide dedicated cloud resources, SSD or NVMe storage, vertical scaling, and a choice of server locations.
• Vultr: Offers a broad choice of data center locations and server configurations. It is useful when the main audience is closer to a Vultr location or a different server setup is required.
• Linode: Another option for blogs that want predictable cloud resources and a choice of server locations while keeping Cloudways responsible for much of the server management.
• AWS: Uses Amazon Web Services infrastructure and provides more server configuration choices. It is generally more expensive and is better suited to sites with requirements that justify the added cost.
• Google Cloud: Runs WordPress on Google Compute Engine through the Cloudways dashboard. Like AWS, it provides flexible server resources but usually costs more than the simpler cloud options.

All data correct as of August, 2026.

Best WordPress Developer Host: Pressable

Pressable is our choice for the best WordPress developer host. It is a fully managed WordPress platform from Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce, and runs on its WP Cloud infrastructure. That WordPress focus is one of the main reasons it works so well for development work.

Developers get staging and sandbox environments for every site, along with SSH, SFTP, WP-CLI, Git, database access, and other tools needed for building and maintaining WordPress sites. DupliKits can also be used to create reusable site templates, which can save time when several projects start with a similar setup.

Pressable handles much of the hosting work in the background. Hourly and daily backups, caching, security monitoring, automatic scaling, a global CDN, and site migrations are included. There is also 24/7 support from a team that works with WordPress every day.

Pricing is higher than budget hosting, but that is not really what Pressable is competing with. The value comes from reducing server maintenance while keeping the development tools needed for regular WordPress work. For freelance developers and teams managing several sites, that balance makes Pressable a strong choice.

Further Information:

Pressable Plans & Pricing

• Signature 1: Supports one WordPress site, 30,000 monthly visits, and 20GB of storage. Suitable for developers managing a single business or client site.
• Signature 2: Supports three WordPress sites, 50,000 monthly visits, and 30GB of storage. Useful for developers who manage a small collection of client sites.
• Signature 3: Supports five WordPress sites, 75,000 monthly visits, and 35GB of storage. Offers more room for freelancers maintaining several active WordPress projects.
• Signature 4: Supports ten WordPress sites, 150,000 monthly visits, and 50GB of storage. Excellent for developers and small teams that manage a larger group of websites.
• Signature 5 and Above: Plans increase from 20 to 100 WordPress installations, with higher traffic and storage limits. They are aimed at larger development teams and agencies with many sites.

All data correct as of August, 2026.

Best WordPress Agency Host: SiteGround

SiteGround is our choice for the best WordPress agency host. It combines managed WordPress hosting with tools for building, testing, managing, and handing client websites once a project is complete and launched. GrowBig and GoGeek also allow multiple websites under one account, which makes them better suited to agency work than the single site StartUp plan.

SiteGround handles many routine hosting jobs, including WordPress updates, daily backups, caching, CDN access, SSL, security, and server maintenance. GrowBig and GoGeek also include WordPress staging, while developers have access to SSH, SFTP, WP-CLI, databases, and other common development tools.

The agency tools are the main reason for choosing SiteGround here. Team members can be added as collaborators without sharing the main account login. Finished websites can also be transferred to clients while the agency remains attached as a collaborator. GoGeek adds white label client access, so clients using Site Tools do not see SiteGround branding.

The main drawback is renewal pricing. SiteGround offers large discounts for the first year, but regular rates are much higher. Agencies should use those renewal prices when calculating the long-term cost of hosting client websites.

Further Information:

SiteGround Plans & Pricing

• StartUp: Supports one website, around 10,000 monthly visits, and 10GB of storage. It includes managed WordPress tools, daily backups, caching, CDN access, SSL, and email. The single site limit makes it less useful for agency hosting.
• GrowBig: Supports unlimited websites within its resource limits, around 100,000 monthly visits, and 50GB of storage. It adds more server resources, WordPress staging, on-demand backups, and collaboration tools. This is a good starting point for smaller agencies.
• GoGeek: Supports unlimited websites within its resource limits, around 400,000 monthly visits, and 100GB of storage. It provides more server resources and adds white-label client access, making it the strongest shared hosting plan for agencies managing client websites.

All data correct as of August, 2026.

WordPress.com is our choice for the best WooCommerce host. WooCommerce can now be installed on any paid WordPress.com plan, giving store owners more choice over how much hosting and how many store tools they actually need.

The close connection with WooCommerce is a major advantage. WordPress.com and WooCommerce are both part of Automattic, so the hosting platform is built and supported by people with a deep understanding of WordPress and WooCommerce. This becomes useful when a problem involves the store, WordPress, and the hosting environment.

For larger stores, the Commerce plan includes everything in Business, along with WooCommerce and additional selling tools. This includes real-time backups, staging, SFTP, SSH, database access, payment tools, shipping integrations, automated taxes, product recommendations, and other WooCommerce extensions.

WordPress.com also handles much of the hosting work, including caching, security, updates, SSL, and server management. Store owners can concentrate on products, orders, customers, and sales rather than maintaining the server. It may cost more than basic WooCommerce hosting, but the managed setup makes more sense as a store becomes busier.

Further Information:

WordPress.com Commerce Plans & Pricing

• Personal: WooCommerce can be installed alongside third-party plugins and themes. It provides a low-cost starting point for a very small store, but it does not include the advanced backups, staging, and developer tools available on higher plans.
• Premium: Includes everything in Personal, along with additional design, analytics, SEO, advertising, and monetization tools. WooCommerce can be installed, although growing stores may benefit from the stronger hosting tools available with Business.
• Business: Adds real-time backups, staging, SFTP, SSH, database access, WP-CLI, and other developer tools. WooCommerce can be installed normally, making Business a good choice for store owners who want to build their own WooCommerce setup.
• Commerce: Includes everything in Business and adds WooCommerce with a collection of store tools and extensions. It supports unlimited products and orders, payments, shipping integrations, automated taxes, product recommendations, abandoned cart emails, and other selling tools.

All data correct as of August, 2026.

Best Budget WordPress Host: Bluehost

Bluehost is our choice for the best budget WordPress host. Its lower-priced plans provide the tools needed to run a blog, portfolio, small business site, or other WordPress project without paying the higher monthly cost of premium managed hosting.

WordPress hosting includes managed updates, SSL, CDN access, malware scanning, backups, migration tools, and a domain for the first year. Bluehost also provides a 99.99% uptime SLA and several server locations. WordPress setup and site management are handled through a dashboard aimed at users who may not have much hosting experience.

Starter is the obvious choice for smaller sites, while Business provides more storage, supports more websites, and adds further security and backup tools. Higher performance plans are available when a site needs more resources, so there is room to move beyond the entry-level packages.

The main issue is renewal pricing. Bluehost offers large discounts for the initial term, but the regular price is considerably higher. That needs to be included when comparing it with other budget hosts. For a smaller WordPress site where keeping the initial cost low matters, Bluehost still provides a strong set of hosting tools for the money.

Further Information:

Bluehost Plans & Pricing

• Starter: Supports up to ten websites with 10GB of NVMe storage. It includes managed WordPress updates, CDN access, SSL, malware scanning, weekly backups, migration tools, and a domain for the first year. It is the best fit for blogs and smaller WordPress sites.
• Business: Supports up to 50 websites with 50GB of NVMe storage. It provides more room for growing sites and is better suited to users managing several WordPress installations or a busier business website.

All data correct as of August, 2026.

Most WordPress hosts include more than just server space. Backups, staging sites, caching, CDN access, SSL, security, and migration tools reduce the amount of work needed to maintain a site. A host may advertise backups but run them only weekly, or offer staging only on its more expensive plans.

There is also a difference between a tool being included and it being well connected to the hosting platform. The right setup depends on whether the project needs simple management or greater control.

Developer requirements can be very different from those of someone running a single blog. Staging sites, SSH, SFTP, WP-CLI, Git, database access, logs, and local development tools will save a lot of time. They are also useful when testing updates or tracking down a problem without making changes directly on a live site.

Cloudways provides the greatest server control of the hosts compared here, while Kinsta and Pressable combine strong development tools with a more managed setup. WordPress.com also provides many common development tools on suitable plans. SiteGround covers most everyday development needs, while Bluehost provides enough access for many smaller projects.

The main question is how much control is actually required. More server access is useful for some developers, but it also means taking responsibility for more of the hosting setup.

AI tools are starting to appear in WordPress hosting platforms. Many providers now use it to help monitor websites, detect security threats, improve performance, and simplify routine management tasks. Some platforms also include AI assistants that can answer questions, troubleshoot common issues, or help configure hosting settings.

While these tools can save time, they shouldn’t be the main reason for choosing a host. Performance, reliability, support, and security still matter more. AI is best viewed as a useful addition rather than a replacement for a well-managed hosting platform.

The table below shows how the six hosts in this comparison currently approach AI.

All data correct as of August, 2026.

WordPress.com currently has the most complete AI setup of the hosts compared here. Its AI website builder can create a new WordPress site, while WordPress Agent continues working inside the site after it has been built. It can help with content, layouts, images, pages, and other editing jobs.

The more interesting addition for developers is MCP support. WordPress.com can connect with outside AI agents such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and other compatible tools. These agents can read site information and, with permission, carry out tasks such as creating posts, managing content, working with media, and changing site settings. MCP is available across paid WordPress.com plans.

Other hosts are using AI in narrower ways, often concentrating on initial site creation, content generation, or hosting support. Those tools can still be useful, but they should not be a major reason to choose a host on their own. Hosting performance, support, backups, security, development tools, and long-term cost still matter much more.

How to Choose a WordPress Host

Choosing a WordPress host is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make for your website. Your hosting provider affects performance, reliability, security, and how easy your site is to manage. The right host will keep your website running smoothly and give you access to support when you need it.

No hosting plan suits every website. A personal blog has different needs than an online store or an agency managing client sites. Knowing what your website requires before comparing providers will help you narrow your options and avoid paying for services you won’t use.

When comparing hosts, look at uptime, page speed, server locations, backups, staging sites, security, support, and renewal pricing. These factors often matter just as much as the monthly cost.

The articles below cover the main topics involved in choosing a WordPress host. Whether you’re building your first website or moving to a new provider, they’ll help you compare your options and make a confident choice.

WordPress Hosting for Different Needs

Choosing a hosting plan that matches your needs can improve performance, make your website easier to manage, and help you avoid paying for resources you won’t use. As your website grows, you can move to a plan with more storage, power, and management tools.

Whether you’re building your first WordPress website, running an online store, or managing client sites, understanding the strengths of each hosting option will make it easier to choose the right provider.

WordPress Performance & Security

A good hosting provider gives your WordPress website a solid foundation, but hosting is only part of the picture. Your website’s setup, the tools you use, and your security practices all affect performance, reliability, and keeping your visitors safe.

Many WordPress hosts include caching, content delivery networks (CDNs), backups, malware scanning, and SSL certificates. Knowing how these features work will help you get more from your hosting plan. Regular maintenance also helps keep your website running well. Updating WordPress, plugins, and themes, monitoring performance, and following good security practices can prevent many common problems.

The articles below cover the tools and techniques that can improve website speed, strengthen security, and simplify day-to-day management.

Managing Your WordPress Hosting

Launching a WordPress website is only the start. Regular maintenance helps keep your website secure, reliable, and running smoothly. Many hosting providers include tools that simplify routine tasks, but it still helps to understand how they work.

Common tasks include migrating websites, installing SSL certificates, updating PHP, managing domains, restoring backups, and monitoring uptime. Learning these skills will help you solve problems more quickly and get more from your hosting provider.

Whether you’re looking after one website or several client projects, a regular maintenance routine can reduce downtime and keep your websites in good shape.

The articles below cover the most common hosting management tasks and show you how to handle them with confidence.

• When Your WordPress Website Has Outgrown its Hosting

  How do you know when a hosting change is needed? Here are a few things to consider.

• Hosting Your Client’s WordPress Website

  Learn how to avoid common hosting mistakes when hosting WordPress sites for clients.

• Understanding Your Web Host

  Your host may not cover all your needs. Take these steps to ensure your website runs smoothly.

• Building a Performant WordPress Website

  Learn how to boost performance with better hosting, lighter themes, and smart optimzation strategies.

• What To Know About Your Client’s WordPress Website

  We cover what to check first, including themes, plugins, custom code, hosting, and unused tools.

• Add an SSL Certificate to Your WordPress Website

  A quick SSL certificate setup can mean big benefits for your site and visitors.

• WordPress Website Email Issues

  Learn how to test sending, check logs, change the from address, set up SMTP, or use a mail delivery service.

Final Verdict: Which WordPress Host Should You Choose?

WordPress.com is our best overall choice because it works for a broad range of WordPress projects while handling much of the hosting management. It is suitable for blogs, business websites, larger publications, and WooCommerce stores, with access to plugins, themes, staging, backups, security, caching, and development tools on suitable plans.

Kinsta is the better choice for users who want premium managed WordPress hosting and are willing to pay more for it. Cloudways suits established bloggers and publications that want greater control over server resources. Pressable is our choice for developers because its managed platform includes a strong set of WordPress development tools.

SiteGround makes sense for agencies managing several client websites, particularly when collaboration and site management tools are needed. And Bluehost remains the budget choice for smaller WordPress sites where keeping the hosting bill low matters more than having advanced management tools.

No host wins every category because WordPress websites have different requirements. The best option is the provider that has enough performance and resources for the site, includes the tools that will actually be used, and remains affordable after introductory pricing ends. For most WordPress users looking for a balance across those areas, WordPress.com gets our overall recommendation.

WordPress Hosting FAQs

WordPress hosting can look more complicated than it needs to be. Hosting companies use different plan names, prices, limits, and technical terms, even when the services are similar. These answers cover some of the most common questions about choosing and using WordPress hosting.

• What is the best hosting for WordPress?
  WordPress.com is our best overall WordPress host because it combines managed hosting with good performance, security, backups, CDN access, and WordPress support. Kinsta is our choice for managed hosting, Cloudways for bloggers, Pressable for developers, SiteGround for agencies, and Bluehost for smaller budgets.
• How much should WordPress hosting cost?
  Basic WordPress hosting can cost only a few dollars per month, while managed hosting may cost $20 to $50 per month or more. Larger sites and stores can cost considerably more. Always check the regular renewal price because introductory rates can make the first term look much cheaper.
• Do I need managed WordPress hosting?
  No. Smaller blogs, portfolios, and business sites can run well on lower-cost hosting. Managed WordPress hosting becomes more useful for busy sites, stores, and businesses that benefit from automatic backups, security, caching, staging, and WordPress-focused support.
• Can I change WordPress hosts later?
  Yes. WordPress sites can be moved between hosting providers. Many hosts provide migration tools or will move the site for you. Keep the old hosting active until the new site has been checked and the domain is pointing to the new server.
• Does better hosting make WordPress faster?
  Better hosting can improve WordPress performance by providing faster servers, more resources, caching, and CDN access. But hosting cannot fix every problem. Large images, heavy themes, slow plugins, external scripts, and database problems can still make a site slow.
• Is WordPress hosting different from regular web hosting?
  WordPress hosting is web hosting set up with WordPress in mind. It may include WordPress updates, caching, backups, security, staging, WP-CLI, and specialist support. WordPress can also run on regular hosting as long as the server meets its requirements.
• Do I need separate hosting for WooCommerce?
  No. WooCommerce runs on WordPress and does not require a separate type of hosting. But stores can need more server resources because carts, checkout pages, customer accounts, orders, and stock changes create more database activity than a typical WordPress site.
• How much traffic can WordPress hosting handle?
  There is no single number. A cached blog and a busy WooCommerce store can use very different resources even with the same number of visitors. Check the host’s traffic, bandwidth, storage, CPU, memory, and other resource limits before choosing a plan.

Read more articles by Paul Andrew

The post The Best WordPress Hosting in 2026 appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.