Amazon Web Services Updates & Release Notes

Today at the What’s Next with AWS, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, Colleen Aubrey, SVP Amazon Applied AI Solutions, Julia White, CMO of AWS, and OpenAI leaders discussed how they and their customers are changing how businesses operate with agents.

Here’s our roundup of the biggest announcements from the event:

Amazon Quick is an AI assistant for work that connects to all of them, learns what matters to you, and takes action on your behalf. Starting today, you can use the new desktop app, sign up for Free and Plus pricing plans, generate visual assets in the chat, and easily connect Quick to even more apps.

• Quick’s new desktop app (Preview): You can create a personalized experience by staying connected to your local files, calendar, and communications without opening a browser.
• New Free and Plus pricing plans for Quick: You can sign up within minutes using your personal email address or existing Google, Apple, Github, or Amazon credentials—no AWS account required.
• Generate visual assets on the fly: Available today, Quick now lets you create polished documents, presentations, infographics, and images directly from the chat interface, no design skills or hours of formatting required.
• Easily connect Quick to even more apps: Also available today, Quick is expanding its native integrations to include Google Workspace, Zoom, Airtable, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams.

To learn more, visit the About Amazon News post.

Amazon Connect is expanding from a single product into a set of four agentic AI solutions designed to work within your existing workflows: Amazon Connect Decisions (supply chains), Talent (hiring), Customer (customer experience), and Health (health care).

• Amazon Connect Decisions is a supply chain planning and intelligence solution that shifts teams from crisis management to proactive planning and decisioning. AI teammates, combining 30 years of Amazon operational science and 25+ specialized supply chain tools, adapt to your business, learn from your team, and continuously improve your operations.
• Amazon Connect Talent (Preview) is an agentic AI hiring solution built for talent acquisition leaders managing scaled hiring. It delivers AI-led interviews, science-backed assessments, and consistent evaluation, helping recruiters hire high quality candidates faster while providing applicants with a flexible interview experience that reduces human preconceptions.
• Amazon Connect Customer, previously known as Amazon Connect, delivers intelligent, personalized customer experiences across voice, chat, and digital channels. Amazon Connect Customer now offers new configuration capabilities that enable organizations to set up conversational AI in weeks, not months, and configure experiences without technical expertise.
• Amazon Connect Health delivers agentic patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding — giving patients faster access to care, clinicians more time for care, and staff capacity for specialized work.

To learn more, visit the About Amazon News post.

AWS and OpenAI expanded partnership

AWS and OpenAI are bringing the latest OpenAI models to Amazon Bedrock, launching Codex on Amazon Bedrock, and launching Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (all in limited preview), giving enterprises the frontier intelligence they want on the infrastructure they trust.

• OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock (Limited preview): The latest OpenAI models, including GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4, will be available in preview on Amazon Bedrock. Use OpenAI’s frontier models through the same Bedrock APIs you already rely on, with unified security, governance, and cost controls. No additional infrastructure to configure, no new security model to learn.
• Codex on Amazon Bedrock (Limited preview): You can access the OpenAI coding agent within the AWS environments where they already operate at scale. You can authenticate using their AWS credentials, process inference through Amazon Bedrock infrastructure, and apply Codex usage toward their AWS cloud commitments. Codex on Bedrock is available through the Bedrock API, starting with the Codex CLI, the Codex desktop app, and Visual Studio Code extension.
• Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (Limited preview): Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents combines frontier AI models with trusted AWS infrastructure, enabling customers to quickly and easily build production-ready OpenAI-powered agents in the cloud. It is built with the OpenAI harness, which is engineered to unlock the full potential of OpenAI frontier models, delivering faster execution, sharper reasoning, and reliable steering of long-running tasks.

To learn more, visit the AWS What’s New post and About Amazon News post.

Hello! I’m Daniel Abib, and this is my first AWS Weekly Roundup. I’m a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, focused on the generative AI and Amazon Bedrock. With over 28 years of experience in solution architecture, software development, and cloud architecture, I help Startups & Enterprises harness the power of generative AI with Amazon Bedrock. I’ve been at AWS for more than six and a half years, working closely with customers across Latin America, and I’m also passionate about Serverless technologies.

Outside of work and endurance sports, I’m a dedicated father to Cecília (7) and Rafael (4), who keep me busier—and happier— than any distributed system ever could. I’m based in São Paulo, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (@DCABib), where I share insights about generative AI, Amazon Bedrock, AWS serverless services, and the occasional Ironman throwback.

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

Last week’s launches

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

• Amazon Redshift increases performance for new queries in dashboards and ETL workloads by up to 7x — Amazon Redshift now delivers up to 7x faster performance for new queries in dashboards and ETL workloads. Queries you run for the first time — without cached results — now execute significantly faster, reducing wait times for interactive dashboards and accelerating your ETL pipelines. This is particularly impactful for workloads with high query variability where cache hits are less frequent.
• NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super now available on Amazon Bedrock — NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super is now available in Amazon Bedrock, expanding the lineup of foundation models you can access through the unified Bedrock API. Nemotron 3 Super is a high-performance language model optimized for tasks such as text generation, complex reasoning, summarization, and code generation. You can now invoke Nemotron 3 Super alongside other foundation models in your existing Bedrock workflows, without managing any infrastructure.
• Introducing Nova Forge SDK, a seamless way to customize Nova models for enterprise AI — Nova Forge SDK provides a streamlined way to fine-tune and customize Amazon Nova models for enterprise use cases. You can adapt Nova models to your domain-specific data and deploy them directly within Amazon Bedrock, reducing the complexity of building tailored AI solutions. The SDK handles the heavy lifting of model customization, letting you focus on your business logic rather than the underlying infrastructure.
• Amazon Corretto 26 is now generally available — Amazon Corretto 26, the latest long-term support (LTS) release of the no-cost, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK, is now generally available. Corretto 26 includes the latest Java language features, performance improvements, and security patches, all backed by long-term support from AWS. You can use it across development and production environments on Amazon Linux, Windows, macOS, and Docker images.
• AWS Lambda now supports Availability Zone metadata — AWS Lambda now provides Availability Zone metadata for your function invocations. You can now identify which Availability Zone your Lambda function is running in, enabling better observability, more informed architectural decisions, and simplified troubleshooting for latency-sensitive and multi-AZ workloads. This is particularly useful when correlating Lambda execution with other AZ-aware services in your architecture.
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports log ingestion using HTTP-based protocol — Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports ingesting logs using an HTTP-based protocol, making it simpler to send logs from applications and services that use standard HTTP endpoints. You can now route logs to CloudWatch Logs without requiring custom agents or additional SDK integrations, lowering the barrier to centralized log management across your workloads.
• Amazon EKS announces 99.99% Service Level Agreement and new 8XL scaling tier for Provisioned Control Plane clusters — Amazon EKS now offers a 99.99% Service Level Agreement (SLA) for clusters running on Provisioned Control Plane, up from the 99.95% SLA offered on standard control plane. EKS is also introducing the 8XL scaling tier, the largest available Provisioned Control Plane tier, which doubles the Kubernetes API server request processing capacity of the next lower 4XL tier — ideal for large-scale workloads like AI/ML training, high-performance computing (HPC), and large-scale data processing.

Other AWS news

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

• Kiro for students — Kiro is now available for students, giving the next generation of builders access to AI-powered development tools at no cost. As Swami Sivasubramanian shared on LinkedIn, “Students are the future decision-makers shaping technology” — and Kiro gives them hands-on experience building with AI from day one. If you’re a student or know someone who is, this is a great opportunity to start building with AI-assisted development.
• Strands Steering Hooks achieved 100% agent accuracy — The Strands Agents team published results showing that Steering Hooks can achieve 100% agent accuracy, outperforming both prompt engineering and rigid workflow approaches for controlling agent behavior. As Swami highlighted on LinkedIn, building reliable AI agents often means rethinking how we guide model behavior — and Steering Hooks offer a compelling new path to agent reliability.
• Introducing Badges on AWS Builder Center — AWS Builder Center now features badges that recognize your contributions and achievements within the builder community. You can earn badges by sharing solutions, participating in challenges, and engaging with fellow builders. It’s a great way to showcase your expertise and track your growth.
• Keep Building Together: The Power of Community — A thoughtful read on the power of community-driven learning and collaboration in the AWS ecosystem. Whether you’re just getting started with AWS or you’ve been building for years, the builder community is a place to connect, share knowledge, and grow together. I highly recommend checking it out.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits — Join AWS Summits in 2026, free in-person events where you can explore emerging cloud and AI technologies, learn best practices, and network with industry peers and experts. Upcoming Summits include Paris (April 1), London (April 22), Bengaluru (April 23–24), Singapore (May 6), Tel Aviv (May 6), and Stockholm (May 7).
• AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders, featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs. Upcoming events include San Francisco (April 10) and Romania (April 23–24).
• AWSome Women Summit LATAM — Taking place on March 28 in Mexico City, this event celebrates and empowers women in cloud technology across Latin America. A fantastic initiative for the LATAM tech community.

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse the AWS Events and Webinars 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!

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

Fiti AWS Student Community Kenya!

Last week was an incredible whirlwind: a round of meetups, hands-on workshops, and career discussions across Kenya that culminated with the AWS Student Community Day at Meru University of Science and Technology, with keynotes from my colleagues Veliswa and Tiffany, and sessions on everything from GitOps to cloud-native engineering, and a whole lot of AI agent building.

JAWS Days 2026 is the largest AWS Community Day in the world, with over 1,500 attendees on March 7th. This event started with a keynote speech on building an AI-driven development team by Jeff Barr, and included over 100 technical and community experience sessions, lightning talks, and workshops such as Game Days, Builders Card Challenges, and networking parties.

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

Last week’s launches

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

• Introducing Amazon Connect Health, Agentic AI Built for Healthcare — Amazon Connect Health is now generally available with five purpose-built AI agents for healthcare: patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding. All features are HIPAA-eligible and deployable within existing clinical workflows in days.
• Policy in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is now generally available — You can now use centralized, fine-grained controls for agent-tool interactions that operate outside your agent code. Security and compliance teams can define tool access and input validation rules using natural language that automatically converts to Cedar, the AWS open-source policy language.
• Introducing OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail to run your autonomous private AI agents — You can deploy a private AI assistant on your own cloud infrastructure with built-in security controls, sandboxed agent sessions, one-click HTTPS, and device pairing authentication. Amazon Bedrock serves as the default model provider, and you can connect to Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord.
• AWS announces pricing for VPC Encryption Controls — Starting March 1, 2026, VPC Encryption Controls transitions from free preview to a paid feature. You can audit and enforce encryption-in-transit of all traffic flows within and across VPCs in a region, with monitor mode to detect unencrypted traffic and enforce mode to prevent it.
• Database Savings Plans now supports Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Neptune Analytics — You can save up to 35% on eligible serverless and provisioned instance usage with a one-year commitment. Savings Plans automatically apply regardless of engine, instance family, size, or AWS Region.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk now offers AI-powered environment analysis — When your environment health is degraded, Elastic Beanstalk can now collect recent events, instance health, and logs and send them to Amazon Bedrock for analysis, providing step-by-step troubleshooting recommendations tailored to your environment’s current state.
• AWS simplifies IAM role creation and setup in service workflows — You can now create and configure IAM roles directly within service workflows through a new in-console panel, without switching to the IAM console. The feature supports Amazon EC2, Lambda, EKS, ECS, Glue, CloudFormation, and more.
• Accelerate Lambda durable functions development with new Kiro power — You can now build resilient, long-running multi-step applications and AI workflows faster with AI agent-assisted development in Kiro. The power dynamically loads guidance on replay models, step and wait operations, concurrent execution patterns, error handling, and deployment best practices.
• Amazon GameLift Servers launches DDoS Protection — You can now protect session-based multiplayer games against DDoS attacks with a co-located relay network that authenticates client traffic using access tokens and enforces per-player traffic limits, at no additional cost to GameLift Servers customers.

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

From AWS community

Here are my personal favorite posts from AWS community and my colleagues:

• I Built a Portable AI Memory Layer with MCP, AWS Bedrock, and a Chrome Extension — Learn how to build a persistent memory layer for AI agents using MCP and Amazon Bedrock, packaged as a Chrome extension that carries context across sessions and applications.
• When the Model Is the Machine — Mike Chambers built an experimental app where an AI agent generates a complete, interactive web application at runtime from a single prompt — no codebase, no framework, no persistent state. A thought-provoking exploration of what happens when the model becomes the runtime.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Community GameDay Europe — Think you know AWS? Prove it at the AWS Community GameDay Europe on March 17, a gamified learning event where teams compete to solve real-world technical challenges using AWS services.
• AWS at NVIDIA GTC 2026 — Join us at our AWS sessions, booths, demos, and ancillary events in NVIDIA GTC 2026 on March 16 – 19, 2026 in San Jose. You can receive 20% off event passes through AWS and request a 1:1 meeting at GTC.
• AWS Summits — Join AWS Summits in 2026: free in-person events where you can explore emerging cloud and AI technologies, learn best practices, and network with industry peers and experts. Upcoming Summits include Paris (April 1), London (April 22), and Bengaluru (April 23–24).
• AWS Community Days — Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Slovakia (March 11), Pune (March 21), and the AWSome Women Summit LATAM in Mexico City (March 28)

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

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

— seb

Hey! It’s my first post for 2026, and I’m writing to you while watching our driveway getting dug out. I hope wherever you are you are safe and warm and your data is still flowing!

This week brings exciting news for customers running GPU-intensive workloads, with the launch of our newest graphics and AI inference instances powered by NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell architecture. Along with several service enhancements and regional expansions, this week’s updates continue to expand the capabilities available to AWS customers.

Last week’s launches
I thought these projects, blog posts, and news items were also interesting:

• Amazon EC2 G7e instances are now generally available — The new G7e instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs deliver up to 2.3 times better inference performance compared to G6e instances. With two times the GPU memory and support for up to 8 GPUs providing 768 GB of total GPU memory, these instances enable running medium-sized models of up to 70B parameters with FP8 precision on a single GPU. G7e instances are ideal for generative AI inference, spatial computing, and scientific computing workloads. Available now in US East (N. Virginia) and US East (Ohio).
• Amazon Corretto January 2026 Quarterly Updates — AWS released quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) versions of OpenJDK. Corretto 25.0.2, 21.0.10, 17.0.18, 11.0.30, and 8u482 are now available, ensuring Java developers have access to the latest security patches and performance improvements.
• Amazon ECR now supports cross-repository layer sharing — Amazon Elastic Container Registry now enables you to share common image layers across repositories through blob mounting. This feature helps you achieve faster image pushes by reusing existing layers and reduce storage costs by storing common layers once and referencing them across repositories.
• Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights expands to four additional regions — CloudWatch Database Insights on-demand analysis is now available in Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Thailand), and Mexico (Central). This feature uses machine learning to help identify performance bottlenecks and provides specific remediation advice.
• Amazon Connect adds conditional logic and real-time updates to Step-by-Step Guides — Amazon Connect Step-by-Step Guides now enables managers to build dynamic guided experiences that adapt based on user interactions. Managers can configure conditional user interfaces with dropdown menus that show or hide fields, change default values, or adjust required fields based on prior inputs. The feature also supports automatic data refresh from Connect resources, ensuring agents always work with current information.

Upcoming AWS events
Keep a look out and be sure to sign up for these upcoming events:

• Best of AWS re:Invent (January 28-29, Virtual) — Join us for this free virtual event bringing you the most impactful announcements and top sessions from AWS re:Invent. AWS VP and Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr will share highlights during the opening session. Sessions run January 28 at 9:00 AM PT for AMER, and January 29 at 9:00 AM SGT for APJ and 9:00 AM CET for EMEA. Register to access curated technical learning, strategic insights from AWS leaders, and live Q&A with AWS experts.
• AWS Community Day Ahmedabad (February 28, 2026, Ahmedabad, India) — The 11th edition of this community-driven AWS conference brings together cloud professionals, developers, architects, and students for expert-led technical sessions, real-world use cases, tech expo booths with live demos, and networking opportunities. This free event includes breakfast, lunch, and exclusive swag.

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse for upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events in your area.

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

~ micah

Next week, don’t miss AWS re:Invent, Dec. 1-5, 2025, for the latest AWS news, expert insights, and global cloud community connections! Our News Blog team is finalizing posts to introduce the most exciting launches from our service teams. If you’re joining us in person in Las Vegas, review the agenda, session catalog, and attendee guides before arriving. Can’t attend in person? Watch our Keynotes and Innovation Talks via livestream.

Kiro is now generally available

Last week, Kiro, the first AI coding tool built around spec-driven development, became generally available. This tool, which we pioneered to bring more clarity and structure to agentic workflows, has already been embraced by over 250,000 developers since its preview release. The GA launch introduces four new capabilities: property-based testing for spec correctness (which measures whether your code matches what you specified); a new way to checkpoint your progress on Kiro; a new Kiro CLI bringing agents to your terminal; and enterprise team plans with centralized management.

Last week’s launches

We’ve announced numerous new feature and service launches as we approach re:Invent week. Key launches include:

• Accelerate large-scale AI applications with the new Amazon EC2 P6-B300 instances
• Introducing flat-rate pricing plans with no overages for website delivery and security
• New Amazon Bedrock service tiers help you match AI workload performance with cost
• Monitor network performance and traffic across your EKS clusters with Container Network Observability
• New: AWS Billing Transfer for centrally managing AWS billing and costs across multiple organizations
• AWS Control Tower introduces a Controls Dedicated experience
• New business metadata features in Amazon SageMaker Catalog to improve discoverability across organizations
• Streamlined multi-tenant application development with tenant isolation mode in AWS Lambda
• Accelerate workflow development with enhanced local testing in AWS Step Functions
• Simplify access to external services using AWS IAM Outbound Identity Federation
• Introducing attribute-based access control for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets
• Introducing VPC encryption controls: Enforce encryption in transit within and across VPCs in a Region
• Build production-ready applications without infrastructure complexity using Amazon ECS Express Mode
• New one-click onboarding and notebooks with a built-in AI agent in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio
• Simplified developer access to AWS with ‘aws login’

Here are some AWS bundled feature launches:

• Amazon EKS announces new Provisioned Control Plane, and fully managed MCP servers (preview) and enhanced AI-powered troubleshooting in the console with Amazon ECS.
• Amazon ECR introduces managed container image signing, archive storage class for rarely accessed container images, and AWS PrivateLink for FIPS Endpoints.
• Amazon Aurora DSQL provides an integrated query editor in the console, statement-level cost estimates in query plans, new Python, Node.js, and JDBC Connectors, up to 256 TiB of storage volume.
• Amazon API Gateway supports response streaming for REST APIs, developer portal capabilities, and additional TLS security policies for REST APIs.
• Amazon Connect provides conversational analytics for voice, persistent agent connections for faster call handling, and multi skill agent scheduling.
• Amazon CloudWatch introduces scheduled queries in Logs Insights and in-console agent management on EC2.
• AWS CloudFormation StackSets offers deployment ordering for auto-deployment mode. You can define the sequence in which your stack instances automatically deploy across accounts and Regions.
• AWS NAT Gateway supports Regional availability to create a single NAT Gateway that automatically expands and contracts across availability zones (AZs).
• Amazon Bedrock supports OpenAI GPT OSS models for Custom Model Import, coding use cases for Guardrails, and 10 additional languages for speech analytics for Data Automation.
• Amazon OpenSearch supports Cluster Insights for improved operational visibility, backup and restore, and audit logs for data plane APIs in Serverless through the console.

See AWS What’s New for more launch news that I haven’t covered here, and we’ll see you next week at re:Invent!

• Channy

Today, Amazon Connect introduces a set of new features that help businesses enhance their contact center operations through generative AI, advanced security features, and streamlined bot management. These innovations help businesses deliver better customer experiences by creating more time and space for meaningful human interactions, while maintaining security and compliance.

Contact center managers continually face challenges in optimizing self-service resolution rates, evaluating agent performance efficiently, and maintaining data privacy compliance. Additionally, creating and managing conversational AI experiences often requires specialized expertise and complex integrations across multiple services.

To address these challenges, Amazon Connect introduced key features such as generative AI–powered customer segmentation for targeted campaigns, native WhatsApp Business messaging for omnichannel support, secure collection of sensitive customer data in chat interactions, simplified conversational AI bot management in the Amazon Connect interface, and new enhancements to Amazon Q in Connect. Amazon Connect also added new analytics capabilities through Amazon Connect Contact Lens to help optimize bot performance and contact center operations.

Here are the new capabilities that will help you create more personalized and efficient customer experiences while maintaining the highest standards of data security and operational excellence.

Generative AI powered features

Amazon Connect integrates new generative AI capabilities to automate and enhance customer interactions, enabling smarter targeting and more efficient contact center management.

• Generative AI segmentation and trigger-based campaigns – Uses generative AI–powered assistance to create customer segments using conversational prompts. This allows businesses to create precise customer segments using natural language descriptions, making it easier to identify and reach specific customer groups. Trigger campaigns enable organizations to communicate with their customers based on specific customer events, such as cart abandonment.
• You can also start with ready-to-use suggestions.
• Simplify conversational AI bot creation and enhance them with Amazon Q in Connect – Create, edit, and manage conversational AI bots powered by Amazon Lex directly within the Amazon Connect web interface. You can now enhance these bots with Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI–powered assistant for customer service. Amazon Q in Connect now supports end-customer self-service interactions across interactive voice response (IVR) and digital channels, in addition to assisting contact center agents with recommended responses and actions.
• This integration extends beyond traditional voice and chatbot Amazon Lex capabilities by providing advanced conversational abilities via large language models (LLMs). The system intelligently searches configured knowledge bases, customer information, web content, and third-party application data to respond to customer questions when they don’t match predefined intents. Administrators can set custom guardrails for their instance, defining restrictions on response generation and monitoring Amazon Q in Connect performance.
• Generative AI–powered automated evaluations: Supervisors can automatically evaluate up to 100 percent of contacts using generative AI.
• Generative AI–powered contact categorization: Improves existing semantic match functionality using natural language intents.

Improved interfaces and tools

Enhanced capabilities for bot management and monitoring, simplifying the creation and optimization of automated experiences.

• Amazon Connect for WhatsApp Business messaging – Natively integrate with WhatsApp Business messaging so customers can receive support over WhatsApp in addition to existing Amazon Connect channels such as voice, SMS, chat, and Apple Messages for Business. This addition to Amazon Connect omnichannel capabilities helps businesses meet customers on their preferred communication channel while maintaining consistent service delivery and management within the Amazon Connect application.
• Contact Lens conversational AI bot dashboards – Offers analytics to monitor the performance of your conversational AI bots built in Amazon Connect.
• Self-service voice (IVR) recording and interaction logs on contact details – Provides comprehensive records of self-service interactions, including audio recordings.
• Improved intraday forecasts – Allows comparison of intraday forecasts against previously published forecasts.
• Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect (Preview) – Natively integrates the digital channels and unified routing of Amazon Connect into Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system. This new offering allows companies to use a single routing and workflow system for both Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels, intelligently directing calls, chats, and cases to the appropriate self-service or agent interaction. If you’re interested, sign up to join the preview.

Enhanced security for chat

New features that enhance security and compliance in chat interactions, enabling secure handling of sensitive information.

• Collection of sensitive customer data within chats – Amazon Connect chat and messaging now includes a data privacy option that enables secure handling of sensitive customer information during chat interactions. This feature protects personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card industry (PCI) data, promoting compliance with data protection regulations.

Key benefits

The latest features of Amazon Connect combine generative AI, enhanced security, and streamlined bot management to help businesses:

• Transform customer experience – Amazon Connect elevates customer interactions through AI–powered segmentation, enabling personalized engagement strategies. The new WhatsApp Business messaging expands omnichannel support capabilities, meeting customers on their preferred channel. Additionally, advanced bot capabilities, including Amazon Q in Connect, enhance self-service resolution rates, delivering more efficient customer experiences.
• Enhance security and operations – Contact centers can now strengthen their security posture with PCI-compliant chat interactions while maintaining operational efficiency. Custom AI guardrails promote appropriate response generation, while the simplified bot management interface eliminates the need for specialized expertise. Analytics and forecasting capabilities provide comprehensive performance monitoring, enabling data-driven decision-making for optimal contact center operations.
• Pricing and availability – These features are available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is supported. For pricing, visit the Amazon Connect Pricing. For implementation guidance, visit the Amazon Connect documentation.

— Eli

Last week's launches

I counted about 40 new launches from AWS since last week 6 back to our normal rhythm of releases. Services teams are listening to your feedback and developing little (or big) changes that makes your life easier when working with our services. The ability to support multiple sessions in the AWS Console is my favorite one so far in 2025.

But our teams didn’t stop there, let’s look at the last week’s new announcements.

Beside the usual Regional expansion (new capabilities that are now available in a new Region), here are the launches that got my attention.

• Amazon EventBridge announces direct delivery to cross-account targets 6 Amazon EventBridge is now able to deliver events to targets in another AWS account directly without having to send them to the default bus in the target account first. This will simplify so many architectures out there! It supports any target that supports resource-based policies, including AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon API Gateway.

• Amazon Corretto quaterly update 6 We announced quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) and Feature Release (FR) versions of OpenJDK. Corretto 23.0.2, 21.0.6, 17.0.14, 11.0.26, 8u442 are now available for download. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. You can download the updates from the Corretto home page or just type apt-get or yum update.

• High-throughput mode for Amazon SNS FIFO Topics 6 Amazon SNS now supports high-throughput mode for SNS FIFO topics, with default throughput matching SNS standard topics across all Regions. When you enable high-throughput mode, SNS FIFO topics will maintain order within message group, while reducing the deduplication scope to the message-group level. With this change, you can leverage up to 30K messages per second (MPS) per account by default in US East (N. Virginia) Region, and 9K MPS per account in US West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland) Regions, and request quota increases for additional throughput in any Region.

• Amazon Connect agent workspace now supports audio optimization for Citrix and Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops 6 Amazon Connect agent workspace now supports the ability to redirect audio from Citrix and Amazon WorkSpaces Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments to a customer service agent’s local device. Audio redirection improves voice quality and reduces latency for voice calls handled on virtual desktops, providing a better experience for both end customers and agents.

• Amazon Redshift announces support for History Mode for zero-ETL integrations 6 This new capability enables you to build Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD 2) tables on your historical data from databases, out-of-the-box in Amazon Redshift, without writing any code. History mode simplifies the process of tracking and analyzing historical data changes, allowing you to gain valuable insights from your data’s evolution over time.

Finally, Amazon Bedrock has its own set of announcements. First, for anyone investing in retrieval-augmented generation, Bedrock now support multimodal content with Cohere Embed 3 Multilingual and Embed 3 English models. This enables you to create embeddings to not only index text, but also images.

Second, read Luma AI’s Ray2 visual AI model now available in Amazon Bedrock. Luma Ray2 is a large-scale video-generation model capable of creating realistic visuals with fluid, natural movement. With Luma Ray2 in Amazon Bedrock, you can generate production-ready video clips with seamless animations, ultrarealistic details, and logical event sequences with natural language prompts, removing the need for technical prompt engineering. Ray2 currently supports 5- and 9-second video generations with 540p and 720p resolution.

And finally, Amazon Bedrock Flows announces preview of multi-turn conversation support. Amazon Bedrock Flows enables you to link foundation models (FMs), Amazon Bedrock Prompts, Amazon Bedrock Agents, Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, and other AWS services together to build and scale pre-defined generative AI workflows. This week, the team announced preview of multi-turn conversation support for agent nodes in Flows. This capability enables dynamic, back-and-forth conversations between users and flows, similar to a natural dialogue.

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

Other AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.

AWS Summits season is starting! I’m already working with the local team to prepare content for the Summits in Paris and London. Summits are free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Stay updated by visiting the official AWS Summit website and sign up for notifications to learn when registration opens for events in your area.

AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you, and don’t forget to register.

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events here.

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

6 seb

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

This week started with challenges for many using services in the the North Virginia (us-east-1) Region. On Monday, we experienced a service disruption affecting DynamoDB and several other services due to a DNS configuration problem. The issue has been fully resolved, and you can read the full details in our official summary. As someone who works closely with developers, I know how disruptive these incidents can be to your applications and your users. The teams are learning valuable lessons from this event that will help improve our services going forward.

Last week’s launches

On a brighter note, I’m excited to share some launches and updates from this past week that I think you’ll find interesting.

Last week’s launches

• AWS RTB Fabric is now generally available — If you’re working in advertising technology, you’ll be interested in AWS RTB Fabric, a fully managed service for real-time bidding workloads. It connects AdTech partners like SSPs, DSPs, and publishers through a private, high-performance network that delivers single-digit millisecond latency—critical for those split-second ad auctions. The service reduces networking costs by up to 80% compared to standard cloud solutions with no upfront commitments, and includes three built-in modules to optimize traffic, improve bid efficiency, and increase bid response rates. AWS RTB Fabric is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore and Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt and Ireland).

• Customer Carbon Footprint Tool now includes Scope 3 emissions data — Understanding the full environmental impact of your cloud usage just got more comprehensive. The AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool (CCFT) now covers all three industry-standard emission scopes as defined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. This update adds Scope 3 emissions—covering the lifecycle carbon impact from manufacturing servers, powering AWS facilities, and transporting equipment to data centers—plus Scope 1 natural gas and refrigerants. With historical data available back to January 2022, you can track your progress over time and make informed decisions about your cloud strategy to meet sustainability goals. Access the data through the CCFT dashboard or AWS Billing and Cost Management Data Exports.

Additional updates

I thought these projects, blog posts, and news items were also interesting:

• AWS Secret-West Region is now available — AWS launched its second Secret Region in the western United States, capable of handling mission-critical workloads at the Secret U.S. security classification level. This new region provides enhanced performance for latency-sensitive workloads and offers multi-region resiliency with geographic separation for Intelligence Community and Department of Defense missions. The infrastructure features data centers and network architecture designed, built, accredited, and operated for security compliance with Intelligence Community Directive requirements.

• Amazon CloudWatch now generates incident reports — CloudWatch investigations can now automatically generate comprehensive incident reports that include executive summaries, timeline of events, impact assessments, and actionable recommendations. The feature collects and correlates telemetry data along with investigation actions to help teams identify patterns and implement preventive measures through structured post-incident analysis.

• Amazon Connect introduces threaded email views — Amazon Connect email now displays exchanges in a threaded format and automatically includes prior conversation context when agents compose responses. These enhancements make it easier for both agents and customers to maintain context and continuity across interactions, delivering a more natural and familiar email experience.

• Amazon EC2 I8g instances expand to additional regions — Storage Optimized I8g instances are now available in Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and third-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, these instances deliver up to 60% better compute performance and 65% better real-time storage performance per TB compared to previous generation I4g instances, with storage I/O latency reduced by up to 50%.

• AWS Location Service adds enhanced map styling — Developers can now incorporate terrain visualization, contour lines, real-time traffic overlays, and transportation-specific routing details through the GetStyleDescriptor API. The new styling parameters enable tailored maps for specific applications—from outdoor navigation to logistics planning.

• CloudWatch Synthetics introduces multi-check canaries — You can now bundle up to 10 different monitoring steps in a single canary using JSON configuration without custom scripts. The multi-check blueprints support HTTP endpoints with authentication, DNS validation, SSL certificate monitoring, and TCP port checks, making API monitoring more cost-effective.

• Amazon S3 Tables now generates CloudTrail events — S3 Tables now logs AWS CloudTrail events for automatic maintenance operations, including compaction and snapshot expiration. This enables organizations to audit the maintenance activities that S3 Tables automatically performs to enhance query performance and reduce operational costs.

• AWS Lambda increases asynchronous invocation payload size to 1 MB — Lambda has quadrupled the maximum payload size for asynchronous invocations from 256 KB to 1 MB across all AWS Commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions. This expansion streamlines architectures by allowing comprehensive data to be included in a single event, eliminating the need for complex data chunking or external storage solutions. Use cases now better supported include large language model prompts, detailed telemetry signals, complex ML output structures, and complete user profiles. The update applies to asynchronous invocations through the Lambda API or push-based events from services like S3, CloudWatch, SNS, EventBridge, and Step Functions. Pricing remains at 1 request charge for the first 256 KB, with 1 additional charge per 64 KB chunk thereafter.

Upcoming AWS events

Keep a look out and be sure to sign up for these upcoming events:

• AWS re:Invent 2025 (December 1-5, 2025, Las Vegas) — AWS flagship annual conference offering collaborative innovation through peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities. Registration is now open.

• Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse for upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events in your area.

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

~ micah

This week I was at the inaugural AWS AI in Practice meetup from the AWS User Group UK. AI-assisted software development and agents were the focus of the evening! Next week I’ll be in Italy for Codemotion (Milan) and an AWS User Group meetup (Rome). My sessions there will be about AI agents and context engineering. I am also excited to try the new Amazon Quick Suite that brings AI-powered research, business intelligence, and automation capabilities into a single workspace.

Last week’s launches

Here are the launches that got my attention this week:

• Amazon Quick Suite – A new agentic teammate that quickly answers your questions at work and turns those insights into actions for you. Read more in Esra’s launch post.
• Amazon EC2 – General-purpose M8a instances powered by the 5th Generation AMD EPYC (codename Turin) processors and compute-optimized C8i and C8i-flex instances powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors are now available.
• Amazon EKS – EKS and EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.34 with several improvements.
• AWS IAM Identity Center – AWS Key Management Service keys can now be used to encrypt identity data stored in IAM Identity Center organization instances.
• Amazon VPC Lattice – You can now configure the number of IPv4 addresses assigned to resource gateway elastic network interfaces (ENIs). The IPv4 addresses are used for network address translation and determine the maximum number of concurrent IPv4 connections to a resource
• Amazon Q Developer – Amazon Q Developer can help you get information about AWS product and service pricing, availability, and attributes, making it easier to select the right resources and estimate workload costs using natural language. More info in this blog post.
• Amazon RDS for Db2 – You can now perform native database-level backups, offering greater flexibility in database management and migration.
• AWS Service Quotas – Get notified of your quota usage with automatic quota management. Configure your preferred notifications channels, such as email, SMS, or Slack. Notifications are also available in AWS Health, and you can subscribe to related AWS Cloudtrail events for automation workflows.
• Amazon Connect – You can now programmatically enrich case data with the new case APIs to link related cases, add custom related items, and search across them. You can now also customize service level calculations to your specific needs. New capabilities that have just been introduced include copy and bulk edit of agent scheduling configuration and agent schedule adherence notifications.
• AWS Client VPN – Now supports MacOS Tahoe.

Additional updates

Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that I found interesting:

• Serverless ICYMI Q3 2025 – A quarterly recap of serverless news, in case you missed it.
• Best practices for migrating from Apache Airflow 2.x to Apache Airflow 3.x on Amazon MWAA – A guide to help get the benefit of the new release.
• Building self-managed RAG applications with Amazon EKS and Amazon S3 Vectors – A reference architecture for building and deploying a self-managed RAG application using open source tools such as Ray, Hugging Face, and LangChain.
• BBVA: Building a multi-region, multi-country global Data and ML Platform at scale – A six-part series of posts describing the journey to transform BBVA entire data analytics infrastructure with one of the largest and most complex cloud migrations in the banking sector.
• Customizing text content moderation with Amazon Nova – Fine-tune Amazon Nova for content moderation tasks tailored to your requirements using domain-specific training data and organization-specific moderation guidelines.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendars so that you can sign up for these upcoming events:

• AWS AI Agent Global Hackathon – This is your chance to dive deep into our powerful generative AI stack and create something truly awesome. From September 8th to October 20th, you have the opportunity to create AI agents using AWS suite of AI services, competing for over $45,000 in prizes and exclusive go-to-market opportunities.
• AWS Gen AI Lofts – You can learn AWS AI products and services with exclusive sessions, meet industry-leading experts, and have valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Register in your nearest city: Paris (October 7–21), London (Oct 13–21), and Tel Aviv (November 11–19).
• AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Budapest (October 16).

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse here upcoming in-person events, developer-focused events, and events for startups.

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

This week brings an array of innovations spanning from generative AI capabilities to enhancements of foundational services. Whether you’re building AI-powered applications, managing databases, or optimizing your cloud infrastructure, these updates help build more advanced, robust, and flexible applications.

Last week’s launches

Here are the launches that got my attention this week:

• Amazon DocumentDB – Amazon DocumentDB Serverless is now available offering an on-demand, fully managed MongoDB API-compatible document database service. Read more in Channy’s post.
• Amazon Q Developer CLI – You can now create custom agents to help you customize the CLI agent to be more effective when performing specialized tasks such as code reviews and troubleshooting. More info in this blog.
• Amazon Bedrock Data Automation – Now supports DOC/DOCX files for document processing and H.265 encoded video files for video processing, making it easier to build multimodal data analysis pipelines.
• Amazon DynamoDB – Introduced the Amazon DynamoDB data modeling Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool, providing a structured, natural-language-driven workflow to translate application requirements into DynamoDB data models.
• AWS Lambda – Response streaming now supports a default maximum response payload size of 200 MB, 10 times higher than before. Lambda response streaming helps you build applications that progressively stream response payloads back to clients, improving performance for latency sensitive workloads by reducing time to first byte (TTFB) performance.
• Powertools for AWS – Introducing v2 of Powertools for AWS Lambda (Java), a developer toolkit that helps you implement serverless best practices and directly translates AWS Well-Architected recommendations.
• Amazon SNS – Now supports three additional message filtering operators: wildcard matching, anything-but wildcard matching, and anything-but prefix matching. SNS now also supports message group IDs in standard topics, enabling fair queue functionality for subscribed Amazon SQS standard queues.
• Amazon CloudFront – Now offers two capabilities to enhance origin timeout controls: a response completion timeout and support for custom response timeout values for Amazon S3 origins. These capabilities give you more control over how to handle slow or unresponsive origins.
• Amazon EC2 – You are now able to force terminate EC2 instances that are stuck in the shutting-down state.
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling – You can now use AWS Lambda functions as notification targets for EC2 Auto Scaling lifecycle hooks. For example, you can use this to trigger custom actions when an instance enters a wait state.
• Amazon SES – You can now provision isolated tenants within a single SES account and apply automated reputation policies to manage email sending.
• AWS Management Console – You can now view your AWS Applications in the Service menu in the console navigation bar. With this view you can see all your Applications and choose an Application to see all its associated resources.
• Amazon Connect – Amazon Connect UI builder now features an updated user interface to reduce the complexity to build structured workflows. It also simplified forecast editing with a new UI experience that improves planning accuracy. The Contact Control Panel now features an updated and more intuitive user interface. Amazon Connect also introduced new actions and workflows into the agent workspace. These actions are powered by third-party applications running in the background.
• AWS Clean Rooms – Now publishes events to Amazon EventBridge for status changes in a Clean Rooms collaboration, further simplifying how companies and their partners analyze and collaborate on their collective datasets without revealing or copying one another’s underlying data.
• AWS Entity Resolution – Introduced rule-based fuzzy matching using Levenshtein Distance, Cosine Similarity, and Soundex algorithms to help resolve consumer records across fragmented, inconsistent, and often incomplete datasets.

Additional updates

Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that I found interesting:

• Amazon Strands Agents SDK: A technical deep dive into agent architectures and observability – Nice overview to build single and multi-agent architectures.
• Build dynamic web research agents with the Strands Agents SDK and Tavily – Showing how easy it is to add a new tool.
• Structured outputs with Amazon Nova: A guide for builders – Good tips implemented on top of native tool use with constrained decoding.
• Automate the creation of handout notes using Amazon Bedrock Data Automation – A solution to build an automated, serverless solution to transform webinar recordings into comprehensive handouts.
• Build modern serverless solutions following best practices using Amazon Q Developer CLI and MCP – Adding the AWS Serverless MCP server.
• Introducing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser Tool – More info on this tool that enables AI agents to interact seamlessly with websites.
• Introducing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Code Interpreter – A fully managed service that enables AI agents to securely execute code in isolated sandbox environments.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendars so that you can sign up for these upcoming events:

• AWS re:Invent 2025 (December 1-5, 2025, Las Vegas) — AWS’s flagship annual conference offering collaborative innovation through peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities.
• AWS Summits — Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Mexico City (August 6) and Jakarta (August 7).
• AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Australia (August 15), Adria (September 5), Baltic (September 10), and Aotearoa (September 18).
• Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse here upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events.

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

Every Monday we tell you about the best releases and blogs that caught our attention last week. This week I’m making an exception to include a release from today: Amazon Bedrock API keys. This new feature simplifies generative AI development by providing direct API authentication without needing to manually configure IAM principals and policies.
Amazon Bedrock API keys support both long-term (with flexible validity duration) and short-term (up to 12 hours or console session duration) options. These improvements reduce developer onboarding time while maintaining enterprise security controls. To learn more about API keys in Amazon Bedrock, visit the API keys documentation.
Before continuing with this AWS Weekly Roundup, I’d like to share that last month I moved with my family to San Francisco, California, to start a new role as Developer Advocate/SDE, GenAI.
This excites me because I’ll have the opportunity to connect with new communities in the Bay Area while tackling exciting new challenges. If you’re part of a community focused on building generative AI and agentics applications, or know of one, I’d love to connect. Let’s connect!
Last week’s launches
Here are the launches from last week:

• New Amazon EC2 C8gn instances powered by AWS Graviton4 offering up to 600Gbps network bandwidth – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8gn instances are now generally available, powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and 6th generation AWS Nitro Cards. These network-optimized instances deliver up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth. This represents the highest bandwidth among EC2 network-optimized instances, with up to 192 vCPUs and 384 GiB memory. They provide 30% higher compute performance than C7gn instances and are ideal for network-intensive workloads like virtual appliances, data analytics, and cluster computing jobs.
• Build the highest resilience apps with multi-Region strong consistency in Amazon DynamoDB global tables – Amazon DynamoDB global tables now supports multi-Region strong consistency (MRSC) for applications requiring zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This capability ensures applications can read the latest data from any Region during outages, addressing critical needs in payment processing and financial services. MRSC requires three AWS Regions configured as either three full replicas or two replicas plus a witness, providing the highest level of application resilience for mission-critical workloads.
• Amazon Nova Canvas update: Virtual try-on and style options now available – Amazon Nova Canvas introduces virtual try-on capabilities that help you visualize how clothing looks on a person by combining two images, plus eight new pre-trained style options (3D animation, design sketch, vector illustration, graphic novel, etc.) for generating images with improved artistic consistency. Available in three AWS Regions, these features enhance AI-powered image generation capabilities for retailers and content creators seeking realistic product visualizations.
• Amazon Q in Connect now supports 7 languages for proactive recommendations – Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI-powered assistant for customer service, now provides proactive recommendations in seven languages: English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. The AI-powered customer service assistant detects customer intent during voice and chat interactions to help agents resolve issues quickly and accurately.
• Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL integration with Amazon SageMaker is now available – This integration provides near real-time data availability for analytics. It automatically extracts MySQL data into lakehouses with Apache Iceberg compatibility. You can then access this data seamlessly through various analytics engines and machine learning tools.
• Amazon Aurora DSQL is now available in additional AWS Regions – Amazon Aurora DSQL expands to Asia Pacific (Seoul) and now supports multi-Region clusters across Asia Pacific and European regions. This serverless, distributed SQL database offers unlimited scalability, highest availability, and zero infrastructure management with AWS Free Tier access.
  Other AWS blog posts
• Optimize RAG in production environments using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and Amazon OpenSearch Service – Learn how to optimize Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) in production environments using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and Amazon OpenSearch Service. This comprehensive guide demonstrates implementing RAG workflows with LangChain, covers OpenSearch optimization strategies, provides setup instructions, and explains benefits of combining these AWS services for scalable, cost-effective generative AI applications.v
• Agentic GenAI App Using Bedrock, MCP servers on EKS – This post shows how to build a scalable AI chat application using Amazon Bedrock, Strands Agent, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers deployed on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The architecture combines agentic workflows with containerized microservices for intelligent, auto-scaling conversations with multiple foundation models.
• Enforce table level access control on data lake tables using AWS Glue 5.0 with AWS Lake Formation – AWS Glue 5.0 introduces Full-Table Access (FTA) control for Apache Spark with AWS Lake Formation, providing table-level security without fine-grained access overhead. This feature supports native Spark SQL/DataFrames for Lake Formation tables. It enables read/write operations on Iceberg and Hive tables with improved performance and lower costs.
  Upcoming AWS events
  Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events:
• AWS re:Invent – Register now to get a head start on choosing your best learning path, booking travel and accommodations, and bringing your team to learn, connect, and have fun. Early-career professionals can apply for the All Builders Welcome Grant program, designed to remove financial barriers and create diverse pathways into cloud technology. Applications are now open and close on July 15, 2025.
• AWS NY Summit – You can gain insights from Swami’s keynote featuring the latest cutting-edge AWS technologies in compute, storage, and generative AI. My News Blog team is also preparing some exciting news for you. If you’re unable to attend in person, you can still participate by registering for the global live stream. Also, save the date for these upcoming Summits in July and August near your city.
• AWS Builders Online Series – If you’re based in one of the Asia Pacific time zones, join and learn fundamental AWS concepts, architectural best practices, and hands-on demonstrations to help you build, migrate, and deploy your workloads on AWS.
• Join AWS Gen AI Lofts – Experience AWS Gen AI Lofts across San Francisco, Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Bengaluru, Manchester, Paris, Tel Aviv, and additional locations – hands-on workshops, expert guidance, investor networking, and collaborative spaces designed to accelerate your generative AI startup journey.
  You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.
  That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
  —
  Eli

Update 4/14/2025:

The UI in AWS Lake formation has changed, instead of “Create Table”, it is now “Create”, and then customers can choose a “Table” or “Resource Link”.

Analytics are vital to the success of a contact center. Having insights into each touchpoint of the customer experience allows you to accurately measure performance and adapt to shifting business demands. While you can find common metrics in the Amazon Connect console, sometimes you need to have more details and custom requirements for reporting based on the unique needs of your business.

Starting today, the Amazon Connect analytics data lake is generally available. As announced last year as preview, this new capability helps you to eliminate the need to build and maintain complex data pipelines. Amazon Connect data lake is zero-ETL capable, so no extract, transform, or load (ETL) is needed.

Here’s a quick look at the Amazon Connect analytics data lake:

Improving your customer experience with Amazon Connect

Amazon Connect analytics data lake helps you to unify disparate data sources, including customer contact records and agent activity, into a single location. By having your data in a centralized location, you now have access to analyze contact center performance and gain insights while reducing the costs associated with implementing complex data pipelines.

With Amazon Connect analytics data lake, you can access and analyze contact center data, such as contact trace records and Amazon Connect Contact Lens data. This provides you the flexibility to prepare and analyze data with Amazon Athena and use the business intelligence (BI) tools of your choice, such as, Amazon QuickSight and Tableau.

Get started with the Amazon Connect analytics data lake

To get started with the Amazon Connect analytics data lake, you’ll first need to have an Amazon Connect instance setup. You can follow the steps in the Create an Amazon Connect instance page to create a new Amazon Connect instance. Because I’ve already created my Amazon Connect instance, I will go straight to showing you how you can get started with Amazon Connect analytics data lake.

First, I navigate to the Amazon Connect console and select my instance.

Then, on the next page, I can set up my analytics data lake by navigating to Analytics tools and selecting Add data share.

This brings up a pop-up dialog, and I first need to define the target AWS account ID. With this option, I can set up a centralized account to receive all data from Amazon Connect instances running in multiple accounts. Then, under Data types, I can select the types I need to share with the target AWS account. To learn more about the data types that you can share in the Amazon Connect analytics data lake, please visit Associate tables for Analytics data lake.

Once it’s done, I can see the list of all the target AWS account IDs with which I have shared all the data types.

Besides using the AWS Management Console, I can also use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to associate my tables with the analytics data lake. The following is a sample command:

$> aws connect batch-associate-analytics-data-set --cli-input-json file:///input_batch_association.json

Where input_batch_association.json is a JSON file that contains association details. Here’s a sample:

{
	"InstanceId": YOUR_INSTANCE_ID,
	"DataSetIds": [
		"<DATA_SET_ID>"
		],
	"TargetAccountId": YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID
}

Next, I need to approve (or reject) the request in the AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) console in the target account. RAM is a service to help you securely share resources across AWS accounts. I navigate to AWS RAM and select Resource shares in the Shared with me section.

Then, I select the resource and select Accept resource share.

At this stage, I can access shared resources from Amazon Connect. Now, I can start creating linked tables from shared tables in AWS Lake Formation. In the Lake Formation console, I navigate to the Tables page and select Create table.

I need to create a Resource link to a shared table. Then, I fill in the details and select the available Database and the Shared table’s region.

Then, when I select Shared table, it will list all the available shared tables that I can access.

Once I select the shared table, it will automatically populate Shared table’s database and Shared table’s owner ID. Once I’m happy with the configuration, I select Create.

To run some queries for the data, I go to the Amazon Athena console.The following is an example of a query that I ran:

With this configuration, I have access to certain Amazon Connect data types. I can even visualize the data by integrating with Amazon QuickSight. The following screenshot show some visuals in the Amazon QuickSight dashboard with data from Amazon Connect.

Customer voice

During the preview period, we heard lots of feedback from our customers about Amazon Connect analytics data lake. Here’s what our customer say:

Joulica is an analytics platform supporting insights for software like Amazon Connect and Salesforce. Tony McCormack, founder and CEO of Joulica, said, “Our core business is providing real-time and historical contact center analytics to Amazon Connect customers of all sizes. In the past, we frequently had to set up complex data pipelines, and so we are excited about using Amazon Connect analytics data lake to simplify the process of delivering actionable intelligence to our shared customers.”

Things you need to know

• Pricing — Amazon Connect analytics data lake is available for you to use up to 2 years of data without any additional charges in Amazon Connect. You only need to pay for any services you use to interact with the data.
• Availability — Amazon Connect analytics data lake is generally available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and Europe (Frankfurt, London)
• Learn more — For more information, please visit Analytics data lake documentation page.

Happy building,
— Donnie

Donnie Prakoso is a software engineer, self-proclaimed barista, and Principal Developer Advocate at AWS. With more than 17 years of experience in the technology industry, from telecommunications, banking to startups. He is now focusing on helping the developers to understand varieties of technology to transform their ideas into execution. He loves coffee and any discussion of any topics from microservices to AI / ML.

As we move into the second week of 2025, China is celebrating Laba Festival (腊八节), a traditional holiday, which marks the beginning of Chinese New Year preparations. On this day, Chinese people prepare Laba congee, a special porridge combining various grains, dried fruits, and nuts. This nutritious mixture symbolizes harmony, prosperity, and good fortune — with each ingredient representing the diversity and abundance of life. This traditional practice dates back to when Buddha achieved enlightenment after consuming rice porridge, making it a symbol of both material and spiritual nourishment. The festival, occurring on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, marks the countdown to Spring Festival, China’s most significant traditional holiday celebrating family reunion and renewal.

As our global tech community grows, such cultural celebrations remind us of the importance of inclusive innovation and shared progress.

Last week’s launches

Let’s take a look at what Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in this week.

• New AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region – AWS has expanded its global infrastructure with the launch of the new Asia Pacific (Thailand) AWS Region, featuring three Availability Zones. With this addition, customers in Thailand and throughout Southeast Asia can serve customers with reduced latency while maintaining data residency within Thailand. The newly launched Region supports the complete range of AWS services and strengthens our presence in the rapidly growing ASEAN market.

• New AWS Direct Connect location in Bangkok – Following the launch of our Thailand Region, we’ve established a new AWS Direct Connect location in Bangkok and expanded our existing infrastructure. This addition provides customers in Thailand with improved connectivity options and reduced network latency when accessing AWS services.

Database and analytics

• Configurable point-in-time recovery periods for Amazon DynamoDB – Amazon DynamoDB now enables customizable point-in-time recovery (PITR) periods, which means customers can specify recovery durations ranging from 1 to 35 days on a per-table basis. This enhancement enables organizations to meet precise compliance requirements while maximizing cost-efficiency. The feature is now available across all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US West) and China Regions. This flexibility in data recovery periods empowers customers to align their backup policies precisely with their business requirements and regulatory obligations.

• Amazon MSK Connect APIs with AWS PrivateLink – Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka Connect (Amazon MSK Connect) APIs now support AWS PrivateLink, giving customers access to MSK Connect APIs through private endpoints within their virtual private cloud (VPC). This enhancement provides increased security and reduced data exposure by keeping traffic within the AWS network.

Generative AI and machine learning

• Amazon Q Developer in SageMaker Code Editor – Amazon Q Developer is now integrated into the Amazon SageMaker Code Editor integrated development environment (IDE), enhancing the developer’s experience with AI-powered code assistance. Intelligent code suggestions, documentation assistance, and contextual recommendations are now directly available within the SageMaker development environment.

Management and governance

• AWS Systems Manager Automation in AWS Chatbot – AWS Chatbot now offers 20 additional AWS Systems Manager Automation runbook recommendations, expanding its capabilities for automated operations management. These new recommendations help customers streamline their operational tasks and implement best practices more efficiently through chat-based interactions.

• AWS Transit Gateway cost analysis enhancement – We’ve introduced new capabilities for analyzing Transit Gateway data processing charges using cost allocation tags. This feature provides improved visibility and control over networking costs, enabling organizations to track and optimize AWS Transit Gateway usage efficiently. The enhanced cost analysis tools deliver detailed insights into network traffic patterns and associated costs.

Other AWS news and highlights

• 2024’s most popular DevOps blog posts – The retrospective blog post “The most visited DevOps and Developer Productivity blog posts in 2024” has reached the top one position on this week’s AWS most popular articles chart. This compilation presents the most influential DevOps content from 2024, offering insights into trending topics and best practices. The collection examines key developments in continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD), infrastructure as code (IaC), and automation practices.

• New security course for generative AI – AWS Skill Builder has released a new course focusing on securing generative AI applications on AWS. This comprehensive training teaches professionals to implement security best practices for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) workloads, addressing data protection, model security, and compliance requirements. The course meets the growing demand for specialized security knowledge in the rapidly evolving field of generative AI.

• Amazon Connect Contact Lens free trials – We’re introducing free trials for first-time users of Amazon Connect Contact Lens conversational analytics and performance evaluations. New customers can process up to 100,000 voice minutes monthly at no cost for 2 months, and first-time performance evaluation users receive a 30-day free trial starting with their first evaluation. With this initiative, customers can experience Contact Lens capabilities in their environment without additional costs. The free trials are available across all AWS Regions where Contact Lens is supported.

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

Whether you’re a developer, architect, business leader, or you’re starting your cloud journey – and regardless of what 2024 brought your way – 2025 presents new opportunities for everyone.

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

– Betty

Life is not always happy, there are difficult times. However, we can share our joys and sufferings with those we work with. The AWS Community is no exception.
Jeff Barr introduced two members of the AWS community who are dealing with health issues. Farouq Mousa is an AWS Community Builder and fighting brain cancer. Allen Helton is an AWS Serverless Hero and his young daughter is fighting leukemia.
Please donate to support Farauq and Olivia, Allen’s daughter to overcome their disease.

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches that got my attention:

• Amazon EC2 high memory U7i Instances – These instances with up to 32 TiB of DDR5 memory and 896 vCPUs are powered by custom fourth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids). These high memory instances are designed to support large, in-memory databases including SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server. To learn more, visit Jeff’s blog post.
• New Amazon Connect analytics data lake – You can use a single source for contact center data including contact records, agent performance, Contact Lens insights, and more — eliminating the need to build and maintain complex data pipelines. Your organization can create your own custom reports using Amazon Connect data or combine data queried from third-party sources. To learn more, visit Donnie’s blog post.
• Amazon Bedrock Converse API – This API provides developers a consistent way to invoke Amazon Bedrock models removing the complexity to adjust for model-specific differences such as inference parameters. With this API, you can write a code once and use it seamlessly with different models in Amazon Bedrock. To learn more, visit Dennis’s blog post to get started.
• New Document widget for PartyRock – You can build, use, and share generative AI-powered apps for fun and for boosting personal productivity, using PartyRock. Its widgets display content, accept input, connect with other widgets, and generate outputs like text, images, and chats using foundation models. You can now use new document widget to integrate text content from files and documents directly into a PartyRock app.
• 30 days of alarm history in Amazon CloudWatch – You can view the history of your alarm state changes for up to 30 days prior. Previously, CloudWatch provided 2 weeks of alarm history. This extended history makes it easier to observe past behavior and review incidents over a longer period of time. To learn more, visit the CloudWatch alarms documentation section.
• 10x faster startup time in Amazon SageMaker Canvas – You can launch SageMaker Canvas in less than a minute and get started with your visual, no-code interface for machine learning 10x faster than before. Now, all new user profiles created in existing or new SageMaker domains can experience this accelerated startup time.

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

Other AWS news

Here are some additional news items and a Twitch show that you might find interesting:

• Let us manage your relational database! – Jeff Barr ran a poll to better understand why some AWS customers still choose to host their own databases in the cloud. Working backwards, he highlights four issues that AWS managed database services address. Consider these before hosting your own database.
• Amazon Bedrock Serverless Prompt Chaining – This repository provides examples of using AWS Step Functions and Amazon Bedrock to build complex, serverless, and highly scalable generative AI applications with prompt chaining.
• AWS Merch Store Spring Sale – Do you want to buy AWS branded t-shirts, hats, bags, and so on? Get 15% off on all items now through June 7th.

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

• AWS World IPv6 Day — Join us a free in-person celebration event on June 6, for technical presentations from AWS experts plus a workshop and whiteboarding session. You will learn how to get started with IPv6 and hear from customers who have started on the journey of IPv6 adoption. Check out your near city: San Francisco, Seattle, New York, London, Mumbai, Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Manila, and Sydney.
• AWS Summits — Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Stockholm (June 4), Madrid (June 5), and Washington, DC (June 26–27).
• AWS re:Inforce — Join us for AWS re:Inforce (June 10–12) in Philadelphia, PA. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference focused on AWS security solutions, cloud security, compliance, and identity. Connect with the AWS teams that build the security tools and meet AWS customers to learn about their security journeys.
• AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Midwest | Columbus (June 13), Sri Lanka (June 27), Cameroon (July 13), New Zealand (August 15), Nigeria (August 24), and New York (August 28).
  You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
—
Channy
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Last week’s launches

If we stay curious, keep learning, and insist on high standards, we will continue to see more ideas turn into reality. The same goes for the generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) world. Here are some launches that utilize generative AI technology this week.

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet foundation model (FM) is now generally available on Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock to connect internal data sources for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock support metadata filtering, which improves retrieval accuracy by ensuring the documents are relevant to the query. You can narrow search results by specifying which documents to include or exclude from a query, resulting in more relevant responses generated by FMs such as Claude 3 Sonnet.

Finally, you can customize prompts and number of retrieval results in Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock. With custom prompts, you can tailor the prompt instructions by adding context, user input, or output indicator(s), for the model to generate responses that more closely match your use case needs. You can now control the amount of information needed to generate a final response by adjusting the number of retrieved passages. To learn more these new features, visit Knowledge bases for Amazon Bedrock in the AWS documentation.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens – At AWS re:Invent 2023, we previewed a generative AI capability to summarize long customer conversations into succinct, coherent, and context-rich contact summaries to help improve contact quality and agent performance. These generative AI–powered post-contact summaries are now available in Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

Amazon DataZone – At AWS re:Invent 2023, we also previewed a generative AI–based capability to generate comprehensive business data descriptions and context and include recommendations on analytical use cases. These generative AI–powered recommendations for descriptions are now available in Amazon DataZone.

There are also other important launches you shouldn’t miss:

• A new Local Zone in Miami, Florida – AWS Local Zones are an AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists. You can now use a new Local Zone in Miami (use1-mia2-az1) from the Zones tab in the Amazon EC2 console settings to get started.
• New Amazon EC2 C7gn metal instance – You can use AWS Graviton based new C7gn bare metal instances to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted business-critical applications. The EC2 C7gn metal size comes with 64 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory.
• AWS Batch multi-container jobs – You can use multi-container jobs in AWS Batch, making it easier and faster to run large-scale simulations in areas like autonomous vehicles and robotics. With the ability to run multiple containers per job, you get the advanced scaling, scheduling, and cost optimization offered by AWS Batch, and you can use modular containers representing different components like 3D environments, robot sensors, or monitoring sidecars.
• Amazon Guardduty EC2 Runtime Monitoring – We are announcing the general availability of Amazon GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring to expand threat detection coverage for EC2 instances at runtime and complement the anomaly detection that GuardDuty already provides by continuously monitoring VPC Flow Logs, DNS query logs, and AWS CloudTrail management events. You now have visibility into on-host, OS-level activities and container-level context into detected threats.
• GitLab support for AWS CodeBuild – You can now use GitLab and GitLab self-managed as the source provider for your CodeBuild projects. You can initiate builds from changes in source code hosted in your GitLab repositories. To get started with CodeBuild’s new source providers, visit the AWS CodeBuild User Guide.
• Retroactive support for AWS cost allocation tags – You can enable AWS cost allocation tags retroactively for up to 12 months. Previously, when you activated resource tags for cost allocation purposes, the tags only took effect prospectively. Submit a backfill request, specifying the duration of time you want the cost allocation tags to be backfilled. Once the backfill is complete, the cost and usage data from prior months will be tagged with the current cost allocation tags.

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

Other AWS News

Some other updates and news about generative AI that you might have missed:

Amazon and Anthropic’s AI investiment – Read the latest milestone in our strategic collaboration and investment with Anthropic. Now, Anthropic is using AWS as its primary cloud provider and will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future FM development. Earlier this month, we announced access to Anthropic’s most powerful FM, Claude 3, on Amazon Bedrock. We announced availability of Sonnet on March 4 and Haiku on March 13. To learn more, watch the video introducing Claude on Amazon Bedrock.

Virtual building assistant built on Amazon Bedrock – BrainBox AI announced the launch of ARIA (Artificial Responsive Intelligent Assistant) powered by Amazon Bedrock. ARIA is designed to enhance building efficiency by assimilating seamlessly into the day-to-day processes related to building management. To learn more, read the full customer story and watch the video on how to reduce a building’s CO2 footprint with ARIA.

Solar models available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart – Upstage Solar is a large language model (LLM) 100 percent pre-trained with Amazon SageMaker that outperforms and uses its compact size and powerful track record to specialize in purpose training, making it versatile across languages, domains, and tasks. Now, Solar Mini is available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. To learn more, watch how to deploy Solar models in SageMaker JumpStart.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Last week’s highlight was news that Linux Foundation launched Valkey community, an open source alternative to the Redis in-memory, NoSQL data store.

Upcoming AWS Events

Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Paris (April 3), Amsterdam (April 9), Sydney (April 10–11), London (April 24), Berlin (May 15–16), and Seoul (May 16–17), Hong Kong (May 22), Milan (May 23), Dubai (May 29), Stockholm (June 4), and Madrid (June 5).
• AWS re:Inforce – Explore cloud security in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce, June 10–12 in Pennsylvania for two-and-a-half days of immersive cloud security learning designed to help drive your business initiatives. Read the story from AWS Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Chris Betz about a bit of what you can expect at re:Inforce.
• AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Mumbai (April 6), Poland (April 11), Bay Area (April 12), Kenya (April 20), and Turkey (May 18).

You can browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

—
Channy

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