My most exciting news of last week: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore previewed the first managed payment capabilities enabling AI agents to autonomously access and pay for APIs, MCP servers, web content, and other agents. Built in partnership with Coinbase and Stripe, it removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building customized systems for billing, credential management, and compliance.

You can connect a Coinbase CDP wallet or Stripe Privy wallet as a payment connection, set session-level spending limits, and your agent transacts autonomously during execution. What excites me most is what AgentCore payments can unlock—like a research agent that can pay for real-time market data on the fly, or a coding agent calling paid APIs mid-task.

To learn more, visit the blog post, dive deeper using the documentation, and get started with the AgentCore CLI.

Last week’s launches
Here are last week’s launches that caught my attention:

• Agent Toolkit for AWS – A production-ready suite of tools and guidance, available at no additional charge, that helps AI coding agents build on AWS with fewer errors, lower token costs, and enterprise-grade security controls. The Agent Toolkit for AWS is the successor to the MCP servers, plugins, and skills available on AWS Labs. To get started, visit the quick start guide or browse the available skills and plugins on GitHub.
• AWS MCP Server GA – You can use a managed remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI agents and coding assistants secure, authenticated access to all AWS services through a small, fixed set of tools. It is part of the Agent Toolkit for AWS. To learn more, visit Seb Stormacq’s blog post.
• Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents (Preview) – You can use AI agents to securely access and operate desktop applications through managed WorkSpaces environments. This capability allows organizations to automate everyday workflows at scale while maintaining full enterprise-grade governance and compliance. To learn more, visit Micah Walter’s blog post.
• Amazon EC2 M8idn/M8idb and R8idn/R8idb instances – These instances are powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors available only on AWS and the latest sixth-generation AWS Nitro cards. These instances deliver up to 43% better compute performance per vCPU compared to previous-generation instances. M8idn/R8idn instances offer up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth, and M8idb/R8idb instances deliver up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth.

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

Additional updates
Here are some additional news items that you might find interesting:

• Valkey turns two – Valkey stands as proof that open, community-driven technology innovates faster, scales further, and delivers more value than any single-vendor model. Valkey has surpassed 100 million Docker pulls (up 17x year over year) and attracted more than 225 contributors who have submitted over 1,500 pull requests, roughly double the development pace of Redis over the same period. You can also use the latest Valkey 9.0 in Amazon ElastiCache.
• Query billion-scale vectors with SQL – You can learn how to query Amazon S3 Vectors from Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition using standard SQL, and how to combine vector similarity results with relational filters in a single query, for example, finding the most semantically similar products and then filtering by price, stock status, or tenant in one SQL statement.
• Building an end-to-end agentic SRE using AWS DevOps Agent – Learn how to configure DevOps Agent Spaces that define an investigation scope, integrating seamlessly with Amazon CloudWatch, Splunk, GitHub, and Slack. You can also learn how to trigger automated investigations via webhooks, generate mitigation plans, and hand off agent-ready specs to coding agents like Kiro for implementation.

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 as well as AWS Summits and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

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

— Channy

Enterprises face a significant challenge when deploying AI agents: the desktop and legacy applications that power most business workflows are simply inaccessible to modern AI systems. According to a 2024 Gartner report, 75% of organizations run legacy applications that lack modern APIs, and 71% of Fortune 500 companies operate critical processes on mainframe systems without adequate programmatic access. For many organizations, this has meant choosing between delaying AI adoption or undertaking expensive and risky modernization projects.

Today, we are announcing that Amazon WorkSpaces now enables AI agents to securely operate desktop applications without requiring application modernization. The same managed virtual desktops that millions of employees use and trust can now also serve AI agents, turning WorkSpaces into infrastructure for scaling enterprise productivity, not just delivering it. Because agents operate within your existing WorkSpaces environment, there are no APIs to build, no application migrations to plan, and no new infrastructure to manage.

Some of our customers had an early opportunity to give their agents a WorkSpace. Chris Noon, Director, Nuvens Consulting shared with us, “WorkSpaces lets our clients give AI agents the same secure, governed desktop environment their employees already use — no custom API integrations, full audit trails, and enterprise-grade isolation out of the box. For regulated industries, that’s not a nice-to-have — it’s the baseline.”

Secure cloud desktop access for AI agents
With WorkSpaces, AI agents can securely access and operate desktop applications running inside managed WorkSpaces environments to complete complex business workflows. Agents authenticate through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and connect via Workspaces with complete audit trails available through AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch. Because agents operate within secure WorkSpaces environments rather than on local machines, your existing security controls and compliance policies remain fully intact.

Amazon Workspaces supports the industry-standard Model Context Protocol (MCP), which means WorkSpaces works with any agent framework, such as LangChain, CrewAI and Strands Agents.

Let’s try it out
To set up a WorkSpaces environment for AI agents, I started in the AWS Management Console by creating a new WorkSpaces Applications stack—the environment definition that controls how agents connect and what they’re allowed to do.

From the Amazon WorkSpaces console, I chose Create stack and configured the basics: name, fleet association, and VPC endpoints. In Step 3 of the stack creation workflow, I noticed the new AI agents section with two options. The first, No AI agent access, is the default configuration for standard WorkSpaces designed for people. The second, Add AI Agents, allows AI agents to securely access and operate applications using their own identity and permissions. I selected Add AI Agents to enable agent connections on this stack.

Next, I will enable storage before configuring the agent access settings to define how agents interact with the desktop.

Under Agent features, I enabled three capabilities. Computer input allows the agent to click, type, and scroll within the desktop. Computer vision allows the agent to capture screenshots of the desktop, which is how it “sees” the application. Finally, screenshot storage configures where session screenshots are stored for audit and debugging.

Under Desktop screen layout, I set the screen resolution to 1280×720 and image format to PNG. The resolution determines the fidelity of what the agent sees during a session—a complex application with dense UI elements might benefit from higher resolution, while a terminal-style interface works well at 720p.

With my stack configured, WorkSpaces exposes a managed MCP endpoint. I pointed my agent framework to this endpoint, provided IAM credentials for authentication, and my agent began interacting with the desktop applications installed on the fleet’s image.

To see this in action, here’s an agent built with the Strands Agent SDK and Amazon Bedrock handling a prescription refill, looking up the patient record, searching for the medication, placing the order, and confirming a successful refill, all inside a sample pharmacy system with no API.

The application doesn’t know an agent is driving it. Nothing about the software was modified, rebuilt, or integrated. The agent worked with it exactly as it exists today.

Now available
This feature is available today at no additional cost in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, London), and Asia (Tokyo, Mumbai, Sydney, Seoul, Singapore) Regions.

Get started building today using our GitHub repo, or visit the WorkSpaces page for more details.

Updated July 1, 2026– Feature has moved from public preview to GA.

Twenty years ago this past week, Amazon S3 launched publicly on March 14, 2006. While Amazon Simple Storage Service is often considered the foundational storage service that defined cloud infrastructure, what began as a simple object storage service has grown into something far larger in scope and scale.

As of March 2026, S3 stores more than 500 trillion objects, serves more than 200 million requests per second globally across hundreds of exabytes of data, and the price has dropped to just over 2 cents per gigabyte — an approximately 85% reduction since launch. My colleague Sébastien Stormacq wrote a detailed look at the engineering and the road ahead in Twenty years of Amazon S3 and building what’s next, and if you want to read about those earliest customers and how they shaped what AWS became, I recommend How three startups helped Amazon invent cloud computing and paved the way for AI. Twenty years is worth pausing to celebrate.

Alongside the 20th anniversary of S3, Channy Yun also wrote about a new S3 feature this week: Account regional namespaces for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets. With this feature, you can create general purpose buckets in your own account regional namespace by appending your account’s unique suffix to your requested bucket name, ensuring your desired names are always reserved exclusively for your account. You can enforce adoption across your organization using AWS IAM policies and AWS Organizations service control policies with the new s3:x-amz-bucket-namespace condition key. Read Channy’s post to learn more about account regional namespaces for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets.

This week’s featured launch is one I have a personal connection to: the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver. I wrote about the preview of this capability back in December at re:Invent 2025, and I had a great time putting that post together, so I am happy to hear that it’s generally available now.

Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver is an internet-reachable anycast DNS resolver that provides DNS resolution for authorized clients from any location. It is now generally available across 30 AWS Regions, with support for both IPv4 and IPv6 DNS query traffic. Route 53 Global Resolver gives authorized clients in your organization anycast DNS resolution of public internet domains and private domains associated with Route 53 private hosted zones — from any location, not just from within a specific VPC or Region. It also provides DNS query filtering to block potentially malicious domains, domains that are not safe for work, and domains associated with advanced DNS threats such as DNS tunneling and Domain Generation Algorithms (DGA). Centralized query logging is included as well. With general availability, Global Resolver adds protection against Dictionary DGA threats.

Last week’s launches
Here are some of the other announcements from last week:

• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime now supports stateful MCP server features — Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime now supports stateful Model Context Protocol (MCP) server features, enabling developers to build MCP servers that use elicitation, sampling, and progress notifications alongside existing support for resources, prompts, and tools. With stateful MCP sessions, each user session runs in a dedicated microVM with isolated resources, and the server maintains session context across multiple interactions using an Mcp-Session-Id header. Elicitation enables server-initiated, multi-turn conversations to gather structured input from users during tool execution. Sampling allows servers to request LLM-generated content from the client for tasks such as personalized recommendations. Progress notifications keep clients informed during long-running operations. To learn more, see the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore documentation.
• Amazon WorkSpaces now supports Microsoft Windows Server 2025 — New bundles powered by Microsoft Windows Server 2025 are now available for Amazon WorkSpaces Personal and Amazon WorkSpaces Core. These bundles include security capabilities such as Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot, Secured-core server, Credential Guard, Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity (HVCI), and DNS-over-HTTPS. Existing Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022 bundles remain available. You can use the managed Windows Server 2025 bundles or create a custom bundle and image. This support is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon WorkSpaces is available. For more information, visit the Amazon WorkSpaces FAQs.
• AWS Builder ID now supports Sign in with GitHub and Amazon — AWS Builder ID now supports two additional social login options: GitHub and Amazon. These options join the existing Google and Apple sign-in capabilities. With this update, developers can access their AWS Builder ID profile — and services including AWS Builder Center, AWS Training and Certification, and Kiro — using their existing GitHub or Amazon account credentials, without managing a separate set of credentials. To learn more and get started, visit the AWS Builder ID documentation.
• Amazon Redshift introduces reusable templates for COPY operations — Amazon Redshift now supports templates for the COPY command, allowing you to store and reuse frequently used COPY parameters. Templates help maintain consistency across data ingestion operations, reduce the effort required to execute COPY commands, and simplify maintenance by applying template updates automatically to all future uses. Support for COPY templates is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Redshift is available, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To get started, see the documentation or read the Standardize Amazon Redshift operations using Templates blog.

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

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), and Bengaluru (April 23–24).

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 Pune (March 21), San Francisco (April 10), and Romania (April 23-24).

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 Community GameDay Europe — Taking place on March 17, 2026, AWS Community GameDay Europe is a team-based, hands-on AWS challenge event running simultaneously across 50+ cities in Europe. Your team is dropped into a broken AWS environment — misconfigured services, failing architectures, and security gaps — and has two hours to fix as much as possible. Find your nearest city and sign up at awsgameday.eu.

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!

— Esra

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