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AWS Weekly Roundup: Prime Day 2026 by the numbers, Claude Haiku 5.5, Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic, and more (October 13, 2026)

Some numbers are hard to picture until you sit with them for a moment. Last week we published the Prime Day 2026 metrics, and the one that stuck with me is 2.3 quadrillion: the daily requests Amazon ElastiCache peaked at during the event. Prime Day ran back in June, so this post always lands as a retrospective, and that gap is part of what makes it worth reading. By the time the numbers reach you, the only evidence that any of it happened is that nothing went wrong.

The rest of the week pulled in a different direction: smaller, cheaper, and more constrained. Claude Haiku 5.5 arrived on Amazon Bedrock at roughly 75 percent less than Haiku 4.5, Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic made voice agents quicker on their feet, and Strands Box showed up to put real boundaries around what an agent is allowed to do. Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines
All the numbers: Amazon Prime Day 2026 powered by AWS is the latest entry in a tradition that goes back to 2016, and the scale is still difficult to hold in your head. Over the four days of Prime Day, Amazon DynamoDB processed more than 59 trillion requests while peaking at 192 million requests per second, and kept single-digit millisecond responses throughout. AWS Lambda handled over 2.3 trillion invocations per day. Amazon EBS peaked above 24.8 trillion I/O operations, moving more than an exabyte of data daily. Amazon ECS launched an average of 158.3 million tasks per day on AWS Fargate, a 47.7 percent jump over last year, and AWS Graviton powered up to 49 percent of the Amazon EC2 compute that Amazon.com used.

The number I keep coming back to, though, isn’t a throughput record. The team ran more than 44,000 AWS Fault Injection Service experiments ahead of the event, more than six times what they ran in 2025. Those are deliberate failures injected on purpose, months in advance, so that the trillions of requests above turn into an ordinary shopping afternoon. If you’re preparing for your own peak moment, AWS Countdown Premium is built for exactly that kind of planning.

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

  • Claude Haiku 5.5 is now available on AWS – You can now use the fastest model in the Claude 5.5 family on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS, at around 75 percent less than Claude Haiku 4.5 for most tasks. It’s the first Haiku with effort controls, so you can tune cost against intelligence per task instead of fixing one setting for a whole workload. It pairs naturally with Claude Opus 5.5: Opus plans and makes the judgment calls, and because Haiku is fast and cheap, you can run many Haiku subagents in parallel for routing, classification, and small code changes across many files.
  • Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic for voice agents – You can now build real-time voice agents on a speech-to-speech Amazon Nova model with better reasoning, instruction following, and tool-calling accuracy, plus lower latency. That combination matters for multi-step work: a support agent can look up an order, check return eligibility, and start the return inside one conversation. It keeps expressive voices in seven languages, controllable turn-taking, and a 256K context window, and pairs with Strands Bidi Agents, now generally available, to get a production voice agent going in a few lines of code.
  • Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection now detects data exfiltration and destruction – Amazon GuardDuty now looks past login anomalies to the queries themselves on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. RDS Protection for data activity builds behavioral baselines and uses ML-based anomaly detection plus threat intelligence to flag unusual data access, with no agents, extra infrastructure, or database configuration changes. This closes a real gap: once an attacker has valid credentials from phishing or a misconfiguration, their queries can look indistinguishable from your application’s.
  • AWS Lambda supports OAuth for self-managed Apache Kafka event sources – You can now authenticate Lambda Kafka consumers through your enterprise identity provider, such as Amazon Cognito or Okta. Event source mappings previously supported only SASL/PLAIN, SASL/SCRAM, and mTLS, which left teams in regulated industries unable to use Kafka ESM at all. Now you get the automatic scaling, batching, error handling, and event filtering of Kafka ESM with the same identity governance you apply everywhere else. It works with self-hosted clusters and managed offerings including Confluent Cloud, Aiven, and Redpanda.

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

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

  • Introducing Strands Box: AI agent sandboxes powered by Dogwood – As more of us let agents run shell commands and call APIs without approving every step, isolation alone stops being enough. Strands Box is an open source sandbox (Apache 2.0, developer preview) that combines OS-level containment with fine-grained policies written in Dogwood, so permissions can depend on what the agent has already done. You can say “let the agent post to the incident channel, but no more than three times every 10 minutes” and have that enforced from outside the agent’s process. It also keeps real credentials out of the agent’s environment by attaching them at an egress gateway.

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

  • AWS re:Invent – re:Invent returns to Las Vegas from November 30 to December 4, and reserved seating is now open. The session catalog is live, so register and claim your spots in chalk talks, workshops, and builders’ sessions before they fill up.

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

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

– Daniel Abib

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

TrinaTracker launches robots to automate solar farm construction and maintenance

8 October 2026 at 09:51
TrinaTracker, a global provider of smart tracking systems and a wholly owned subsidiary of Trinasolar, has launched two self-developed robotic products: Buildex PV Module Installation Robot and Aurora PV Cleaning Robot, to expand its Smart PV Ecosystem. TrinaTracker is evolving from a tracking system equipment supplier into a smart PV and robotics solution provider. By […]

AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Opus 4.8 on AWS, Aurora MySQL with Kiro Powers, and more (June 1, 2026)

In my last Week in Review post, I shared what I’d been hearing from customers in the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) workshops I’ve been delivering. Last week I was back at it, this time in Denver for a two-day AI-DLC workshop, where I helped facilitate 17 teams to deliver nearly 20 separate use cases in just two days. The pace of acceleration that AI-DLC unlocks—especially when paired with tools like Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock—is fundamentally changing how businesses operate. Traditional roles within software development teams are collapsing into smaller, AI-augmented squads, and the paradigm shift is beginning to take place right in front of us. To learn more about how to utilize various AI tools, visit the GitHub repository of AI-DLC workflow.

This shift is also reshaping how AWS account teams (solutions architects, customer solutions managers, and technical account managers) collaborate with customers. It’s becoming less about handing off advisory design documents and more about building alongside them in real time. It’s a genuinely exciting moment to be in the middle of the change, and this week’s headline launch — Anthropic’s most capable model yet, now on AWS, is going to push that pace even further.

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

Headlines
Claude Opus 4.8 on AWS – Anthropic’s most capable generally available model is now accessible through both Amazon Bedrock and the Claude Platform on AWS. Opus 4.8 is built for agentic coding, knowledge work, and extended autonomous task execution — it sustains longer autonomous sessions with deeper reasoning, recovers from errors, and synthesizes information across lengthy documents. For coding workloads, it reads codebases like an engineer, plans before it edits, and holds context across long sessions. On Amazon Bedrock, you get AWS-managed features like Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, and data residency; on the Claude Platform on AWS, you get Anthropic’s native APIs unified with AWS billing. To learn more, visit the deep-dive blog post.

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

  • Introducing the next generation of AWS Resilience Hub – A reimagined Resilience Hub gives SREs and developers a unified framework to define resilience standards, evaluate applications against them, and demonstrate compliance across an entire portfolio. It introduces modular resilience policies (covering service-level objectives (SLOs), multi-AZ/Region DR, and data recovery), business-oriented application modeling, generative AI-powered assessments aligned with the Well-Architected and Resilience Analysis Frameworks, and automatic dependency discovery via DNS query log analysis. Integration with AWS Organizations enables organization-wide resilience management from a single delegated administrator account.
  • Introducing the next generation of Amazon OpenSearch Serverless for building agentic AI applications – Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now a fully managed search and vector engine purpose-built for agentic AI applications. It scales from zero to thousands of requests per second—roughly 20x faster than the prior generation—delivers up to 60% cost savings versus peak-provisioned clusters, and adds GPU acceleration plus new SEARCH and VECTORSEARCH collection types. Native integrations with Vercel, Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor through OpenSearch Agent Skills make it straightforward to plug into your agent stack.
  • New assessment capabilities in AWS Transform – AWS Transform expands with new tools to help you build migration business cases and evaluate TCO before moving workloads to AWS. You can ingest data from RVTools exports, CMDB data, the AWS Transform discovery tool, and third-party discovery tools, then run what-if scenarios across region, utilization, and service mapping for EC2, FSx, S3, SQL Server on EC2, and virtual desktops. The release also adds Agentic Readiness Analysis (ARA) and Modernization Analysis (MODA), which scan code repositories in 5 to 30 minutes per repo to surface severity-tagged findings with file-level evidence and AWS-mapped remediation guidance.
  • Amazon Aurora MySQL with Kiro Powers — Aurora MySQL now integrates with Kiro Powers, drawing from a curated repository of pre-packaged MCP servers, steering files, and hooks validated by Kiro partners. Developers can execute both data plane tasks (queries, schema management) and control plane tasks (cluster management) in natural language, with dynamic guidance for Aurora MySQL Serverless scaling, RDS-to-Aurora migration, and replication setup. The companion Database Blog post explains how the agent produces the API calls, SQL, and configuration for you to review and run — available via one-click install from the Kiro IDE or webpage.
  • Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports Windows Desktop OS – You can now bring your own Windows Desktop licenses to Amazon WorkSpaces Applications and stream full Windows desktops and applications from AWS-hosted dedicated hardware. BYOL eliminates OS fees (you pay only for compute and streaming infrastructure), supports eligible Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, and gives users a matching experience between local and remote environments — same workflows, shortcuts, and navigation in both.

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

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

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!

-Micah

AWS Weekly Roundup: Anthropic & Meta partnership, AWS Lambda S3 Files, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore CLI, and more (April 27, 2026)

Late March took me to Seattle for the Specialist Tech Conference, one of the most energizing gatherings of AWS specialists from around the world.

It was an incredible opportunity to connect with peers, exchange experiences, and go deep on the latest advancements in Generative AI and Amazon Bedrock — and a powerful reminder of something I truly believe in: when specialists come together to challenge each other, explore edge cases, and co-create solutions, the impact goes far beyond the meeting room. In a fast-moving space like AI, having a strong internal community isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a competitive advantage.

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

Headlines
Anthropic partnership: Claude on AWS Trainium and Graviton, and Claude Cowork in Amazon Bedrock – This week, AWS and Anthropic deepened their product collaboration in meaningful ways for builders. Anthropic is now training its most advanced foundation models on AWS Trainium and Graviton infrastructure, co-engineering directly at the silicon level with Annapurna Labs to maximize computational efficiency from the hardware up through the full stack.

Claude Cowork is now available in Amazon Bedrock – Claude Cowork brings Anthropic’s collaborative AI capabilities directly to enterprise builders within the AWS ecosystem, enabling teams to work alongside Claude as a true collaborator, not just a tool. You can now deploy Claude Cowork within your existing Amazon Bedrock environment, keeping your data secure within AWS while leveraging the full power of Claude for team-based AI workflows.

Claude Platform on AWS (Coming soon) – A unified developer experience to build, deploy, and scale Claude-powered applications without leaving AWS. If you’re building with Generative AI on AWS, this is a significant step forward in what you’ll be able to do with Claude directly through Amazon Bedrock.

Meta signs agreement with AWS to power agentic AI on Amazon’s Graviton chips – Meta has signed an agreement to deploy AWS Graviton processors at scale, starting with tens of millions of Graviton cores to power CPU-intensive agentic AI workloads — including real-time reasoning, code generation, search, and multi-step task orchestration.

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

  • AWS Lambda functions can now mount Amazon S3 buckets as file systems with S3 Files – You can now mount Amazon S3 buckets as file systems in AWS Lambda using S3 Files, enabling your functions to perform standard file operations without downloading data for processing. Built on Amazon EFS, S3 Files provides the simplicity of a file system with the scalability, durability, and cost-effectiveness of S3 — and multiple Lambda functions can connect to the same file system simultaneously, sharing data through a common workspace. This is particularly valuable for AI and machine learning workloads where agents need to persist memory and share state across pipeline steps.
  • Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes gateway for hybrid Kubernetes networking – Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service now offers the Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes gateway, which automates networking between your EKS cluster VPC and Kubernetes Pods running on EKS Hybrid Nodes. You can now eliminate the need to make on-premises pod networks routable or coordinate network infrastructure changes, greatly simplifying hybrid Kubernetes environments. The gateway automatically enables pod-to-pod traffic across cloud and on-premises environments, control plane-to-webhook communication, and connectivity for AWS services like Application Load Balancers, and is available at no additional charge.
  • Amazon Aurora Serverless: Up to 30% better performance, smarter scaling, and still scales to zero – Amazon Aurora Serverless just got faster and smarter, with up to 30% better performance than the previous version and an enhanced scaling algorithm designed to handle workloads where multiple tasks compete for resources like busy APIs and agentic AI applications with bursts of activity and long idle windows. You can now run even more demanding workloads serverlessly, paying only for what you use, and automatically scaling to zero when not in use. All improvements are available in platform version 4 at no additional cost.
  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore adds new features to help developers build agents faster – Amazon Bedrock AgentCore introduces a managed harness (preview), the AgentCore CLI, and AgentCore skills for coding assistants, helping developers go from idea to working agent prototype faster. The managed harness lets you define an agent by specifying a model, system prompt, and tools and run it immediately with no orchestration code required and when you’re ready for full control, you can export the harness orchestration as Strands-based code. The AgentCore CLI deploys your agents with the governance and auditability of infrastructure-as-code (AWS CDK today, Terraform coming soon), and is available in 14 AWS Regions at no additional charge.

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

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

  • Introducing granular cost attribution for Amazon Bedrock – This post walks through how Amazon Bedrock’s granular cost attribution works and covers practical example cost tracking scenarios. You can now tag and track Bedrock usage costs at a finer level of detail — useful for organizations running multiple teams or projects on Bedrock who need precise cost visibility and chargeback capabilities.
  • Automating Incident Investigation with AWS DevOps Agent and Salesforce MCP Server – This post (co-written with Salesforce) shows how AWS DevOps Agent, integrated with the Salesforce MCP Server, automates the full lifecycle of infrastructure incident investigation from identifying issues and diagnosing root causes to notifying customers through Salesforce Service Cloud. It’s a compelling real-world example of how AI agents and MCP-based tool connectivity are reshaping DevOps workflows in production, dramatically reducing mean time to resolution.
  • Microcredentials from AWS are now free — Here’s why that matters – You can now access AWS microcredentials at no cost through AWS Skill Builder in all countries where the platform is offered. Unlike traditional multiple-choice certifications, microcredentials are hands-on assessments that place builders in simulated business scenarios where they configure, troubleshoot, and optimize directly in a live AWS environment, the same way they would on the job. A great opportunity to validate real cloud skills without a cost barrier.
  • Amazon SageMaker AI now supports optimized generative AI inference recommendations – You can now use Amazon SageMaker AI to automatically identify optimized deployment configurations for your generative AI models, including instance type, container, and inference parameters. This new capability takes the guesswork out of tuning inference infrastructure, helping you reduce costs and improve latency for your AI applications in production.

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

  • What’s Next with AWS: Tune in on April 28 for What’s Next with AWS, a virtual event featuring the latest announcements and product updates directly from AWS teams. A great opportunity to get up to speed on what’s new before diving into the week’s launches.
  • AWS Summits: AWS Summits are free in-person events where you can explore the latest in cloud and AI innovation, learn best practices, and network with builders and experts. Coming up in May: Singapore (May 6), Tel Aviv (May 6), Warsaw (May 6), Stockholm (May 7), Sydney (May 13–14), Hamburg (May 20), Seoul (May 20), Amsterdam (May 27), Bangkok (May 28), Milan (May 28), and Mumbai (May 28). And in June, join us in Los Angeles (June 10). Check the full schedule and register at the link above.
  • 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 Athens, Greece (April 28), Vancouver, Canada (May 1), İstanbul, Türkiye (May 9), and Panama City, Panama (May 23). If you’re in Latin America, mark your calendar for the AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte (August 22), registration is open at awscommunityday.com.br.

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

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

— Daniel Abib

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

AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Amazon Bedrock, Kiro in GovCloud Regions, new Agent Plugins, and more (February 23, 2026)

Last week, my team met many developers at Developer Week in San Jose. My colleague, Vinicius Senger delivered a great keynote about renascent software—a new way of building and evolving applications where humans and AI collaborate as co-developers using Kiro. Other colleagues, Du’An Lightfoot, Elizabeth Fuentes, Laura Salinas, and Sandhya Subramani spoke about building and deploying production-ready AI agents. Everyone stayed to ask and hear the questions related to agent memory, multi-agent patterns, meta-tooling and hooks. It was interesting how many developers were actually building agents.

We are continuing to meet developers and hear their feedback at third-party developer conferences. You can meet us at the dev/nexus, the largest and longest-running Java ecosystem conference on March 4-6 in Atlanta. My colleague, James Ward will speak about building AI Agents with Spring and MCP, and Vinicius Senger and Jonathan Vogel will speak about 10 tools and tips to upgrade your Java code with AI. I’ll keep sharing places for you to connect with us.

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

  • Claude Sonnet 4.6 model in Amazon Bedrock – You can now use Claude Sonnet 4.6 which offers frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work at scale. Claude Sonnet 4.6 approaches Opus 4.6 intelligence at a lower cost. It enables faster, high-quality task completion, making it ideal for high-volume coding and knowledge work use cases.
  • Amazon EC2 Hpc8a instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors – You can use new Hpc8a instances delivering up to 40% higher performance, increased memory bandwidth, and 300 Gbps Elastic Fabric Adapter networking. You can accelerate compute-intensive simulations, engineering workloads, and tightly coupled HPC applications.
  • Amazon SageMaker Inference for custom Amazon Nova models – You can now configure the instance types, auto-scaling policies, and concurrency settings for custom Nova model deployments with Amazon SageMaker Inference to best meet your needs.
  • Nested virtualization on virtual Amazon EC2 instances – You can create nested virtual machines by running KVM or Hyper-V on virtual EC2 instances. You can leverage this capability for use cases such as running emulators for mobile applications, simulating in-vehicle hardware for automobiles, and running Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows workstations.
  • Server-Side Encryption by default in Amazon Aurora – Amazon Aurora further strengthens your security posture by automatically applying server-side encryption by default to all new databases clusters using AWS-owned keys. This encryption is fully managed, transparent to users, and with no cost or performance impact.
  • Kiro in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – You can use Kiro for the development teams behind government missions. Developers in regulated environments can now leverage Kiro’s agentic AI tool with the rigorous security controls required.

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:

  • Introducing Agent Plugins for AWS – You can see how new open-source Agent Plugins for AWS extend coding agents with skills for deploying applications to AWS. Using the deploy-on-aws plugin, you can generate architecture recommendations, cost estimates, and infrastructure-as-code directly from your coding agent.
  • A chat with Byron Cook on automated reasoning and trust in AI systems – You can hear how to verify AI systems doing the right thing using automated reasoning when they generate code or manage critical decisions. Byron Cook’s team has spent a decade proving correctness in AWS and apply those techniques to agentic systems.
  • Best practices for deploying AWS DevOps Agent in production – You can read best practices for setting up DevOps Agent Spaces that balance investigation capability with operational efficiency. According to Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS DevOps Agent, a frontier agent that resolves and proactively prevents incidents, has handled thousands of escalations, with an estimated root cause identification rate of over 86% within Amazon.

From AWS community
Here are my personal favorite posts from AWS community:

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with community, share knowledge, and access content that supports your development.

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).
  • Amazon Nova AI Hackathon – Join developers worldwide to build innovative generative AI solutions using frontier foundation models and compete for $40,000 in prizes across five categories including agentic AI, multimodal understanding, UI automation, and voice experiences during this six-week challenge from February 2nd to March 16th, 2026.
  • 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 Ahmedabad (February 28), JAWS Days in Tokyo (March 7), Chennai (March 7), Slovakia (March 11), and Pune (March 21).

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

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

— Channy

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