The agentic launches that stayed with me last week had nothing to do with how capable a model is. They were about reach. AWS Step Functions, which already orchestrates over 220 AWS services, can now be handed to an agent as a tool, so workflows teams already trust became callable without a rewrite. In the same week, the AI blog published how one engagement platform exposed roughly 400 internal API operations the same way. Neither story involves rebuilding anything, only describing what exists and letting the agent find it.

The other thread was cost. OpenAI’s newest Terra model reached Amazon Bedrock priced well below the model beside it, and two post-quantum launches landed for a deadline nobody can put on a calendar yet. Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines
OpenAI GPT-6.1 Terra is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, and what interests me is where it sits rather than what it tops. Terra is the everyday-workload line of the GPT-6 family. In OpenAI’s Agents’ Last Exam evaluation it scored 15 percentage points higher than GPT-5.6 Terra, performed on par with GPT-6 Astra, and completed tasks more than three times faster than both. Those are OpenAI’s figures, not an independent test. The price is what I would check first: input and output tokens are at least 50% lower than GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-5.6 Terra. It takes up to 1 million input tokens with text and image input, and you can reach it from the Bedrock APIs or ChatGPT Work and Codex.

AWS Step Functions workflows are now available as AI agent tools through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway, which connects agents to tools over the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The division of labor is the idea: the agent decides when to run a workflow and what input to pass; Step Functions runs each step exactly as you defined it. A support agent can trigger a refund, and the eligibility check, the manager approval, and the credit still happen in that order every time, because the ordering was never the model’s to improvise. Your existing Standard and Express workflows qualify as connector targets, and agents can also look up runs. It’s available in all Regions where AgentCore Gateway is, at standard rates.

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

AWS Key Management Service now supports ML-KEM for post-quantum key encapsulation – You can now establish a shared secret with a post-quantum algorithm using AWS KMS keys, with private keys in FIPS 140-3 Level 3 validated HSMs. All three NIST FIPS 203 parameter sets are supported through Encapsulate, which produces a random 32-byte shared secret and its ciphertext, and Decapsulate, which recovers it. The threat is harvest now, decrypt later: an adversary records today’s key exchange and recovers the secret once quantum computers are powerful enough. It’s available everywhere KMS runs except the Middle East (UAE and Bahrain) and China Regions. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL added post-quantum TLS key exchange the same week, on versions 18 and higher.

AWS IAM Identity Center now supports cross-Region trusted identity propagation – You can now carry a user’s identity with their request to AWS services in another Region. This removes a genuine architectural constraint: trusted identity propagation used to require every service accessing that identity to sit in the same Region, which left two unappealing options, broad IAM roles that cannot distinguish individual users, or consolidating all your services into a single Region. Now the identity travels with the request automatically, so you grant access by user and group membership and audit who accessed what. It’s available at no additional cost everywhere IAM Identity Center runs.

Amazon ECS now supports GPU sharing with NVIDIA Multi-Process Service (MPS) – You can now run multiple Amazon ECS tasks concurrently on a single NVIDIA GPU, the practical answer to work that only ever uses a fraction of one, like small-model inference and multi-model serving. You declare the GPU memory each container needs and can optionally cap its share of GPU compute, and ECS places tasks on GPUs with available capacity as your services scale, with no code changes. It works on ECS Managed Instances and ECS on Amazon EC2, and on Managed Instances it watches the MPS control daemon and replaces the instance if it turns unhealthy. It’s available in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

AWS Lambda supports Seekable OCI (SOCI) lazy loading for Lambda Managed Instances – You can now have AWS Lambda fetch only the files needed at each stage of startup instead of pulling a whole container image first, which AWS puts at up to 70% off container startup time. You create a SOCI index, push it to Amazon ECR, point the image URI at the indexed tag, and Lambda detects it automatically. The technique also reached Amazon SageMaker AI training and processing jobs, with benchmarks: lazy loading held at 3 to 11 seconds regardless of image size, against a median 3 minutes 42 seconds for a 13.2 GB image, a range they report as 8x to 46x.

Amazon EKS Auto Mode now supports Kubernetes Gateway API – You can now declare how traffic reaches your applications with Gateway and HTTPRoute resources on Amazon EKS without installing a separate controller, and EKS Auto Mode provisions and manages the underlying AWS load balancing infrastructure. You get HTTP and gRPC routing, cross-namespace routing, weighted traffic splitting, header-based routing, and automatic TLS certificate discovery through AWS Certificate Manager. Existing Ingress workloads keep working alongside them, so this is additive rather than a migration. Gateway API support is included with EKS Auto Mode; standard load balancing charges apply.

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:

How Nubank automated disaster recovery with the AWS DevOps Agent – Nubank serves more than 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, and classifies over 300 business flows as critical, each tested on a regulator’s schedule. Nubank reports that handing evidence collection and report writing to the AWS DevOps Agent cut a test cycle from about 4.3 hours to roughly 40 minutes, and quadrupled flow coverage in 2026 to more than 160. One execution terminated more than 900 EKS instances under synthetic traffic with AWS Fault Injection Service, producing the evidence its regulator needed.

How MoEngage turned over 400 APIs into agent tools with AgentCore Gateway – Roughly 400 internal REST API operations, built by 25 teams, sitting in private VPCs across seven Regions, with tenant identity that could never become a parameter the model gets to set. MoEngage estimates the managed path saved about six months of platform engineering. The detail worth stealing: a full tool listing would have crossed 20,000 tokens per connection, so agents search for tools by describing a task instead of receiving the catalog.

Reducing petabyte-scale S3 storage costs with evidence-based lifecycle rules – The hard part isn’t deciding to act, it’s knowing which data has gone cold and where it can safely live. This uses S3 Storage Lens groups and Storage Class Analysis to prove access patterns before moving anything. In the engagement described, 5.8 PB of logs in Amazon S3 Standard at approximately $241,000 per month showed an access ratio below 0.1% past 90 days, and a 90-day transition to Glacier Instant Retrieval cut the bill by roughly 70%, a figure the author ties to that workload.

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, with more than 2,200 sessions. The event catalog is live and reserved seating is open, so register and claim your spots before they fill up.

AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. The 2026 season is winding down as re:Invent approaches, so check the hub for what’s still on.

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!

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.

• Amazon Redshift adds Apache Iceberg materialized views – You can now pre-compute expensive joins and aggregations once in Amazon Redshift and store the result as an Iceberg table in Amazon S3, registered in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You create them with familiar SQL, and the results are immediately queryable by any Iceberg-compatible engine, including Amazon Athena, Apache Spark, Trino, and Snowflake. Redshift keeps them current by recomputing only what changed. There’s a good deep dive on the AWS Big Data blog if you want the details.

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.

• AWS Continuum sets a new standard in autonomous code security – Related to that theme, AWS Continuum for Penetration Testing now integrates into your CI/CD pipeline in public preview, turning penetration testing into a deploy-time event instead of something that happens off to the side. Developers get findings with severity, affected endpoints, and remediation guidance right in the pipeline output, and the pipeline re-tests to verify fixes.

• How Postman runs Agent Mode for 40 million developers on Amazon Bedrock – A look at the architecture behind a feature serving a very large developer audience. Worth reading if you’re moving an agentic feature from a demo to something that has to hold up under real traffic.

• ICYMI: What landed for AI builders in September 2026 – If you lost track of a month that included a lot of model launches, this is a tidy catch-up in one place.

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.

• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders, and this is a busy stretch. Upcoming stops include San Francisco (October 13), Miami (October 14), Brisbane (October 16), Cape Town (October 16), Malta (October 16), and Mumbai (October 17). Here in Brazil, the community calendar has more editions coming before the end of the year.

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!