Last week, Claude Fable 5.1 became available on AWS. According to Anthropic, Claude Fable 5.1 delivers frontier intelligence for ambitious tasks across coding, scientific research, and enterprise workflows. Claude Fable 5.1 is built for long-running, high-stakes work that runs for hours and spans many applications. It can own more of a software project on its own, handling features across an entire codebase, code review, and performance work over extended sessions.

Anthropic has designated Fable 5.1 a Covered Model, a category of Claude models that carry additional data retention, safety review, and access policies wherever they’re offered. Claude Fable 5.1 is subject to data retention for up to 30 days and human review by Amazon personnel, with a new aws_review data retention mode. In this mode, AWS retains your prompts and outputs for human safety review within the AWS boundary. The provider_data_share mode is legacy, and Amazon Bedrock does not share your data with the model provider. In addition, Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS), built in partnership between AWS and Anthropic, will let eligible customers use Covered Models while keeping their data in a cloud environment they control.

You have two ways to access Claude Fable 5.1: Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. To learn more, see the Claude Fable 5.1 model card on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS.

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

• Amazon Linux 2027 (AL2027) in public preview: AL2027 is the next version of the Amazon Linux operating system. It runs on kernel 7.1+, purpose-built for cloud-native workloads on AWS with performance, scale, and security in mind. Built on AL2023’s baseline, AL2027 is designed for customers who need a secure, stable, and AWS-native operating system running web applications, databases, containerized microservices, AI/ML workloads, and large-scale infrastructure.
• Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd memory-optimized instances: These instances are powered by AWS Graviton5 processors, delivering the best price performance for memory-intensive workloads running on Amazon EC2. R9g and R9gd instances deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to AWS Graviton4-based R8g and R8gd instances. They are up to 30% faster for databases, up to 35% faster for web applications, and up to 35% faster for machine learning. To learn more, read Daniel’s blog post.
• AWS Lambda SnapStart for container image functions: Lambda SnapStart is an opt-in capability that makes it easier for you to build highly responsive and scalable applications without provisioning resources or implementing complex performance optimizations. Previously, SnapStart was only supported for managed runtimes (Python, .NET, and Java). You can now use SnapStart for container images to reduce startup times from several seconds to as low as sub-second for latency-sensitive workloads such as ML inference and interactive APIs.
• AWS Agent Registry now generally available: AWS Agent Registry provides a private, governed catalog and discovery layer for agents, tools, skills, MCP servers, and custom resources within your organization. In addition to the capabilities launched in preview (manual and URL-based record creation, approval workflows, semantic and keyword search, and AWS CloudTrail audit trails), Registry now adds new enterprise features. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• Amazon Redshift now supports Apache Iceberg v3 tables: You can read from and write to Apache Iceberg v3 tables in your data lake of Amazon Redshift. With this launch, Amazon Redshift introduces support for default column values, row lineage, and deletion vectors. Amazon Redshift’s Graviton based provisioned and serverless clusters support the new v3 format. To learn more, visit Apache Iceberg v3 features in Redshift.

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 projects and news items you may find interesting:

• AWS named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services: For the 16th consecutive year, Gartner has recognized AWS as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, and once again placed AWS highest on the Ability to Execute axis. We believe this recognition reflects our commitment to delivering the broadest and deepest set of cloud capabilities from infrastructure and AI to security and operations, so you can build, innovate, and scale with confidence.
• AWS Certified AI Business Strategist: This new certification targets professionals who evaluate, champion, and scale AI initiatives in their organizations: line-of-business leaders driving adoption across their teams, sales professionals articulating AI value to customers, consultants guiding client strategy from experimentation through production, program managers aligning AI investments to business outcomes. Beta exam registration opened September 1, 2026, with exam delivery beginning September 29.
• Agentic Security: Detection and Response at Machine Speed: We believe security should evolve ahead of AI adoption, not behind it. That belief drove our team to collaborate with the SANS Institute on a new chapter in the 2026 Cloud Security Exchange eBook, where we lay out a practical framework for securing agentic workloads at enterprise scale. Our chapter goes deeper on securing agentic workloads, with specific architectural patterns, implementation guidance, and frameworks for security teams at every stage of agentic AI maturity, whether you’re evaluating, piloting, or operating at scale.

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

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events including AWS re:Invent, 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 is all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Channy

Anthropic has signed a $35 billion cloud computing deal with Lambda, an Nvidia-backed cloud provider.

The article Anthropic ramps up Claude infrastructure with $35 billion Lambda deal appeared first on The Decoder.

Neocloud Lambda has raised $1B in private debt to buy Nvidia AI chips and lease them to Microsoft. It's the latest in a string of loans, underscoring the high cost of the AI boom.

Last week, we brought together AWS Heroes from around the world to connect, collaborate, and celebrate the builders who go above and beyond for the AWS community.

The AWS Heroes Summit, an invite-only annual gathering, brings global experts specializing in fields like AI, serverless, and containers together for direct collaboration, technical deep-dives, and feedback sessions with internal AWS product and service teams.

Day 1 started with an inspiring fireside chat from AWS CEO Matt Garman. From an insightful AMA with James Hamilton on Day 2 to breakout sessions from various product teams that sparked new ideas, our AWS Heroes excelled at sharing knowledge, lifting each other up, and turning conversations into collaborations. To learn more, read the attendee feedback on LinkedIn.

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

• Web Search on Amazon Bedrock: Amazon Bedrock now enables OpenAI models (GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, and GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna) to browse and retrieve information from the internet, allowing AI applications to access up-to-date information beyond their training data. This capability opens new possibilities for building AI agents and applications that can answer questions using real-time web content while maintaining data residency within your secured AWS environment with zero data egress. To get started, visit the AI blog post and the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.
• Runtime Instances on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: You can now deploy and run AI agents on dedicated runtime instances through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, providing more control over agent execution environments with predictable performance and cost. To get started, visit Sébastien’s blog post and AgentCore documentation.
• Vector search for Amazon DynamoDB: You can store and query vector embeddings alongside your existing data in DynamoDB without managing a separate vector database. DynamoDB already supports storing memory for AI agents, and with vector search you can now add semantic retrieval over that memory for agentic grounding, with predictable performance. To learn more, visit Esra’s blog post and Amazon DynamoDB Developer Guide.
• AWS Transform continuous modernization now generally available: This capability helps engineering teams analyze and remediate technical debt across source code repositories at scale. You can modernize mainframe and legacy workloads with an ongoing, automated approach rather than a one-time migration event. To learn more, visit Micah’s preview blog post. You can also try the AWS Transform Kiro Power and agent plugins.
• Up to 3,000 Mbps for AWS Lambda function bandwidth: AWS Lambda functions now support increased network bandwidth, enabling data-intensive workloads and faster communication between Lambda functions and other AWS services. This feature enables functions outside a VPC that are configured with 2 GB of memory or more to access network bandwidth that scales proportionally, from 625 Mbps at 2 GB up to 3,000 Mbps at 10 GB.

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 projects and news items that you may find interesting:

• Introducing Dogwood: Runtime Verification for AI Agents: AWS open-sourced Dogwood, a purpose-built governance language for AI agents to support Cedar policies and add temporal conditions. Powering Dogwood, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore introduced temporal policies whose decisions depend on the history of an agent’s actions within a session, not on the current request alone.
• AWS supports Agent Plugins: An Open Standard for Portable Agent Extensions: AWS announced support for Agent Plugins, an open source, vendor-neutral specification that gives AI agent extensions a common packaging format so you can package an extension once and ship it to any client, including Kiro, VS Code, Cursor, or any tool that implements the spec.
• Introducing Kiro Crew: Kiro Crew is a persistent, self-evolving workspace that keeps work moving, online or off, enabling collaborative multi-agent development workflows. It’s built for engineering work that goes beyond a single chat session, and spans repos, tools, and days. You can run several efforts in parallel or hand work to subagents that report back, so nothing waits in line.

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

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events including 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 is all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Channy

Last week I had the privilege of spending three days in São Paulo with technical builders from across Latin America, brought together for a regional tech event full of deep-dive sessions, hands-on workshops, and conversations with customers and partners. What struck me most wasn’t any single session, it was the energy of a technical community that so rarely gets to be in the same room. People traded architecture ideas over coffee, sketched out solutions on whiteboards, and left with a longer list of things to try than they arrived with. It’s a good reminder that, for all the tooling we build, the community around it is what makes the technology stick.

That community spirit connects nicely to the week’s biggest infrastructure news, which is all about bringing AWS closer to where builders actually are.

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

Headlines
AWS Local Zone in Athens, Greece: AWS has opened a new Local Zone in Athens, Greece, the second Local Zone in EMEA with support for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots, so you can store and process data within Greece to help meet local data residency requirements. The Athens Local Zone supports Amazon EC2 (C7i, M7i, and R7i instances), Amazon S3 with the One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class, Amazon EBS, Amazon ECS, and more.

With this launch, you can process and store data in-country while delivering single-digit millisecond latency to your end users. AWS Local Zones place AWS infrastructure much closer to large population and industry hubs to support workloads such as financial services, healthcare, media production, and real-time gaming. For builders in Greece, this means running latency-sensitive workloads locally and meeting in-country data residency requirements, without managing your own data center infrastructure. To learn more, visit AWS Global Infrastructure and Sustainability Blog post.

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

• Claude Opus 5 on AWS: You can use Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5, the most advanced Opus model yet, matching Claude Fable 5’s top-tier intelligence in many domains at Opus-tier pricing. Amazon Bedrock offers Claude Opus 5 with zero data retention (ZDR) enabled by default, giving you Opus’ top-tier intelligence while meeting your data governance requirements unlike Claude Fable 5. You have two ways to access Claude Opus 5: Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. To learn more, visit the deep dive blog post.
• AWS Lambda durable execution SDK for .NET is now generally available: You can now build resilient, long-running workflows in C# using Lambda durable functions, without implementing custom progress tracking or integrating an external orchestration service. The SDK is a natural fit for multi-step applications like payment processing pipelines, AI agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop approvals, it checkpoints progress automatically and can pause execution for up to a year. If you’re a .NET developer building serverless workflows, this removes a lot of the plumbing you used to write by hand.
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now delivers unified observability with traces and logs in a single log group: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now delivers agent traces and prompts to the same Amazon CloudWatch log group as your agent’s logs. Previously, telemetry was split across destinations, trace spans went to a shared log group while prompts, inputs, and outputs went to a separate one, so debugging a single agent invocation meant searching in multiple places. You can now debug an invocation in one place, and apply fine-grained access control and customer-managed key (CMK) encryption at the individual agent level.
• Amazon Connect delivers more natural agentic voice experiences: Amazon Connect now supports more natural, human-sounding agentic voice experiences across 50+ languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Thai, with over 100 new voice options and conversational improvements that make AI interactions sound more fluid. Connect’s agentic self-service lets AI agents understand, reason, and take action across voice and digital channels, adapting to a customer’s tone and sentiment. You can now build contact center experiences that feel natural to callers in far more of the languages your customers actually speak.
• Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports Amazon OpenSearch: You can now query and analyze your search and log analytics data from Amazon OpenSearch directly alongside other data assets in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio. With this connection, you can combine operational search data in OpenSearch with data from sources like Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and relational databases, all within a single, governed environment. It’s especially useful when you need to correlate analytical and operational workloads, such as joining application logs with transactional data to uncover insights.
• Amazon CloudWatch announces coding agent insights: Amazon CloudWatch now gives engineering leaders visibility into how AI coding tools are driving value across their organization. Coding agent insights integrates with the Claude apps gateway for AWS to collect telemetry from Claude Code without additional instrumentation, and also supports agents like Codex and GitHub Copilot. As teams scale AI coding adoption, you can now measure the return on that investment with metrics built on OpenTelemetry, no custom instrumentation required.

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:

• Evaluating AI Agents: A production blueprint with Strands and AgentCore: A practical guide to evaluating AI agents before and after they reach production, using Strands Agents and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. If you’re moving agents from prototype to production, this post is a great companion to the AgentCore observability update above, it walks through how to measure agent quality systematically rather than by gut feel.
• Building multi-region resiliency for AWS CloudFormation custom resource deployment: Learn how to architect CloudFormation custom resources for multi-region resiliency, so your infrastructure-as-code deployments stay reliable even when a single Region has issues.
• Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) pricing plans: Amazon SES now offers pricing plans that give you more predictable costs as your email volume grows. If you send at scale, this could simplify your billing significantly.

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

• AWS Summits: AWS Summits are free events that bring the cloud and AI community together to connect, learn, and explore the latest technologies. Browse the full calendar to find a Summit near you in the second half of 2026.
• AWS Community Days: Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. If you’re in Latin America, don’t miss AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte on 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!

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, my team visited Seoul to meet AWS Korea User Group (AWSKRUG) leaders. AWSKRUG is the largest cloud developer community in Korea, with 20 meetup groups organized by topic and area that collectively host over 100 events each year, primarily in Seoul.

My team regularly visits countries across the Asia-Pacific region, listens to feedback from user group leaders, and works to support their communities. At this meeting, leaders honestly shared what they did well in the first half of the year, what needs improvement, and what they asked of AWS Developer Experience team. We also enjoyed a pleasant conversation during our Chimaek time together.

Now, let’s take a closer look at key launches of last week.

A one-click Lambda setup prompt for coding agents caught my eye most last week. This prompt configures your agent with AWS Serverless skills and the Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, embedding serverless best practices from the start. This prompt references the Lambda agent setup guide, which includes installation commands for Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Devin Desktop, and OpenCode.

To get started, choose the Copy agent prompt button on the Lambda console screen or copy fetch https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/samples/aws-lambda-agent-setup.md directly, and paste this URL in your preferred AI agent.

You can also use Agent Toolkit for AWS to give your coding agent current AWS knowledge and safe resource access. Use fetch https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws/refs/heads/main/setup-instructions/setup.md for installing AWS MCP Server.

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

• OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna on Amazon Bedrock: You can use the smartest family of models from OpenAI yet on Bedrock’s next-generation inference engine built for high performance, security, and reliability. The three models span capability tiers from flagship reasoning (Sol) to balanced performance (Terra) to fast, cost-efficient inference (Luna), all accessible through the Responses API on Amazon Bedrock.
• Same-day transitions to Amazon S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA: You can now transition objects to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) as soon as the day they are created, without the previous 30-day minimum retention period in S3 Standard. These storage classes offer up to 40% lower storage costs than S3 Standard while still providing millisecond access when needed, making them ideal for backups, log analytics, and compliance workloads where data becomes cold within hours or days.
• Self-managed code storage on AWS Lambda: With self-managed Amazon S3 buckets for code storage, you can reference source code directly from your own S3 buckets without Lambda creating intermediate copies. This eliminates code storage limits and reduces function activation time after function creates and updates by removing the copy step.
• Importing users with password hashes on Amazon Cognito: You can now import users with password hashes in CSV user imports. Previously, imported users had to reset their passwords on first sign-in. Now, you can include password hashes in the CSV import, enabling users to sign in immediately with their existing credentials. When creating a CSV import, you specify the password hashing algorithm used by your source system.

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:

• Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale: When Amazon SQS launched publicly in July 2006, it made this pattern available to every AWS customer. Twenty years later, that core function, decoupling producers from consumers, remains the reason customers use SQS. Let’s look back important milestones after Jeff’s 15th anniversary post.
• Open Protocols with the Strands Agents SDK: Learn how open AI protocols such as MCP, A2A, UTCP, AG-UI, and x402 work together using Strands Agents SDK for building AI agents as an example implementation, though the patterns apply to any agent framework.
• Open source Bulk Executor for Amazon DynamoDB: Performing bulk operations against all items in a DynamoDB table has historically required custom coding. The Bulk Executor for DynamoDB simplifies bulk tasks like these. You can use this feature to invoke commands like count, find, delete, or update. No coding is required, even when running at large scale.
• Transform AWS Support Case Workflows with Kiro CLI: Explore how Kiro CLI’s MCP integration accelerates support case workflows by combining investigation, documentation lookup, and case creation into a single conversational interface across three real-world scenarios: AWS Glue job failures, AWS Lambda cold start investigation, and AWS WAF false positive analysis.

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

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

Finally, some customers experienced an issue with Cost Explorer displaying inaccurate estimated billing data in last weekend. They may have received erroneous budget and cost anomaly detection alerts, and observed inflated estimated cost and usage data. The issue has been resolved, and all AWS services are operating normally. We apologize for the concern this incident caused our customers and are conducting a thorough retrospective to prevent events like this from reoccurring, as well as improving our response when billing incidents occur. For more information, visit the AWS Health Dashboard.

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

— Channy

Last week, I took some time off in York, England, often described as the most haunted city in the country. I wandered through the ruins of abbeys that have stood for nearly a thousand years, walked along medieval walls, and spent an evening on a ghost tour hearing stories passed down through centuries. There’s something grounding about standing in a place that has witnessed so much history. Now I’m back at my desk, and the contrast is hard to miss: those abbey stones have stood for a thousand years largely unchanged, while in the span of a single week away, the pace of technological change has moved forward yet again.

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

Headlines
On April 28, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, Colleen Aubrey, SVP Amazon Applied AI Solutions, Julia White, CMO of AWS, and OpenAI leaders took the stage to share how customers are changing the way businesses operate with agents. The event brought a packed slate of announcements across Amazon Quick, Amazon Connect, and a deeper partnership with OpenAI. Here’s a roundup of the biggest announcements from the event.

Amazon Quick expands with a desktop app, new pricing plans, and visual asset generation – Amazon Quick is an AI assistant for work that connects to your apps, learns what matters to you, and takes action on your behalf. This week, Quick introduced a new desktop app (Preview) that keeps you connected to your local files, calendar, and communications without opening a browser. You can sign up within minutes using your personal email address or existing Google, Apple, Github, or Amazon credentials—no AWS account required. Quick can now generate polished documents, presentations, infographics, and images directly from the chat interface, and native integrations expand to include Google Workspace, Zoom, Airtable, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams. A new Build custom apps with Quick capability (Preview) lets you create intelligent apps, dashboards, and web pages connected to the rest of your business using natural language.

Amazon Connect expands into four agentic AI solutions – 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 is a supply chain planning and intelligence solution that shifts teams from crisis management to proactive planning, combining 30 years of Amazon operational science with more than 25 specialized supply chain tools. Amazon Connect Talent (Preview) is an agentic AI hiring solution that delivers AI-led interviews, science-backed assessments, and consistent evaluation for talent acquisition leaders managing scaled hiring. Amazon Connect Customer, previously known as Amazon Connect, delivers personalized customer experiences across voice, chat, and digital channels, with new configuration capabilities that enable organizations to set up conversational AI in weeks rather than months. Amazon Connect Health delivers agentic patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding, giving patients faster access to care and clinicians more time to deliver it.

AWS and OpenAI expand their partnership across Amazon Bedrock – AWS and OpenAI are bringing the latest OpenAI models to Amazon Bedrock, launching Codex on Amazon Bedrock, and introducing Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI — all in limited preview. OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock (Limited preview) brings the latest OpenAI models, including GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4, to the Bedrock APIs you already use, with unified security, governance, and cost controls. No additional infrastructure to configure, no new security model to learn. Codex on Amazon Bedrock (Limited preview) lets you access the OpenAI coding agent within your existing AWS environments, authenticating with your AWS credentials, processing inference through Bedrock, and applying Codex usage toward your AWS cloud commitments. Codex on Bedrock is available through the Bedrock API, starting with the Codex CLI, the Codex desktop app, and a Visual Studio Code extension. Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (Limited preview) combines OpenAI frontier models with AWS infrastructure to build production-ready OpenAI-powered agents in the cloud, built with the OpenAI harness for faster execution, sharper reasoning, and reliable steering of long-running tasks.

To learn more, visit Top announcements of the What’s Next with AWS, 2026.

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

• Amazon EC2 M8in and M8ib instances are now generally available – Powered by custom 6th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 6th-gen AWS Nitro cards, these instances deliver up to 43% higher performance over M6in and M6ib. M8in offers 600 Gbps network bandwidth, while M8ib delivers up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth. Available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Spain).
• Amazon EC2 R8in and R8ib instances are now generally available – Memory-optimized instances built on the same 6th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Nitro cards, with the same 600 Gbps network and 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth profiles. Well-suited for large commercial databases, data lakes, and in-memory databases such as SAP HANA. Available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Spain).
• Amazon EC2 C8ine and M8ine instances are now generally available – Network-optimized instances offering up to 2.5x higher packet performance per vCPU and up to 2x higher network throughput for traffic through internet gateways compared to C6in and M6in. Designed for security and network virtual appliances including virtual firewalls, load balancers, and 5G UPF workloads. Available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) for C8ine; US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) for M8ine.
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore adds optimization capabilities (Preview) – AgentCore now offers recommendations, batch evaluations, and A/B tests to complete the observe-evaluate-improve loop for agents in production. Recommendations analyze production traces and evaluation outputs to propose optimized system prompts and tool descriptions, which you can validate with batch evaluations against pre-defined test cases or A/B tests against live traffic. Every recommendation requires your approval before it ships.
• AWS Lambda adds support for Ruby 4.0 – Ruby 4.0, the latest LTS release, is available as a Lambda managed runtime and container base image. It includes support for Lambda advanced logging controls, including JSON structured logs, configurable logging levels, and target CloudWatch log group configuration. Available in all AWS Regions, including China Regions and AWS GovCloud (US).

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:

• Amazon Q Developer end-of-support announcement – Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins and paid subscriptions will reach end of support on April 30, 2027, giving customers 12 months to transition to Kiro. New signups will be blocked starting May 15, 2026, although existing subscriptions can continue to add users. Starting May 29, 2026, Opus 4.6 will no longer be available on Q Developer Pro; Opus 4.5 and other existing models remain available, and the latest coding models including Opus 4.7 are available exclusively on Kiro. Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console and first-party AWS experiences (documentation, mobile app, Slack, and Microsoft Teams) are not affected.
• AWS 10,000 AIdeas Competition: Meet the Winners – AWS announced the 20 winners of the 10,000 AIdeas Competition, a global challenge where builders submitted AI applications built entirely with Kiro and the AWS Free Tier, with submissions from 115 countries narrowed down through four rounds of evaluation and two rounds of community voting. Winners span Global Champions, Regional Champions, Innovation Awards, and Creative Track categories, with cash prizes and AWS credits awarded across each tier.
• AWS Student Builder Groups – AWS Cloud Clubs is evolving to AWS Student Builder Groups. The community now spans 600+ colleges and universities across 63 countries. Existing Cloud Club memberships, badges, and progress carry forward, and Cloud Club Captains become Group Leaders. Membership is open to any learner 18 or older. You can find a group near you on AWS Builder Center or apply to launch a new group on your campus.

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

• AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free in-person events covering cloud and AI. 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), Milano (May 28), and Mumbai (May 28).
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include İstanbul, Türkiye (May 9) and Panama City, Panama (May 23).

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building. You can also browse upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, plus developer-focused sessions.

— 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!

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!

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

Over the past week, we passed Laba festival, a traditional marker in the Chinese calendar that signals the final stretch leading up to the Lunar New Year. For many in China, it’s a moment associated with reflection and preparation, wrapping up what the year has carried, and turning attention toward what lies ahead.

Looking forward, next week also brings Lichun, the beginning of spring and the first of the 24 solar terms. In Chinese tradition, spring is often seen as the season when growth begins and new cycles take shape. There’s a common saying that “a year’s plans begin in spring,” capturing the idea that this is a time to set one’s direction and start fresh.

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

• Amazon Bedrock enhances support for agent workflows with server-side tools and extended prompt caching – Amazon Bedrock introduced two updates that improve how developers build and operate AI agents. The Responses API now supports server-side tool use, so agents can perform actions such as web search, code execution, and database updates within AWS security boundaries. Bedrock also adds a 1-hour time-to-live (TTL) option for prompt caching, which helps improve performance and reduce the cost for long-running, multi-turn agent workflows. Server-side tools are available with OpenAI GPT OSS 20B and 120B models, and the 1-hour prompt caching TTL is generally available for select Claude models by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock.
• Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio adds private VPC connectivity with AWS PrivateLink – Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing private connectivity between your VPC and SageMaker Unified Studio without routing customer data over the public internet. With SageMaker service endpoints onboarded into a VPC, data traffic remains within the AWS network and is governed by IAM policies, supporting stricter security and compliance requirements.
• Amazon S3 adds support for changing object encryption without data movement – Amazon S3 now supports changing the server-side encryption type of existing encrypted objects without moving or re-uploading data. Using the UpdateObjectEncryption API, you can switch from SSE-S3 to SSE-KMS, rotate customer -managed AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys, or standardize encryption across buckets at scale with S3 Batch Operations while preserving object properties and lifecycle eligibility.
• Amazon Keyspaces introduces table pre-warming for predictable high-throughput workloads – Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports table pre-warming, which helps you proactively set warm throughput levels so tables can handle high read and write traffic instantly without cold-start delays. Pre-warming helps reduce throttling during sudden traffic spikes, such as product launches or sales events, and works with both on-demand and provisioned capacity modes, including multi-Region tables. The feature supports consistent, low-latency performance while giving you more control over throughput readiness.
• Amazon DynamoDB MRSC global tables integrate with AWS Fault Injection Service – Amazon DynamoDB multi-Region strong consistency (MRSC) global tables now integrate with AWS Fault Injection Service. With this integration, you can simulate Regional failures, test replication behavior, and validate application resiliency for strongly consistent, multi-Region workloads.
• Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals integration with Kiro powers – You can investigate application health issues faster with AI agent-assisted workflows in Kiro. This Kiro power packages the Application Signals MCP server with targeted observability guidance, giving the Kiro agent instant context for service health monitoring, SLO compliance, and investigation workflows.

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 projects, blog posts, and news items that I found interesting:

• Building zero-trust access across multi-account AWS environments with AWS Verified Access – This post walks through how to implement AWS Verified Access in a centralized, shared-services architecture. It shows how to integrate with AWS IAM Identity Center and AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to apply zero trust access controls at the application layer and reduce operational overhead across multi-account AWS environments.
• Amazon EventBridge increases event payload size to 1 MB – Amazon EventBridge now supports event payloads up to 1 MB, an increase from the previous 256 KB limit. This update helps event-driven architectures carry richer context in a single event, including complex JSON structures, telemetry data, and machine learning (ML) or generative AI outputs, without splitting payloads or relying on external storage.
• AWS MCP Server adds deployment agent SOPs (preview) – AWS introduced deployment standard operating procedures (SOPs) that AI agents can deploy web applications to AWS from a single natural language prompt in MCP -compatible integrated development environments (IDEs) and command line interfaces (CLIs) such as Kiro, Cursor, and Claude Code. The agent generates AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) infrastructure, deploys AWS CloudFormation stacks, and sets up continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows following AWS best practices. The preview supports frameworks including React, Vue.js, Angular, and Next.js.
• AWS Network Firewall adds generation AI traffic visibility with web category filtering – AWS Network Firewall now provides visibility into generative AI application traffic through predefined web categories. You can use these categories directly in firewall rules to govern access to generative AI tools and other web services. When combined with TLS inspection, category-based filtering can be applied at the full URL level.
• AWS Lambda adds enhanced observability for Kafka event source mappings – AWS Lambda introduced enhanced observability for Kafka event source mappings, providing Amazon CloudWatch Logs and metrics to monitor event polling configuration, scaling behavior, and event processing state. The update improves visibility into Kafka-based Lambda workloads, helping teams diagnose configuration issues, permission errors, and function failures more efficiently. The capability supports both Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) and self-managed Apache Kafka event sources.
• AWS CloudFormation 2025 year in review – This year-in-review post highlights CloudFormation updates delivered throughout 2025, with a focus on early validation, safer deployments, and improved developer workflows. It covers enhancements such as improved troubleshooting, drift-aware change sets, stack refactoring, StackSets updates, and new -IDE and AI -assisted tooling, including the CloudFormation language server and the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) MCP server.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars so that you can sign up for this upcoming event:

AWS Community Day Romania (April 23–24, 2026) – This community-led AWS event brings together developers, architects, entrepreneurs, and students for more than 10 professional sessions delivered by AWS Heroes, Solutions Architects, and industry experts. Attendees can expect expert-led technical talks, insights from speakers with global conference experience, and opportunities to connect during dedicated networking breaks, all hosted at a premium venue designed to support collaboration and community engagement.

If you’re looking for more ways to stay connected beyond this event, join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community.

Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup.

–betty