Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
AIAWS Weekly Roundup: Price reduction of GPT models in Bedrock, CloudWatch managed collectors for Prometheus metrics, and more (August 3, 2026)
AWS announced significant updates across AI, observability, and multicloud networking, headlined by up to 80% price reductions for OpenAI GPT-5.6 models in Amazon Bedrock. Key launches include managed Prometheus collectors in CloudWatch, general availability of AWS Interconnect for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure connectivity, and enhanced multi-region support for IAM Identity Center.
AWS Weekly Roundup: Local Zone in Athens, Claude Opus 5 on AWS, Lambda durable execution for .NET, and more (July 27, 2026)
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 sa
AWS Weekly Roundup: One-click Lambda setup prompt, OpenAI GPT-5.6 models on Bedrock, and more (July 20, 2026)
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 work
Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale
On July 13, 2006, we launched Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) as one of the first three services available to customers, alongside Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 . We had learned firsthand that distributed systems need a reliable way to pass messages between components without creating tight dependencies. If one service called another directly and that service was slow or un
AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center at 1 year, Network Scanning in Security Hub, Loom for AWS, and more (July 13, 2026)
AWS Builder Center turned one year old last week. Launched on July 9, 2025, the platform has grown from a community hub with Wishlist voting, community profiles, and a toolbox into a full ecosystem with sandbox environments, workshops, Spaces, and a Builders’ Library. To mark the anniversary, Rick Suttles published a full feature timeline covering everything shipped over the pa
AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 5 on AWS, Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents, AWS service availability updates, and more (July 6, 2026)
A couple of editions ago I wrote about what I find so energizing about working with startups. Last week I got a fresh dose of it: I spent a few days with the AWS Startups team, listening to stories of founders talking about the problems they’re actually solving. One story that stayed with me came from Marco Negreiros, founder of EyeCare Health , a Brazilian healthtech expanding
Upgrade Amazon EKS clusters with confidence using Kubernetes version rollbacks
Upgrading a Kubernetes control plane has long been a one way door. Open source Kubernetes doesn’t support control plane rollback, so once you upgrade, there’s no going back. The community is making real progress here, and KEP-4330 introduces emulated versions to ease rollback. But in practice this constraint has pushed organizations to build elaborate compensating mechanisms li
Accelerate your infrastructure deployments by up to 4x with AWS CloudFormation Express mode
Today, we’re announcing AWS CloudFormation Express mode, a new deployment mode that accelerates deployments for developers and AI tools iterating on infrastructure. Express mode accelerates deployments by completing when CloudFormation confirms resource configuration is applied, rather than waiting for extended stabilization checks. This reduces deployment time by up to 4 times
Automate public TLS certificate issuance with ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager
If you manage TLS certificates for your applications, you know the challenge: certificates expire, and when they do, your customers see errors or your service goes down. As certificate validity periods get shorter (the Certification Authority (CA)/Browser Forum mandates reduced maximum validity to 100 days starting March 2027, and to 47 days by 2029), manual renewal processes b
Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors are now available
When you run compute-intensive workloads like real-time analytics, batch processing, video encoding, scientific modeling, or CPU-based machine learning inference, every percentage point of performance matters. You need instances that deliver higher throughput per vCPU, faster memory access, and more network bandwidth, all while keeping your costs in check. Today I am happy to a
AWS Weekly Roundup, Agentic CX designer for Amazon Connect Customer, EC2 AMI Watermarks, Open Governance for MySQL, and more (June 29, 2026)
It has been a busy stretch on the AWS Summit circuit. At the New York City Summit, I delivered a workshop called Building AI architectures with AWS Serverless, and it was a lot of fun watching builders wire up agents and serverless services to solve real problems in a single afternoon. This week I am heading down to the Washington, DC Summit , which always puts a spotlight on i
Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control: AWS Lambda introduces MicroVMs
Today, we are announcing AWS Lambda MicroVMs, a new serverless compute primitive within AWS Lambda that lets you run code generated by users or AI in isolated, stateful execution environments. You get virtual machine level isolation, near-instant launch and resume, and direct control over environment lifecycle and state, all without managing infrastructure or building expertise
AWS Weekly Roundup: NY Summit recap, Local Zone in Hanoi, Grok 4.3 in Bedrock, price reductions, and more (June 22, 2026)
Last week AWS Summit New York City brought together thousands of customers, partners, and builders for a free, one-day event showcasing the latest in cloud and AI innovation. Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI at AWS unveiled a stack of AI launches in his keynote , all built around one thesis: agents that compound value over time. Agents for working – You can launch au
Announcing Amazon EC2 G7 instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G7 instances, delivering high performance GPU acceleration for AI inference, graphics, and data analytics workloads. AWS is the first major cloud provider to support NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. G7 instances are accelerated by these GPUs with custom sixth-generati
Amazon ECS introduces new high-resolution metrics for faster service auto scaling
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) service auto scaling automatically adjusts task counts to meet workload demand with comprehensive scaling policies, including predictive scaling for recurring traffic patterns, scheduled scaling for planned events, and target tracking to scale dynamically on real-time metrics. You can choose proactive scaling by using predictive sca
AITop announcements of the AWS Summit in New York, 2026
AWS Summit New York 2026 focused heavily on agentic AI capabilities, with major announcements centered on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore enhancements for enterprise AI agent development. Key launches include managed knowledge bases, web search integration, AI traffic monetization through AWS WAF, and security automation tools like AWS Continuum that operate at machine speed to identify and remediate vul
AIAnnouncing Web Search on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Ground your AI agents in current, accurate web knowledge
AWS has launched Web Search on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a fully managed tool that enables AI agents to ground responses in current web knowledge while keeping all data within customers' AWS environments. The service leverages Amazon's search infrastructure and combines web index data with structured knowledge graph information to provide more accurate responses than traditional web search, elimin
AIIntroducing Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base for faster, more accurate enterprise AI applications
AWS has launched Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base, a fully managed service that simplifies building enterprise RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) pipelines for generative AI applications. The service abstracts infrastructure complexity by providing native connectors to six enterprise data sources, intelligent parsing capabilities, and an agentic retriever for complex queries. Developers can
AIAmazon S3 annotations: attach rich, queryable context directly to your objects
Amazon S3 has introduced annotations, a new metadata capability that allows organizations to attach up to 1 GB of rich, queryable business context directly to storage objects without rewriting them. This feature addresses limitations of existing metadata options by supporting mutable, large-scale context in flexible formats (JSON, XML, YAML, plain text) that automatically moves with objects during