Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
AI transformation across the infrastructure lifecycle: From supply chain to fleet operations
AI infrastructure is a system, and every part of that system is connected. Decisions made in silicon and systems design influence how infrastructure is sourced, deployed, and operated across the fleet. And what we learn once that hardware is running can inform what we build next. This feedback matters because the system never stands still. Demand shifts, component constraints e
All the numbers: Amazon Prime Day 2026 powered by AWS
Amazon Prime Day 2026 was exclusively for Prime members and ran June 23–26, 2026 with millions of deals across more than 35 categories. As part of our annual tradition of sharing how AWS powered Prime Day ( 2016 , 2017 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023 , 2024 , and 2025 ), I want to share the services and chart-topping metrics from AWS that made your amazing shopping experienc
AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, Q3 service availability updates, Kiro workflows, and more (October 5, 2026)
Last week, we announced a public preview of Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI , built on a customized version of OpenAI’s Agents API engineered to be AWS-native and integrated with AWS resources. You can now build agents optimized for OpenAI models that run entirely inside AWS with the identities, permissions, and governance controls you already use. You can choos
Responsible infrastructure at hyperscale: Managing the full lifecycle of Azure hardware
Every new generation of cloud infrastructure creates two jobs. We must deploy more capable systems quickly, and we must manage the hardware they replace responsibly. Even though these jobs happen behind the scenes, the results matter to Microsoft Azure customers. Newer systems deliver more compute capacity from the space and power available in a datacenter. At the same time, th
Announcing AWS Well-Architected Agent, an AI-powered intelligence to optimize your cloud environment (preview)
Today, we’re announcing the public preview of AWS Well-Architected Agent , an AI-powered service that analyzes your AWS environment to deliver targeted, contextual recommendations for improving your applications’ cost, security, performance, and resilience. The AWS Well-Architected Agent analyzes your infrastructure, understands unique business goals, and delivers contextual re
Amazon S3 Tables now support all Apache Iceberg V3 data types
Amazon S3 Tables now support all data types in the Apache Iceberg V3 specification. You can create V3 tables or upgrade existing V2 tables to take advantage of V3 features like deletion vectors, row lineage, and new data types such as variant, nanosecond timestamps, unknown, geometry, and geography. Apache Iceberg has become the open standard for managing large analytics datase
Amazon S3 Vectors now supports metadata pre-filtering for higher recall on filtered searches
Today, we’re announcing metadata pre-filtering for Amazon S3 Vectors , which delivers higher recall on filtered queries by evaluating your metadata filter before the similarity search. You can filter on attributes such as tenant, category, status, or time, and pre-filtering adds prefix matching with $startsWith for paths, URLs, and hierarchical keys. Each vector carries up to 2
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports direct querying of Apache Iceberg and Parquet data in your data lake
Today, we’re announcing a new capability for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL that you can use to directly query operational data together with data stored in your data lake in Apache Iceberg and Apache Parquet formats, using your existing PostgreSQL applications and tools. By eliminating the need to extract, transform, and load (ETL) structured data from data lakes into your operation
Celebrating Our Newest AWS Heroes – September 2026
Today, we’re excited to introduce the newest members of the AWS Heroes program . AWS Heroes are a vibrant, worldwide group of AWS experts who go above and beyond to share knowledge, mentor others, and build thriving communities. These individuals make a real difference in helping developers and organizations succeed with AWS. This month, we welcome three exceptional community l
FabCon and SQLCon 2026 in Barcelona: Building the data foundation for Microsoft Copilot and agents
In this article Enabling Frontier Transformation with Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Fabric The next evolution of Power BI: Agentic app creation Move from idea to production faster with Fabric Apps Building an AI-ready data foundation with Microsoft Fabric Create and manage agents in Fabric Operate Fabric with greater visibility and control Manage, optimize, and scale your dat
SQL Server on Azure Local is now generally available
Some of the world’s most critical databases run in places where cloud connectivity cannot be assumed. A remote industrial site, for example, may need production systems to continue operating when external connectivity is unavailable. A regulated organization may need sensitive data and processing to remain within sovereign boundaries. Today, SQL Server on Azure Local is general
AWS Weekly Roundup: GPT-6 Sol and Luna, Claude Opus 5.5 on Amazon Bedrock, Strands harness, and more (September 28, 2026)
If there’s one theme that defined last week, it’s choice. The frontier models keep arriving, and the interesting question is no longer just “how smart is it?” but “which model fits this step, at this cost, at this latency?” That’s exactly what landed on Amazon Bedrock over the past few days: GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna from OpenAI, giving you two new points on the intelligence-ver
Ship agents faster with expanded model choice, voice agents, and continuous optimization
The best model for your business will keep changing. Adopting it should move your business forward, not send your team back to rebuild the architecture around it. As models advance, organizations need the freedom to choose the right model for each workload, and an agent foundation that can evolve with those choices. Microsoft Foundry provides that model—and harness—agnostic fou
Introducing enhanced custom event buses in Amazon EventBridge for enterprise-scale event-driven applications
Organizations building event-driven applications on Amazon EventBridge typically start with a single custom event bus in one account. This works well when a single team owns the architecture. As adoption grows across the organization, though, things get complicated. AWS best practices recommend a multi-account structure, which means each team runs in its own account. To route e
Designing agent-first platforms: What changes when agents do the work
For decades, applications have been designed to wait. A user clicks, a request arrives, code runs, a response goes back. And we got very good at this. We learned to forecast traffic, scale on demand, wrap everything in enterprise controls, and run it all with the operational discipline that keeps critical business systems available around the clock. That model is being turned o
Your architecture diagram is not your resilience
This first article in our resilience series draws on a conversation with Mark Russinovich about how resilience is changing in the AI era and what it takes to continuously validate it at scale. What surprises me most about resilience failures is how ordinary the drift is. A workload is deployed across availability zones, but a health probe still points to a single dependency. A
Claude Opus 5.5 comes to Microsoft Foundry for long-running coding and knowledge work
AI models are increasingly taking on work that extends far beyond a single prompt: building a feature across a codebase, investigating a complex issue, synthesizing hundreds of pages of information, or working through a multi-step business process. As that work gets longer, raw intelligence is only part of what matters. The model also needs to stay focused, make good decisions
GPT-6 Astra, Sol, and Luna: For production agents in Microsoft Foundry
Today, we are expanding our GPT-6 series by welcoming GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna to our generally available lineup in Microsoft Foundry . Building on the exceptional customer momentum of GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra , this launch continues our work to deliver transformative capabilities in Microsoft Foundry that produce less noise and are more capable at completing full tasks with
Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Omni: AI-powered observability for generative AI and agentic workloads
Today, Amazon CloudWatch introduces CloudWatch Omni, a unified observability experience for application and AI workloads that is app-centric, AI-powered, built on open standards, and delivered off-console. CloudWatch Omni is a purpose-built observability, evaluation, and experimentation solution for AI agents. It helps teams design, evaluate, and operate AI agents across any mo