Field notes from the edge.
What our engineers learned this week. Hands-on technical deep-dives, postmortems, and strategy frameworks.
AIRuntime instances: persistent compute for production AI agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore introduces runtime instances, a new managed compute option that provides persistent EC2 infrastructure for production AI agents requiring extended execution times, GPU acceleration, and multi-agent coordination. Unlike the existing microVM option limited to 8-hour invocations, runtime instances support sessions up to 14 days with features like stop/restart capabilities, sh
AIAmazon DynamoDB now supports real-time vector search at any scale
Amazon DynamoDB now offers general availability of native vector search capabilities, enabling organizations to store vector embeddings alongside operational data and perform similarity searches with single-digit millisecond latency at any scale. This eliminates the need for separate vector databases and synchronization pipelines, reducing operational overhead and costs while maintaining DynamoDB'
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.
AIWhat customers value most in Microsoft Databases—from reliability to AI readiness
Microsoft Databases received multiple 2026 PeerSpot Customer Choice/Tech Leader recognitions across SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and Azure Cosmos DB. Customer feedback consistently highlights five key themes: reliability, scalability, operational simplicity, developer productivity, and AI readiness. These recognitions validate Microsoft's database portfolio as ent
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
AT&T and Microsoft scale trillion-token workloads with Microsoft Foundry and AMD
First-of-its-kind telecom AI deployment Telecommunications organizations are increasingly looking to AI to help teams navigate highly specialized domains, but generic models often lack the industry-specific knowledge needed to understand telecom networks, standards, and operations. To address that gap, AT&T created their Open Telco (OTel) models, the next generation of telecom-
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
Azure Databricks delivers proven business value
Microsoft Azure Databricks delivers the first-party advantage of Databricks on Microsoft—and for customers, that advantage shows up as real, measurable value. It is the same Databricks platform your teams already know, co-engineered with Microsoft and delivered as a native Azure service , so it fits naturally into the Microsoft tools, identity, and governance your organization
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
Frontier models and production agents: Advancing Microsoft Foundry for the agentic era
What’s new today GPT‑5.6 is generally available in Microsoft Foundry, alongside the Asia-Pacific Data Zone, and hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service. AI only creates value when it shows up in real systems—systems that are reliable, observable, and aligned to business outcomes. More than 100,000 organizations are already building on Microsoft Foundry , and companies like Adobe
External key management for Azure Managed HSM is now in public preview
Azure Key Vault Managed Hardware Security Module (HSM) provides strong sovereignty over your encryption keys. Keys are generated and stored in a single-tenant, FIPS 140-3 Level 3 HSM that only you control: Microsoft has no access to your key material, and you govern who can use each key. For most organizations, including those with stringent regulatory requirements, this level
Built to bounce back: How Azure resiliency evolved
In this article Resiliency as a shared responsibility, not a handoff Platform foundations that reflect reality: zones, regions, and sovereignty Azure features and capabilities strengthen resiliency outcomes Bridging intent to execution through experiences on Azure How you can build Resilience in Azure Azure Essentials Resiliency in the cloud is often described in terms of avail
Azure IaaS: How to design, build, and optimize cloud infrastructure for long-term cost efficiency
In this article Compute: Matching resources to workload requirements Storage: Balancing performance and lifecycle management Networking: Improving efficiency without compromising resiliency Continuous optimization is where long-term savings happen Continue your Azure IaaS optimization journey Create a resilient infrastructure with Azure This blog post is the third part of a blo
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
Proving application resilience on Azure with Chaos Studio
Takeaway: Azure Chaos Studio helps organizations validate application resilience by simulating outages, failovers, network disruptions, and infrastructure failures before they impact production. You don’t know with certainty that your application is resilient until that resilience is tested. Better to learn it isn’t by deliberately breaking it in a test environment and watching
Meet Brain: The AI system behind Azure reliability
In this article How Azure's AI-powered reliability intelligence system works Why Brain is needed What is Brain? Azure’s centralized AIOps for cloud reliability Foundations of Azure’s digital twin for cloud health What it means to operate against a cloud intelligence system The future of agentic AI and cloud operations What's next for Azure reliability and Brain Azure reliabilit
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