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Let me start this week’s update with something I’m especially excited about – the upcoming BeSA (Become a Solutions Architect) cohort. BeSA is a free mentoring program that I host along with a few other AWS employees on a volunteer basis to help people excel in their cloud careers. Last week, the instructors’ lineup was finalized for the 6-week cohort starting September 6. The cohort will focus on migration and modernization on AWS. Visit the BeSA website to learn more.

Another highlight for me last week was the announcement of six new AWS Heroes for their technical leadership and exceptional contributions to the AWS community. Read the full announcement to learn more about these community leaders.

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

• Amazon EC2 Single GPU P5 instances are now generally available — You can right-size your machine learning (ML) and high performance computing (HPC) resources cost-effectively with the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P5 instance size with one NVIDIA H100 GPU.
• AWS Advanced Go Driver is generally available — You can now use the AWS Advanced Go Driver with Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible and MySQL-Compatible database clusters for faster switchover and failover times, Federated Authentication, and authentication with AWS Secrets Manager or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). You can install the PostgreSQL and MySQL packages for Windows, Mac, or Linux, by following the installation guides in GitHub.
• Expanded support for Cilium with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes — Cilium is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated project that provides core networking capabilities for Kubernetes workloads. Now, you can receive support from AWS for a broader set of Cilium features when using Cilium with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes including application ingress, in-cluster load balancing, Kubernetes network policies, and kube-proxy replacement mode.
• Amazon SageMaker AI now supports P6e-GB200 UltraServers — You can accelerate training and deployment of foundational models (FMs) at trillion-parameter scale by using up to 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs under one NVLink domain with the new P6e-GB200 UltraServer support in Amazon SageMaker HyperPod and Model Training.
• Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports fine-grained quota allocation of compute resources, topology-aware-scheduling of LLM tasks and custom Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) — You can allocate fine-grained compute quota for GPU, Trainium accelerator, vCPU, and vCPU memory within an instance to optimize compute resource distribution. With topology-aware scheduling, you can schedule your large language model (LLM) tasks on an optimal network topology to minimize network communication and enhance training efficiency. Using custom AMIs, you can deploy clusters with pre-configured, security-hardened environments that meet your specific organizational requirements.

Additional updates
Here are some additional news items and blog posts that I found interesting:

• Celebrating 10 years of Amazon Aurora innovation — Join the livestream event on August 21, 2025, to celebrate a decade of Aurora database innovation.
• AWS named as a Leader in 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services — For the fifteenth consecutive year, Gartner has named AWS a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services (SCPS), making AWS the longest-running Magic Quadrant Leader.
• Introducing AWS Cloud Control API (CCAPI) MCP Server — You can now use natural language to managing cloud infrastructure using CCAPI MCP Server. You can create, read, update, delete, and list resources using natural language.
• Introducing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Identity — AgentCore Identity provides a centralized capability to manage agent identities, securing credentials, and supporting seamless integration with AWS and third-party services through Sigv4, standardized OAuth 2.0 flows, and API key.
• Introducing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway — A fully managed service to connect AI agents with tools and services. It serves as a centralized tool server, providing a unified interface where agents can discover, access, and invoke tools.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS and AWS Community events:

• AWS re:Invent 2025 (December 1-5, 2025, Las Vegas) — The AWS flagship annual conference offering collaborative innovation through peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities.
• AWS Summits — Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Coming up soon are summits in Johannesburg (August 20) and Toronto (September 4).
• AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Adria (September 5), Baltic (September 10), Aotearoa (September 18), and South Africa (September 20).

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse here for upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events.

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

– Prasad

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On August 4, 2025, Gartner published its Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services (SCPS). Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the longest-running Magic Quadrant Leader, with Gartner naming AWS a Leader for the fifteenth consecutive year.

In the report, Gartner once again placed AWS highest on the “Ability to Execute” axis. We believe this reflects our ongoing commitment to giving customers the broadest and deepest set of capabilities to accelerate innovation as well as unparalleled security, reliability, and performance they can trust for their most critical applications.

Here is the graphical representation of the 2025 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services.

Gartner recognized AWS strengths as:

• Largest cloud community – AWS has built a strong global community of cloud professionals, providing significant opportunities for learning and engagement.
• Cloud-inspired silicon – AWS has used its cloud computing experience to develop custom silicon designs, including AWS Graviton, AWS Inferentia, and AWS Trainium, which enable tighter integration between hardware and software, improved power efficiency, and greater control over supply chains.
• Global scale and operational execution – AWS’s significant share of global cloud market revenue has enabled it to build a larger and more robust network of integration partners than some other providers in this analysis, which in turn helps organizations successfully adopt cloud.

The most common feedback I hear from customers is that AWS has the largest and most dynamic cloud community, making it easy to ask questions and learn from millions of active customers and tens of thousands of partners globally. We recently launched our community hub, AWS Builder Center to connect directly with AWS Heroes and AWS Community Builders. You can also explore and join AWS User Groups and AWS Cloud Clubs in a city near you.

We have also focused on facilitating the digital transformation of enterprise customers through a number of enterprise programs, such as the AWS Migration Acceleration Program. Using generative AI on migration and modernization, we introduced AWS Transform, the first agentic AI service developed to accelerate enterprise modernization of mission-critical business workloads such as .NET, mainframe, and VMware.

Access the complete full Gartner report to learn more. It outlines the methodology and evaluation criteria used to develop their assessments of each cloud service provider included in the report. This report can serve as a guide when choosing a cloud provider that helps you innovate on behalf of your customers.

— Channy

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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Ten years ago, we announced the general availability of Amazon Aurora, a database that combined the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

As Jeff described it in its launch blog post: “With storage replicated both within and across three Availability Zones, along with an update model driven by quorum writes, Amazon Aurora is designed to deliver high performance and 99.99% availability while easily and efficiently scaling to up to 64 TiB of storage.”

When we started developing Aurora over a decade ago, we made a fundamental architectural decision that would change the database landscape forever: we decoupled storage from compute. This novel approach enabled Aurora to deliver the performance and availability of commercial databases at one-tenth the cost.

This is one of the reasons why hundreds of thousands of AWS customers choose Aurora as their relational database.

Today, I’m excited to invite you to join us for a livestream event on August 21, 2025, to celebrate a decade of Aurora database innovation.

A brief look back at the past
Throughout the evolution of Aurora, we’ve focused on four core innovation themes: security as our top priority, scalability to meet growing workloads, predictable pricing for better cost management, and multi-Region capabilities for global applications. Let me walk you through some key milestones in the Aurora journey.

We previewed Aurora at re:Invent 2014, and made it generally available in July 2015. At launch, we presented Aurora as “a new cost-effective MySQL-compatible database engine.”

In June 2016, we introduced reader endpoints and cross-Region read replicas, followed by AWS Lambda integration and the ability to load tables directly from Amazon S3 in October. We added database cloning and export to Amazon S3 capabilities in June 2017 and full compatibility with PostgreSQL in October that year.

The journey continued with the serverless preview in November 2017, which became generally available in August 2018. Global Database launched in November 2018 for cross-Region disaster recovery. We introduced blue/green deployments to simplify database updates, and optimized read instances to improve query performance.

In 2023, we added vector capabilities with pgvector for similarity search for Aurora PostgreSQL, and Aurora I/O-Optimized to provide predictable pricing with up to 40 percent cost savings for I/O-intensive applications. We launched Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift which enables near real-time analytics and ML using Amazon Redshift on petabytes of transactional data from Aurora by removing the need for you to build and maintain complex data pipelines that perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations. This year we added Aurora MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Sagemaker, enabling near real-time access of your data in the lakehouse architecture of SageMaker to run a broad range of analytics.

In 2024, we made it as effortless as just one click to select Aurora PostgreSQL as a vector store for Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and launched Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database, a serverless horizontal scaling (sharding) capability.

To simplify scaling for customers, we also increased the maximum storage to 128 TiB in September 2020, allowing many applications to operate within a single instance. Last month, we’ve further simplified scaling by doubling the maximum storage to 256 TiB, with no upfront provisioning required and pay-as-you-go pricing based on actual storage used. This enables even more customers to run their growing workloads without the complexity of managing multiple instances while maintaining cost efficiency.

Most recently, at re:Invent 2024, we announced Amazon Aurora DSQL, which became generally available in May 2025. Aurora DSQL represents our latest innovation in distributed SQL databases, offering active-active high availability and multi-Region strong consistency. It’s the fastest serverless distributed SQL database for always available applications, effortlessly scaling to meet any workload demand with zero infrastructure management.

Aurora DSQL builds on our original architectural principles of separation of storage and compute, taking them further with independent scaling of reads, writes, compute, and storage. It provides 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability, with strong consistency across all Regional endpoints.

And in June, we launched Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for Aurora, so you can integrate your AI agents with your data sources and services.

Let’s celebrate 10 years of innovation
By attending the August 21 livestream event, you’ll hear from Aurora technical leaders and founders, including Swami Sivasubramanian, Ganapathy (G2) Krishnamoorthy, Yan Leshinsky, Grant McAlister, and Raman Mittal. You’ll learn directly from the architects who pioneered the separation of compute and storage in cloud databases, with technical insights into Aurora architecture and scaling capabilities. You’ll also get a glimpse into the future of database technology as Aurora engineers share their vision and discuss the complex challenges they’re working to solve on behalf of customers.

The event also offers practical demonstrations that show you how to implement key features. You’ll see how to build AI-powered applications using pgvector, understand cost optimization with the new Aurora DSQL pricing model, and learn how to achieve multi-Region strong consistency for global applications.

The interactive format includes Q&A opportunities with Aurora experts, so you’ll be able to get your specific technical questions answered. You can also receive AWS credits to test new Aurora capabilities.

If you’re interested in agentic AI, you’ll particularly benefit from the sessions on MCP servers, Strands Agents, and how to integrate Strands Agents with Aurora DSQL, which demonstrate how to safely integrate AI capabilities with your Aurora databases while maintaining control over database access.

Whether you’re running mission-critical workloads or building new applications, these sessions will help you understand how to use the latest Aurora features.

Register today to secure your spot and be part of this celebration of database innovation.

To the next decade of Aurora innovation!

— seb

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We are excited to announce the latest cohort of AWS Heroes, recognized for their exceptional contributions and technical leadership. These passionate individuals represent diverse regions and technical specialties, demonstrating notable expertise and dedication to knowledge sharing within the AWS community. From AI and machine learning to serverless architectures and security, our new Heroes showcase the breadth of cloud innovation while fostering inclusive and engaging technical communities. Join us in welcoming these community leaders who are helping to shape the future of cloud computing and inspiring the next generation of AWS builders.

Kristine Armiyants – Masis, Armenia

Community Hero Kristine Armiyants is a software engineer and cloud support engineer who transitioned into technology from a background in finance, having earned an MBA before becoming self-taught in software development. As the founder and leader of AWS User Group Armenia for over 2.5 years, she has transformed the local tech landscape by organizing Armenia’s first AWS Community Day, scaling it from 320 to 440+ attendees, and leading a team that brings international-scale events to her country. Through her technical articles in Armenian, hands-on workshops, and “no-filter” blog series, she makes cloud knowledge more accessible while mentoring new user group organizers and early-career engineers. Her dedication to community building has resulted in five new AWS Community Builders from Armenia, demonstrating her commitment to creating inclusive spaces for learning and growth in the AWS community.

Nadia Reyhani – Perth, Australia

Machine Learning Hero Nadia Reyhani is an AI Product Engineer who integrates DevOps best practices with machine learning systems. She is a former AWS Community Builder and regularly presents at AWS events on building scalable AI solutions using Amazon SageMaker and Bedrock. As a Women in Digital Ambassador, she combines technical expertise with advocacy, creating inclusive spaces for underrepresented groups in cloud and AI technologies.

Raphael Manke – Karlsruhe, Germany

DevTools Hero Raphael Manke is a Senior Product Engineer at Dash0 and the creator of the unofficial AWS re:Invent planner, which is used to help build a schedule for the event. With a decade of AWS experience, he specializes in serverless technologies and DevTools that streamline cloud development. As the organizer of the AWS User Group in Karlsruhe and a former AWS Community Builder, he actively contributes to product enhancement through public speaking and direct collaboration with AWS service teams. His commitment to the AWS community spans from local user group leadership to providing valuable feedback to service teams.

Rowan Udell – Brisbane, Australia

Security Hero Rowan Udell is an independent AWS security consultant specializing in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). He has been sharing AWS security expertise for over a decade through books, blog posts, meet-ups, workshops, and conference presentations. Rowan has taken part in many AWS community programs, was an AWS Community Builder for four years, and is part of the AWS Community Day Australia Organizing Committee. A frequent speaker at AWS events including Sydney Summit and other community meetups, Rowan is known for transforming complex security concepts into simple, practical, and workable solutions for businesses securing their AWS environments.

Sangwoon (Chris) Park – Seoul, Korea

Serverless Hero Sangwoon (Chris) Park leads development at RECON Labs, an AI startup specializing in AI-driven 3D content generation. He is a former AWS Community Builder and the creator of “AWS Classroom” YouTube channel, and he shares practical serverless architecture knowledge with the AWS community. Chris hosts monthly AWS Classroom Meetups and the AWS KRUG Serverless Small Group, actively promoting serverless technologies through community events and educational content.

Toshal Khawale – Pune, India

Community Hero Toshal Khawale is an experienced technology leader with over 22 years of expertise in engineering and AWS cloud technology, holding 12 AWS certifications that demonstrate his cloud knowledge. As a Managing Director at PwC, Toshal guides organizations through cloud transformation, digital innovation, and application modernization initiatives, having led numerous large-scale AWS migrations and generative AI implementations. He was an AWS Community Builder for six years and continues to serve as the AWS User Group Pune Leader, actively fostering community engagement and knowledge sharing. Through his roles as a mentor, frequent speaker, and advocate, Toshal helps organizations maximize their AWS investments while staying at the forefront of cloud technology trends.

Learn More

Visit the AWS Heroes webpage if you’d like to learn more about the AWS Heroes program, or to connect with a Hero near you.

— Taylor

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Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS), a new AWS service that lets you run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environments directly within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). With Amazon EVS, you can deploy fully functional VCF environments in just hours using a guided workflow, while running your VMware workloads on qualified Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) bare metal instances and seamlessly integrating with AWS services such as Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.

Many organizations running VMware workloads on premises want to move to the cloud to benefit from improved scalability, reliability, and access to cloud services, but migrating these workloads often requires substantial changes to applications and infrastructure configurations. Amazon EVS lets customers continue using their existing VMware expertise and tools without having to re-architect applications or change established practices, thereby simplifying the migration process while providing access to AWS’s scale, reliability, and broad set of services.

With Amazon EVS, you can run VMware workloads directly in your Amazon VPC. This gives you full control over your environments while being on AWS infrastructure. You can extend your on-premises networks and migrate workloads without changing IP addresses or operational runbooks, reducing complexity and risk.

Key capabilities and features

Amazon EVS delivers a comprehensive set of capabilities designed to streamline your VMware workload migration and management experience. The service enables seamless workload migration without the need for replatforming or changing hypervisors, which means you can maintain your existing infrastructure investments while moving to AWS. Through an intuitive, guided workflow on the AWS Management Console, you can efficiently provision and configure your EVS environments, significantly reducing the complexity to migrate your workloads to AWS.

With Amazon EVS, you can deploy a fully functional VCF environment running on AWS in a few hours. This process eliminates many of the manual steps and potential configuration errors that often occur during traditional deployments. Furthermore, with Amazon EVS you can optimize your virtualization stack on AWS. Given the VCF environment runs inside your VPC, you have full full administrative access to the environment and the associated management appliances. You also have the ability to integrate third-party solutions, from external storage such as Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP or Pure Cloud Block Store or backup solutions such as Veeam Backup and Replication.

The service also gives you the ability to self-manage or work with AWS Partners to build, manage, and operate your environments. This provides you with flexibility to match your approach with your overall goals.

Setting up a new VCF environment

Organizations can streamline their setup process by ensuring they have all the necessary pre-requisites in place ahead of creating a new VCF environment. These prerequisites include having an active AWS account, configuring the appropriate AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions, and setting up a Amazon VPC with sufficient CIDR space and two Route Server endpoints, with each endpoint having its own peer. Additionally, customers will need to have their VMware Cloud Foundation license keys ready, secure Amazon EC2 capacity reservations specifically for i4i.metal instances, and prepare their VLAN subnet information planning.

To help ensure a smooth deployment process, we’ve provided a Getting started hub, which you can access from the EVS homepage as well as a comprehensive guide in our documentation. By following these preparation steps, you can avoid potential setup delays and ensure a successful environment creation.

Let’s walk through the process of setting up a new VCF environment using Amazon EVS.

You will need to provide your Site ID, which is allocated by Broadcom when purchasing VCF licenses, along with your license keys. To ensure a successful initial deployment, you should verify you have sufficient licensing coverage for a minimum of 256 cores. This translates to at least four i4i.metal instances, with each instance providing 64 physical cores.

This licensing requirement helps you maintain optimal performance and ensures your environment meets the necessary infrastructure specifications. By confirming these requirements upfront, you can avoid potential deployment delays and ensure a smooth setup process.

Once you have provided all the required details, you will be prompted to specify your host details. These are the underlying Amazon EC2 instances that your VCF environment will get deployed in.

Once you have filled out details for each of your host instances, you will need to configure your networking and management appliance DNS details. For further information on how to create a new VCF environment on Amazon EVS, follow the documentation here.

After you have created your VCF environment, you will be able to look over all of the host and configuration details through the AWS Console.

Additional things to know

Amazon EVS currently supports VCF version 5.2.1 and runs on i4i.metal instances. Future releases will expand VCF versions, licensing options, and more instance type support to provide even more flexibility for your deployments.

Amazon EVS provides flexible storage options. Your Amazon EVS local Instance storage is powered by VMware’s vSAN solution, which pools local disks across multiple ESXi hosts into a single distributed datastore. To scale your storage, you can leverage external Network File System (NFS) or iSCSI-based storage solutions. For example, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is particularly well-suited for use as an NFS datastore or shared block storage over iSCSI.

Additionally, Amazon EVS makes connecting your on-premises environments to AWS simple. You can connect from on-premises vSphere environment into Amazon EVS using a Direct Connect connection or a VPN that terminates into a transit gateway. Amazon EVS also manages the underlying connectivity from your VLAN subnets into your VMs.

AWS provides comprehensive support for all AWS services deployed by Amazon EVS, handling direct customer support while engaging with Broadcom for advanced support needs. Customers must maintain AWS Business Support on accounts running the service.

Availability and pricing

Amazon EVS is now generally available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Regions, with additional Regions coming soon. Pricing is based on the Amazon EC2 instances and AWS resources you use, with no minimum fees or upfront commitments.

To learn more, visit the Amazon EVS product page.