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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.

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

This post was originally published on this site

Hey! It’s my first post for 2026, and I’m writing to you while watching our driveway getting dug out. I hope wherever you are you are safe and warm and your data is still flowing!

This week brings exciting news for customers running GPU-intensive workloads, with the launch of our newest graphics and AI inference instances powered by NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell architecture. Along with several service enhancements and regional expansions, this week’s updates continue to expand the capabilities available to AWS customers.

Last week’s launches

Amazon EC2 G7e instances are now generally available — The new G7e instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs deliver up to 2.3 times better inference performance compared to G6e instances. With two times the GPU memory and support for up to 8 GPUs providing 768 GB of total GPU memory, these instances enable running medium-sized models of up to 70B parameters with FP8 precision on a single GPU. G7e instances are ideal for generative AI inference, spatial computing, and scientific computing workloads. Available now in US East (N. Virginia) and US East (Ohio).

Additional updates

I thought these projects, blog posts, and news items were also interesting:

Amazon Corretto January 2026 Quarterly Updates — AWS released quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) versions of OpenJDK. Corretto 25.0.2, 21.0.10, 17.0.18, 11.0.30, and 8u482 are now available, ensuring Java developers have access to the latest security patches and performance improvements.

Amazon ECR now supports cross-repository layer sharing — Amazon Elastic Container Registry now enables you to share common image layers across repositories through blob mounting. This feature helps you achieve faster image pushes by reusing existing layers and reduce storage costs by storing common layers once and referencing them across repositories.

Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights expands to four additional regions — CloudWatch Database Insights on-demand analysis is now available in Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Thailand), and Mexico (Central). This feature uses machine learning to help identify performance bottlenecks and provides specific remediation advice.

Amazon Connect adds conditional logic and real-time updates to Step-by-Step Guides — Amazon Connect Step-by-Step Guides now enables managers to build dynamic guided experiences that adapt based on user interactions. Managers can configure conditional user interfaces with dropdown menus that show or hide fields, change default values, or adjust required fields based on prior inputs. The feature also supports automatic data refresh from Connect resources, ensuring agents always work with current information.

Upcoming AWS events

Keep a look out and be sure to sign up for these upcoming events:

Best of AWS re:Invent (January 28-29, Virtual) — Join us for this free virtual event bringing you the most impactful announcements and top sessions from AWS re:Invent. AWS VP and Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr will share highlights during the opening session. Sessions run January 28 at 9:00 AM PT for AMER, and January 29 at 9:00 AM SGT for APJ and 9:00 AM CET for EMEA. Register to access curated technical learning, strategic insights from AWS leaders, and live Q&A with AWS experts.

AWS Community Day Ahmedabad (February 28, 2026, Ahmedabad, India) — The 11th edition of this community-driven AWS conference brings together cloud professionals, developers, architects, and students for expert-led technical sessions, real-world use cases, tech expo booths with live demos, and networking opportunities. This free event includes breakfast, lunch, and exclusive swag.

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

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

~ micah

This post was originally published on this site

At the end of 2025 I was happy to take a long break to enjoy the incredible summers that the southern hemisphere provides. I’m back and writing my first post in 2026 which also happens to be my last post for the AWS News Blog (more on this later).

The AWS community is starting the year strong with various AWS re:invent re:Caps being hosted around the globe, with some communities already hosting their AWS Community Day events, the AWS Community Day Tel Aviv 2026 was hosted last week.

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

• Kiro CLI latest features – Kiro CLI now has granular controls for web fetch URLs, keyboard shortcuts for your custom agents, enhanced diff views, and much more. With these enhancements, you can now use allowlists or blocklists to restrict which URLs the agent can access, ensure a frictionless experience when working with multiple specialized agents in a single session, to name a few.
• AWS European Sovereign Cloud – Following an announcement in 2023 of plans to build a new, independent cloud infrastructure, last week we announced the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to all customers. The cloud is ready to meet the most stringent sovereignty requirements of European customers with a comprehensive set of AWS services.
• Amazon EC2 X8i instances – Previously launched in preview at AWS re:Invent 2025, last week we announced the general availability of new memory-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) X8i instances. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors with a sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.9 GHz, available only on AWS. These SAP certified instances deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.

Additional updates
These projects, blog posts, and news articles also caught my attention:

• 5 core features in Amazon Quick Suite – AWS VP Agentic AI Swami Sivasubramanian talks about how he uses Amazon Quick Suite for just about everything. In October 2025 we announced Amazon Quick Suite, a new agentic teammate that quickly answers your questions at work and turns insights into actions for you. Amazon Quick Suite has become one of my favorite productivity tools, helping me with my research on various topics in addition to providing me with multiple perspectives on a topic.
• Deploy AI agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore using GitHub Actions – Last year we announced Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a flexible service that helps you seamlessly create and manage AI agents across different frameworks and models, whether hosted on Amazon Bedrock or other environments. Learn how to use a GitHub Actions workflow to automate the deployment of AI agents on AgentCore Runtime. This approach delivers a scalable solution with enterprise-level security controls, providing complete continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) automation.

Upcoming AWS events
Join us January 28 or 29 (depending on your time zone) for Best of AWS re:Invent, a free virtual event where we bring you the most impactful announcements and top sessions from AWS re:Invent. Jeff Barr, AWS VP and Chief Evangelist, will share his highlights during the opening session.

There is still time until January 21 to compete for $250,000 in prizes and AWS credits in the Global 10,000 AIdeas Competition (yes, the second letter is an I as in Idea, not an L as in like). No code required yet: simply submit your idea, and if you’re selected as a semifinalist, you’ll build your app using Kiro within AWS Free Tier limits. Beyond the cash prizes and potential featured placement at AWS re:Invent 2026, you’ll gain hands-on experience with next-generation AI tools and connect with innovators globally.

Earlier this month, the 2026 application for the Community Builders program launched. The application is open until January 21st, midnight PST so here’s your last chance to ensure that you don’t miss out.

If you’re interested in these opportunities, join the AWS Builder Center to learn with builders in the AWS community.

With that, I close one of my most meaningful chapters here at AWS. It’s been an absolute pleasure to write for you and I thank you for taking the time to read the work that my team and I pour our absolute hearts into. I’ve grown from the close collaborations with the launch teams and the feedback from all of you. The Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) community has grown significantly, and I want to dedicate more time focused on this community, I’m still at AWS and I look forward to meeting at an event near you!

Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

– Veliswa Boya

This post was originally published on this site

At the beginning of January, I tend to set my top resolutions for the year, a way to focus on what I want to achieve. If AI and cloud computing are on your resolution list, consider creating an AWS Free Tier account to receive up to $200 in credits and have 6 months of risk-free experimentation with AWS services.

During this period, you can explore essential services across compute, storage, databases, and AI/ML, plus access to over 30 always-free services with monthly usage limits. After 6 months, you can decide whether to upgrade to a standard AWS account.

Whether you’re a student exploring career options, a developer expanding your skill set, or a professional building with cloud technologies, this hands-on approach lets you focus on what matters most: developing real expertise in the areas you’re passionate about.

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

• AWS Lambda – Now supports creating serverless applications using .NET 10 both as a managed runtime and a container base image. AWS will automatically apply updates to the managed runtime and base image as they become available. More info in this blog post.
• Amazon ECS – Adds support for tmpfs mounts to Linux tasks running on AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS Managed Instances in addition to the EC2 launch type. With tmpfs, you can create memory-backed file systems for your containerized workloads without writing data to task storage.
• AWS Config – Can now discover, assess, audit, and remediate additional AWS resource types across key services including Amazon EC2, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon S3 Tables.
• Amazon MQ – Introduces HTTP based authentication for RabbitMQ brokers. You can configure this plugin on brokers by making changes to the associated configuration file. It now also supports certificate based authentication with mutual TLS for RabbitMQ brokers.
• Amazon MWAA – You can now create Apache Airflow version 2.11 environments with Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow. This version of Apache Airflow introduces changes that help you prepare for upgrading to Apache Airflow 3.
• Amazon EC2 – M8i, C8i and C8i-flex, R8i and R8i-flex, and I7ie instances are now available in additional AWS Regions.
• AWS Client VPN – A new quickstart reduces the number of steps required to set up a Client VPN endpoint.
• Amazon Quick Suite – Added integrations for AI agents and to its built-in actions library. For example, these now include GitHub, Notion, Canva, Box, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, Intercom, and more.

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

• Automating AWS SDK for Java v1 to v2 Upgrades with AWS Transform – To help you modernize Java applications efficiently while minimizing manual intervention and potential errors.
• Unlock Amazon Aurora’s Advanced Features with Standard JDBC Driver using AWS Advanced JDBC Wrapper – Enhance an existing application that uses the open source standard JDBC driver and unlock the capabilities of Aurora and the AWS Cloud with minimal code changes.
• Implement multi-Region endpoint routing for Amazon Aurora DSQL – An automated solution for redirecting database traffic to alternate regional endpoints without manual configuration changes.
• Crossmodal search with Amazon Nova Multimodal Embeddings – How to implement a crossmodal search system by generating embeddings, handling queries, and measuring performance with working code examples and tips to add these capabilities to your applications.

Upcoming AWS events
Join us January 28 or 29 (depending on your time zone) for Best of AWS re:Invent, a free virtual event where we bring you the most impactful announcements and top sessions from AWS re:Invent. Jeff Barr, AWS VP and Chief Evangelist, will share his highlights during the opening session.

There is still time until January 21 to compete for $250,000 in prizes and AWS credits in the Global 10,000 AIdeas Competition (yes, the second letter is an I as in Idea, not an L as in like). No code required yet: simply submit your idea, and if you’re selected as a semifinalist, you’ll build your app using Kiro within AWS Free Tier limits. Beyond the cash prizes and potential featured placement at AWS re:Invent 2026, you’ll gain hands-on experience with next-generation AI tools and connect with innovators globally.

If you’re interested in these opportunities, join the AWS Builder Center to learn with builders in the AWS community.

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

– Danilo

This post was originally published on this site

Happy New Year! I hope the holidays gave you time to recharge and spend time with your loved ones.

Like every year, I took a few weeks off after AWS re:Invent to rest and plan ahead. I used some of that downtime to plan the next cohort for Become a Solutions Architect (BeSA). BeSA is a free mentoring program that I, along with a few other Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees, volunteer to host as a way to help people excel in their cloud and AI careers. We’re kicking off a 6-week cohort on “Agentic AI on AWS” starting February 21, 2026. Visit the BeSA website to learn more.

There is still time to submit your idea for the Global 10,000 AIdeas Competition and compete for $250,000 in cash prizes, AWS credits, and recognition, including potential featured placement at AWS re:Invent 2026 and across AWS channels.

You will gain hands-on experience with next-generation AI development tools, connect with innovators globally, and access technical enablement through biweekly workshops, AWS User Groups, and AWS Builder Center resources.

The deadline is January 21, 2026, and no code is required yet. If you’re selected as a semifinalist, you’ll build your app then. Your finished app needs to use Kiro for at least part of development, stay within AWS Free Tier limits, and be completely original and not yet published.

If you haven’t yet caught up with all the new releases and announcements from AWS re:Invent 2025, check out our top announcements post or watch the keynotes, innovation talks, and breakout sessions on-demand.

Launches from the last few weeks
I’d like to highlight some launches that got my attention since our last Week in Review on December 15, 2025:

• Amazon EC2 M8gn and M8gb instances – New M8gn and M8gb instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors to deliver up to 30% better compute performance than AWS Graviton3 processors. M8gn instances feature the latest 6th generation AWS Nitro Cards, and offer up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth, the highest network bandwidth among network-optimized EC2 instances. M8gb offer up to 150 Gbps of Amazon EBS bandwidth to provide higher EBS performance compared to same-sized equivalent Graviton4-based instances.
• AWS Direct Connect supports resilience testing with AWS Fault Injection Service – You can now use AWS Fault Injection Service to test how your applications handle Direct Connect Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) failover in a controlled environment. For example, you can validate that traffic routes to redundant virtual interfaces when a primary virtual interface’s BGP session is disrupted and your applications continue to function as expected.
• New AWS Security Hub controls in AWS Control Tower – AWS Control Tower now supports 176 additional Security Hub controls in the Control Catalog, covering use cases including security, cost, durability, and operations. With this launch, you can search, discover, enable, and manage these controls directly from AWS Control Tower to govern additional use cases across your multi-account environment.
• AWS Transform supports network conversion for hybrid data center migrations – You can now use AWS Transform for VMware to automatically convert networks from hybrid data centers. This removes manual network mapping for environments running both VMware and other workloads. The service analyzes VLANs and IP ranges across all exported source networks and maps them to AWS constructs such as virtual private clouds (VPCs), subnets, and security groups.
• NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano available on Amazon Bedrock – Amazon Bedrock now supports NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B model, NVIDIA’s latest breakthrough in efficient language modeling that delivers high reasoning performance, built-in tool calling support, and extended context processing with 256K token context window.
• Amazon EC2 supports Availability Zone ID across its APIs – You can specify the Availability Zone ID (AZ ID) parameter directly in your Amazon EC2 APIs to guarantee consistent placement of resources. AZ IDs are consistent and static identifiers that represent the same physical location across all AWS accounts, helping you optimize resource placement. Prior to this launch, you had to use an AZ name while creating a resource, but these names could map to different physical locations. This mapping made it difficult to ensure resources were always co-located, especially when operating with multiple accounts.
• Amazon ECS Managed Instances supports Amazon EC2 Spot Instances – Amazon ECS Managed Instances now supports Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, extending the range of capabilities available with AWS managed infrastructure. You can use spare EC2 capacity at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices for fault-tolerant workloads in Amazon ECS Managed Instances.

See AWS What’s New for more launch news that I haven’t covered here. That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

Here’s to a fantastic start to 2026. Happy building!

– Prasad

This post was originally published on this site

Today, I’m happy to announce new serverless customization in Amazon SageMaker AI for popular AI models, such as Amazon Nova, DeepSeek, GPT-OSS, Llama, and Qwen. The new customization capability provides an easy-to-use interface for the latest fine-tuning techniques like reinforcement learning, so you can accelerate the AI model customization process from months to days.

With a few clicks, you can seamlessly select a model and customization technique, and handle model evaluation and deployment—all entirely serverless so you can focus on model tuning rather than managing infrastructure. When you choose serverless customization, SageMaker AI automatically selects and provisions the appropriate compute resources based on the model and data size.

Getting started with serverless model customization
You can get started customizing models in Amazon SageMaker Studio. Choose Models in the left navigation pane and check out your favorite AI models to be customized.

Customize with UI
You can customize AI models in a only few clicks. In the Customize model dropdown list for a specific model such as Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, choose Customize with UI.

You can select a customization technique used to adapt the base model to your use case. SageMaker AI supports Supervised Fine-Tuning and the latest model customization techniques including Direct Preference Optimization, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), and Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF). Each technique optimizes models in different ways, with selection influenced by factors such as dataset size and quality, available computational resources, task at hand, desired accuracy levels, and deployment constraints.

Upload or select a training dataset to match the format required by the customization technique selected. Use the values of batch size, learning rate, and number of epochs recommended by the technique selected. You can configure advanced settings such as hyperparameters, a newly introduced serverless MLflow application for experiment tracking, and network and storage volume encryption. Choose Submit to get started on your model training job.

After your training job is complete, you can see the models you created in the My Models tab. Choose View details in one of your models.

By choosing Continue customization, you can continue to customize your model by adjusting hyperparameters or training with different techniques. By choosing Evaluate, you can evaluate your customized model to see how it performs compared to the base model.

When you complete both jobs, you can choose either the SageMaker or Bedrock in the Deploy dropdown list to deploy your model.

You can choose Amazon Bedrock for serverless inference. Choose Bedrock and the model name to deploy the model into Amazon Bedrock. To find your deployed models, choose Imported models in the Bedrock console.

You can also deploy your model to a SageMaker AI inference endpoint if you want to control your deployment resources such as an instance type and instance count. After the SageMaker AI deployment is In service, you can use this endpoint to perform inference. In the Playground tab, you can test your customized model with a single prompt or chat mode.

With the serverless MLflow capability, you can automatically log all critical experiment metrics without modifying code and access rich visualizations for further analysis.

Customize with code
When you choose customizing with code, you can see a sample notebook to fine-tune or deploy AI models. If you want to edit the sample notebook, open it in JupyterLab. Alternatively, you can deploy the model immediately by choosing Deploy.

You can choose the Amazon Bedrock or SageMaker AI endpoint by selecting the deployment resources either from Amazon SageMaker Inference or Amazon SageMaker Hyperpod.

When you choose Deploy on the bottom right of the page, it will be redirected back to the model detail page. After the SageMaker AI deployment is in service, you can use this endpoint to perform inference.

Okay, you’ve seen how to streamline the model customization in the SageMaker AI. You can now choose your favorite way. To learn more, visit the Amazon SageMaker AI Developer Guide.

Now available
New serverless AI model customization in Amazon SageMaker AI is now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland) Regions. You only pay for the tokens processed during training and inference. To learn more details, visit Amazon SageMaker AI pricing page.

Give it a try in Amazon SageMaker Studio and send feedback to AWS re:Post for SageMaker or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy