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 unavailable, failures cascaded through the entire system. Message queuing solved this by letting services communicate asynchronously: a producer could drop a message into a queue and move on, while a consumer picked it up when ready. This approach kept individual service failures from affecting the rest of the system.

When Amazon SQS launched publicly in July 2006, it made this pattern available to every AWS customer. Twenty years later, that core function, decoupling producers from consumers, remains the reason customers use SQS. The scale, performance, and operational controls around it look very different now though.

Jeff Barr covered the first 15 years of SQS milestones in his 15th anniversary post, from the original 8 KB message limit in 2006 through FIFO queues, server-side encryption, and Lambda integration. Over the last five years, we have continued to scale SQS, added stronger security defaults, and introduced new capabilities that address increasingly complex workload patterns.

Key milestones between 2021 and 2026
High throughput mode for FIFO queues (2021): In May 2021, we launched general availability of high throughput mode for FIFO queues, supporting up to 3,000 transactions per second (TPS) per API action, a tenfold increase over the previous limit. We continued raising this ceiling over the following two years: to 6,000 TPS in October 2022, to 9,000 TPS in August 2023, and to 18,000 TPS in October 2023, before reaching 70,000 TPS per API action in select Regions by November 2023.

Server-side encryption with SSE-SQS (2021): In November 2021, we introduced server-side encryption with Amazon SQS-managed encryption keys (SSE-SQS), giving customers an encryption option that required no key management. In October 2022, we made SSE-SQS the default for all newly created queues, so customers no longer needed to explicitly enable it.

Dead-letter queue redrive enhancements (2021): We progressively expanded how customers recover unconsumed messages from dead-letter queues. In December 2021, we added DLQ redrive to source queue directly in the SQS console. In June 2023, we extended this capability to the AWS SDK and CLI through new APIs, including StartMessageMoveTask, CancelMessageMoveTask, and ListMessageMoveTasks. In November 2023, we added redrive support for FIFO queues.

Attribute-based access control, ABAC (2022): In November 2022, we introduced ABAC, giving customers the ability to configure access permissions based on queue tags rather than maintaining static policies as resources scaled.

JSON protocol support (2023): In November 2023, we added support for the JSON protocol in the AWS SDK, reducing end-to-end message processing latency by up to 23% for a 5 KB payload and lowering client-side CPU and memory usage.

Amazon EventBridge Pipes console integration (2023): We added the ability to connect a queue directly to EventBridge Pipes from the SQS console, routing messages to a broad range of AWS service targets without writing custom integration code.

Extended Client Library for Python (2024): We brought the Extended Client Library, previously available for Java, to Python developers, allowing messages up to 2 GB to be sent through SQS by storing the payload in Amazon S3 and passing a reference through the queue.

FIFO in-flight message limit increase (2024): We increased the in-flight message limit for FIFO queues from 20,000 to 120,000 messages, so consumers can process significantly more messages concurrently without being constrained by the previous ceiling.

Fair queues for multi-tenant workloads (2025): We introduced fair queues to mitigate the noisy neighbor problem in multi-tenant standard queues. By including a message group ID when sending messages, customers can prevent a single tenant from delaying message delivery for others, without any changes required on the consumer side.

1 MiB maximum message payload size (2025): We increased the maximum message payload from 256 KiB to 1 MiB for both standard and FIFO queues, helping customers send larger messages without offloading data to external storage. AWS Lambda event source mapping for SQS was updated in parallel to support the new payload size.

The constant underneath the change
Despite two decades of feature additions, the fundamental use case for SQS has not shifted. Customers use it to decouple services, buffer bursts of traffic, and build systems that stay resilient when individual components fail. That same pattern now extends to AI workloads. Customers use SQS queues to buffer requests to large language models, manage inference throughput, and coordinate communication between autonomous AI agents operating as independent services. For an example of this architecture in practice, read Creating asynchronous AI agents with Amazon Bedrock.

To learn more about Amazon SQS, visit the Amazon SQS product page, review the developer guide, or explore recent updates on the AWS Blogs.

— Esra

The post Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale first appeared on Azalio.

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 past year: AWS Capabilities by Region (1,500+ services across 37 Regions), Spaces for community-created groups, workshops with category and complexity filters, badges and streaks, article series, view counts, saved items, student status, availability notifications, sign-in with GitHub and Amazon, and sandbox environments.

Jeff Barr published a retrospective summarizing Builder Center’s first year. Since launch, 5,548 authors have published 6,448 articles with more than 10.4 million page views combined. Builders have earned 99,226 badges since the badge system launched in March 2026. Community members have submitted 565 wishes, 10 of which have shipped with another 20 on the near-term roadmap.

The top community article Building an AWS Study Buddy with MCP + Strands Agents SDK by Dineshraj Dhanapathy reached 50,000+ views. Chris Miller’s Migrating an EOL Linux Server to AWS in 8 Hours with Kiro followed at 45,000+, and Yash Aggarwal’s AIdeas: NeuroVoice – Multimodal AI for Early Screening of Neurological Diseases article reached 38,000+.

The week’s headline addition is Sandbox Environments by Rick Suttles. Sandboxes give you a free, pre-provisioned AWS account to complete a workshop exercise. Each environment is active for 8 hours, after which the account and all its resources are automatically de-provisioned. You can have one active sandbox at a time and request one per week. No personal AWS account, credit card, or manual cleanup required.

Last week’s launches
Here’s what else happened this week.

• AWS Security Hub introduces Network Scanning – Security Hub introduced Network Scanning, a capability that identifies resources in your environment that are reachable from the public internet. Network Scanning probes your resources from the internet to detect actual reachability, complementing the existing network reachability findings in Security Hub that identify configurations that could make a resource reachable. It discovers public IP addresses, virtual machines, and load balancers across your AWS and Azure environments, identifies reachable ports, and determines what services are running behind them. Each reachable port generates a Security Hub finding with evidence of the port and service discovered. Security Hub Exposures then automatically correlates these findings with other findings and resource configurations to determine broader risk. Existing customers can enable Network Scanning in individual accounts and Regions, or across an organization through a configuration policy. For new customers, Network Scanning is on by default. It is included with Security Hub Essentials at no additional cost.
• Security Hub also extends unified security management to Microsoft Azure – Security Hub now monitors Microsoft Azure resources, providing unified posture management, vulnerability management, and security response across both clouds. It automatically discovers Azure VMs, container images, Function Apps, and identities, and evaluates them for misconfigurations, internet exposure, and software vulnerabilities. AWS and Azure findings appear in the same prioritized view with the same formats and automation workflows.
• Amazon SageMaker Studio integrates with Hugging Face for one-click model deployment and customization – You can now go from discovering a model on Hugging Face to working with it in SageMaker Studio in a single click. Select any supported model on Hugging Face and choose “Customize on SageMaker AI” or “Deploy on SageMaker AI” to land directly on the corresponding workflow page with the model pre-loaded. New customers receive a Studio environment created in seconds with pre-configured permissions for serverless model customization (including fine-tuning with custom reward functions for reinforcement learning), model evaluation, and deployment to SageMaker or Bedrock endpoints. Verified customers receive default GPU access to G5, G6, and G4dn instances without requesting quota increases, and quota utilization is visible directly inside the Studio environment.
• Amazon EKS Auto Mode and Amazon ECS Managed Instances reduce GPU management fees by up to 60% – Beginning July 1, 2026, EKS Auto Mode and ECS Managed Instances reduce management fees for accelerated instance types: G-series fees are down 35%, and P-series and AWS Trainium fees are down 60%. The reductions apply automatically to existing clusters and require no action from customers. Both services include capabilities built for accelerated workloads. EKS Auto Mode provides automatic parallel image pulling on GPU instances with local NVMe storage and accelerator-aware node repair. ECS Managed Instances provides GPU metrics through Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and automatic health monitoring for GPU hardware failures.
• Amazon Aurora DSQL change data capture (CDC) is now generally available – Aurora DSQL CDC streams the results of insert, update, and delete operations as change events to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. You can use it to synchronize data across microservices, trigger Lambda functions, or deliver changes to S3, Redshift, and OpenSearch Service through Amazon Data Firehose. CDC streaming is designed to have zero impact on database workload performance and requires no infrastructure to manage.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Building secure AI agents at scale: Introducing Loom for AWS – Loom is an open-source enterprise platform for building agents with AWS Strands Agents and deploying them on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. It provides a unified management UI and backend API with identity provider integration, scope-based authorization, multi-persona navigation, and full lifecycle management for agents, memory, MCP servers, and agent-to-agent integrations. Loom enforces automated resource tagging for cost attribution, implements RBAC and ABAC for multi-tenant security, uses paved-path blueprints for agent deployments, manages identity propagation through delegated actor chains, integrates with AWS Agent Registry for discovery and governance, and supports human-in-the-loop review before sensitive actions. The project is available in AWS Labs on GitHub.
• Introducing Claude apps gateway for AWS – The Claude apps gateway is a self-hosted control plane that gives organizations centralized control over access, cost, and policy for Claude Code and Claude Desktop. It connects to any OIDC-compliant identity provider, enforces managed settings on every request, routes inference to Amazon Bedrock or Claude Platform on AWS, and supports per-user and per-group spend caps. The gateway runs as a stateless container in your private network, backed by a PostgreSQL database for short-lived sign-in state. No long-lived secrets are stored on developer machines. Deploy it through Amazon Bedrock to keep data within the AWS security boundary, or through Claude Platform on AWS for the native Claude platform experience.
• Introducing OAuth support for AWS MCP Server – You can now connect agents to the AWS MCP Server using browser-based OAuth with the same credentials you use for the AWS Console or CLI. The new sign-in path supports IAM federation, AWS IAM Identity Center, and root or IAM users. AWS Sign-In issues short-lived access tokens and refresh tokens, with automatic token management so developers stay authenticated across restarts. For headless use cases, a non-interactive flow lets applications with existing AWS credentials obtain OAuth access tokens through the create-oauth2-token-with-iam API. New governance controls include OAuth-specific IAM condition keys, token introspection and revocation, dynamic client registration, and CloudTrail audit elements.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – Free in-person events for builders and innovators to learn, think big, and make new connections. Coming up: Taipei (July 15), Bogotá (July 30), Jakarta (August 6), Ciudad de México (August 12), Johannesburg (August 19), and Zurich (September 2).
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Yaoundé, Cameroon (July 25), Ahmedabad, India (July 25), Belo Horizonte, Brazil (August 22), Ottawa, Canada (August 22), Tulsa, USA (August 22), and Toronto, Canada (August 29).

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building.

Wishing everyone a restful and enjoyable summer. Whether you’re building, learning, or recharging, I hope you find time for all three. I’ll be heading to Scandinavia for a few weeks to trade the heat for some cooler weather and longer evenings. Come back next week for more news!

— Esra

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center at 1 year, Network Scanning in Security Hub, Loom for AWS, and more (July 13, 2026) first appeared on Azalio.

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 access to eye care. He shared a striking fact: more than 70% of Brazilian municipalities don’t have a single ophthalmologist. His answer was to put a vision test on the one device almost everyone already carries, the smartphone, so a basic eye screening no longer depends on living near a clinic. Watching a founder turn a gap that big into something that concrete is exactly why I love this space.

This week, I’ll take a closer look at some key launches, and then cover the quarterly AWS Service Availability updates.

Last week’s launches
Here are some of the launches covered from this past week in the AWS News Blog:

• Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors: They deliver up to 25% better compute performance than Graviton4-based instances, 5x larger cache, fastest memory of any processor instances in the cloud, and local NVMe storage options (C9gd).
• A new AWS CloudFormation Express mode: You can speed up infrastructure deployment with AWS CloudFormation Express mode, enabling AI agents and developers to receive deployment confirmation in seconds and iterate faster. Available in all commercial Regions at no additional cost.
• Upgrade Amazon EKS clusters with confidence using Kubernetes version rollbacks: Learn how Kubernetes version rollbacks for Amazon EKS let you reverse cluster upgrades within seven days. This new feature provides a safety net for upgrade failures, no cluster rebuilds required, turning Kubernetes version upgrades into a reversible, low-risk operation.
• Automate public TLS certificate issuance with ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager: AWS Certificate Manager now supports the ACME protocol, so you can automate the issuance and renewal of public TLS certificates using standard, widely adopted tooling.

Here are some launches and updates that caught my attention:

• Claude Sonnet 5 is now available on AWS – Anthropic’s most capable Sonnet model brings top-tier intelligence at Sonnet pricing for coding, agents, and everyday professional work at scale. It navigates large codebases, calls tools precisely, and holds state across long agentic tasks. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents is now generally available: AI agents can now securely access and operate desktop applications through managed WorkSpaces environments, without requiring application modernization or custom integrations. To learn more. visit the Desktop and Application Streaming Blog post.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service is now optimized for log analytics: This release introduces a new engine purpose-built for log analytics workloads that delivers up to 4x better price-performance on internal benchmarks, while keeping the full-text search capabilities OpenSearch is known for. Teams can now get aggregations and precise text search in one place. To learn more, visit the Big Data Blog post.
• Amazon SageMaker AI cuts generative AI inference scale-out time by up to half: SageMaker Inference now supports container image caching, enabling up to 2x faster end-to-end scaling for generative AI models during scale-out events. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• Amazon CloudWatch supports creating alarms from log queries : You can now create alarms directly on log query results and set thresholds in a single workflow, eliminating the need to first create metric filters or custom metrics as intermediate steps.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

AWS Service Availability Updates
When the availability of an AWS service or feature changes, we provide customers guidance in AWS Product Lifecycle Changes on available alternatives and support for migration so that disruptions to your operations are minimized. The following lifecycle changes were updated on June 30, 2026.

Services moving to Maintenance (no longer accessible to new customers starting July 30, 2026):

• Amazon Bedrock Agents (launched November 2023) is now Amazon Bedrock Agents Classic
• Amazon Cognito Sync
• Amazon Kendra
• Amazon Q Business
• AWS Directory Service – Simple AD
• AWS IoT Device Defender – Detect (feature will no longer be accessible to new customers starting August 31, 2026)
• AWS Mainframe Modernization – Self-Managed Experience
• AWS Management Console – myApplications
• AWS Resource Groups – Group Lifecycle Events
• AWS Service Catalog – Application Registry
• AWS Systems Manager – Application Manager
• Amazon SageMaker AI features: A2I, Clarify, Debugger, GeoSpatial, Ground Truth, Mechanical Turk, Model Monitor, Role Manager, and Studio Lab

Services entering Sunset:

• Amazon WorkSpaces – PCoIP
• Amazon WorkSpaces – Pool
• AWS Managed Services (AMS) Advanced
• AWS re:Post Private
• Amazon Sagemaker AI- Profiler

Services reaching End of Support (as of June 30, 2026):

• Amazon Chime SDK – Carrier Voice Focus
• Amazon SageMaker AI – Ground Truth Plus

We understand that changes in availability can impact your operations. For specific guidance, consult the relevant service documentation or contact AWS Support.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free events that bring the cloud and AI community together to connect, learn, and explore the latest technologies. Browse the full calendar to find a Summit near you in the second half of 2026.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. If you’re in Latin America, don’t miss AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte on August 22. Registration is open at awscommunityday.com.br.

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

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

– Daniel Abib

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 5 on AWS, Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents, AWS service availability updates, and more (July 6, 2026) first appeared on Azalio.

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 like bake periods, stagger groups, automated sign offs, and months long upgrade cycles. With Kubernetes releasing three minor versions per year, teams managing hundreds of clusters, especially in regulated environments, often delay upgrades entirely because they aren’t confident they can recover if something goes wrong. The result is clusters stuck on older versions, missing security patches, and eventually running up against extended support timelines.

Today, we’re announcing Kubernetes version rollbacks for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a new feature that gives cluster administrators a safety net when performing cluster upgrades. With version rollbacks, you can reverse a Kubernetes version upgrade within seven days if you encounter issues after upgrading, returning your cluster to its previous working state.

Where approaches like emulated versions keep a cluster in a transitional holding state, EKS version rollback returns your cluster to a fully validated previous version that ran in production, not an emulation of it. Now, if you upgrade a cluster from, say, Kubernetes 1.34 to 1.35 and discover a compatibility issue, you can roll back to 1.34 within seven days. There’s no need to rebuild your cluster or scramble to troubleshoot under pressure. Think of it as an undo button for Kubernetes version upgrades.

The feature supports rolling back one minor version at a time, matching the same incremental approach EKS uses for upgrades. And to help you roll back safely, EKS automatically evaluates your cluster’s rollback readiness through cluster insights, flagging items like node version compatibility or add-on dependencies before you proceed. If you’ve already assessed the situation and want to move quickly, you can use the --force flag to bypass those checks. The above applies to all EKS clusters, whether you manage your own nodes or let AWS handle them. But for customers who have embraced fully managed infrastructure, rollback goes a step further.

Rollback for EKS Auto Mode
EKS Auto Mode gives you one click deployment of production ready Kubernetes clusters, automating compute, networking, and storage management so you can focus on your applications rather than infrastructure. EKS Auto Mode introduces additional considerations for version rollbacks because both the control plane and managed nodes need to be rolled back together. Since node rollbacks respect your pod disruption budgets, the process can take time depending on your configuration.

To give you control over this process, we’ve introduced a cancel API that lets you stop a node rollback at any point. If you decide the rollback is taking too long or you want to change your approach, you can cancel and adjust your disruption budgets to accelerate things, or choose a different path forward.

By default, EKS never bypasses your disruption budgets during a rollback because we prioritize workload stability. You can always choose to modify or remove disruption budgets yourself to speed up the process if needed.

Let’s try it out
To try version rollbacks, I navigated to the Amazon EKS console and selected one of my clusters that I had recently upgraded.

From the cluster’s configuration page, I can see the option to initiate a version rollback, along with information about my current rollback window.

Before initiating the rollback, I reviewed the rollback insights to check for any potential issues. The insights showed me the status of my nodes and flagged anything I should address before proceeding.

After confirming, the rollback began. My cluster remained functional throughout the process. The control plane rollback took about 20 minutes, similar to a standard upgrade. For my EKS Auto Mode cluster, the nodes rolled back gracefully according to my disruption budget settings.

Once complete, my cluster was back on the previous Kubernetes version, running as expected.

Now available
Kubernetes version rollbacks for Amazon EKS are available today at no additional cost in all commercial AWS Regions where Amazon EKS is available. You pay only for the standard EKS and compute costs you would normally incur. There are no extra charges for using the rollback capability.

Control plane rollbacks are available for all EKS clusters, and node rollbacks are available for clusters running EKS Auto Mode. Version rollbacks support clusters running Kubernetes versions available in EKS standard support and extended support.

To get started, visit the Amazon EKS documentation or try it out directly in the Amazon EKS console.

The post Upgrade Amazon EKS clusters with confidence using Kubernetes version rollbacks first appeared on Azalio.

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 for iterative development workflows and production scenarios.

How it works
Every CloudFormation deployment performs stabilization checks after resource configuration is applied. These checks serve an important purpose when you need to confirm resources can serve traffic before shifting load.

However, many workflows do not require full stabilization to proceed. Express mode benefits two primary use cases: iterative development workflows and production scenarios where you are comfortable with eventual stabilization. These use cases include iterating on infrastructure configurations during development, testing individual components of your application, and AI-assisted infrastructure development that benefits from sub-minute feedback loops.

With Express mode, CloudFormation completes deployments when resource configuration is applied, without waiting for stabilization checks. Resources continue becoming operational in the background. CloudFormation automatically retries dependent resources that encounter transient failures during provisioning within the same stack, without requiring any customer intervention. This built-in resilience handles timing issues between resources as they stabilize. Express mode changes when the deployment completes, not how resources are provisioned.

For example, when I create an Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue with a dead letter queue (DLQ), Standard mode takes 64 seconds, but Express mode completes in up to 10 seconds. In the case of deleting an AWS Lambda function with network interface attachment, Standard mode takes 20–30 minutes, but Express mode completes in up to 10 seconds based on my benchmarking test.

Get started with CloudFormation Express mode
When you create a CloudFormation stack in the AWS Management Console, choose Enable in the Express mode under Stack deployment options.

You can also use AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, or IaC tools like AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), and AI tools such as Kiro.

Activate Express mode by setting the --deployment-config parameter to EXPRESS when creating, updating, or deleting stacks. No template changes are required. Express mode disables rollback by default for the fastest iteration experience. To re-enable rollback, set disableRollback to false in the deployment-config for production environments, or implement monitoring/cleanup mechanisms for failed deployments.

aws cloudformation create-stack  
   --stack-name my-app  
   --template-body file://template.yaml  
   --deployment-config '{"mode": "EXPRESS", "disableRollback": true}' 

For example, use the Express mode when you build infrastructure incrementally, adding resources one at a time. Ensure your IAM role templates follow the principle of least privilege.

# Iteration 1: Deploy IAM role
aws cloudformation create-stack 
--stack-name my-microservice 
--template-body file://iteration1-iam.yaml 
--deployment-config '{"mode": "EXPRESS"}' 
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
--role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/CloudFormationDeployRole

# Iteration 2: Add Lambda function
aws cloudformation update-stack 
--stack-name my-microservice 
--template-body file://iteration2-lambda.yaml 
--deployment-config '{"mode": "EXPRESS"}' 
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
--role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/CloudFormationDeployRole

# Iteration 3: Add SQS queue and event source mapping
aws cloudformation update-stack 
--stack-name my-microservice 
--template-body file://iteration3-sqs.yaml 
--deployment-config '{"mode": "EXPRESS"}' 
--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
--role-arn arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/CloudFormationDeployRole

For AWS CDK, activate Express mode with the cdk deploy --express command when you deploy your CDK stack. This command retrieves your generated CloudFormation template and deploys it through the CloudFormation Express mode, which provisions your resources as part of a CloudFormation stack.

Express mode works with all existing CloudFormation templates and supports all CloudFormation features including change sets and nested stacks. When you enable Express mode on a parent stack, all nested stacks also use Express mode. If you need resources to be fully operational before proceeding with traffic or testing, continue using the default deployment behavior, which performs stabilization checks before completing.

Now available
AWS CloudFormation Express mode is available today in all AWS commercial Regions at no additional cost. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region. If you want to call APIs, search documentation, find regional availability, and check troubleshooting about this new feature, try using the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI tool. To learn more, visit the CloudFormation documentation.

Start accelerating your deployments today, and send feedback to AWS re:Post for AWS CloudFormation or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post Accelerate your infrastructure deployments by up to 4x with AWS CloudFormation Express mode first appeared on Azalio.

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 announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C9g and C9gd instances, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. C9g instances are compute-optimized and deliver up to 25% higher performance per vCPU compared to previous-generation C8g instances. They feature the fastest memory of any processor instance in the cloud, with DDR5 8800MT/s DIMMs, 5x more L3 cache, and up to 3x higher packet-processing performance compared to Graviton4-based instances. The faster memory and larger caches mean your workloads spend less time waiting on data, translating into higher throughput for in-memory analytics, faster agentic loops, and more responsive real-time applications.

C9g instances are ideal for batch jobs, video encoding pipelines, or distributed analytics that can utilize Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storage. It is also a natural fit for agentic AI workloads, where concurrent environments and CPU-bound reasoning steps benefit from Graviton5’s higher core count and larger caches. As AI shifts from answering questions to taking actions, running code, and orchestrating multi-step tasks, the demand for CPU compute is growing, and C9g instances are built for this shift.

Some workloads also need fast local storage alongside that compute power. Choose C9gd when your application benefits from high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage, for example scratch space during HPC simulations, temporary caches for ML inference, or local buffers for ad-serving engines.

Graviton5-based instances with NVMe instance store volumes also support detailed performance statistics, providing high-resolution I/O metrics, including latency histograms broken down by I/O size, up to 1-second granularity and accessible via Amazon CloudWatch or nvme-cli at no additional cost.

C9g and C9gd instances at a glance
C9g and C9gd instances are available in 11 sizes ranging from medium to 48xlarge, plus a bare metal option. They offer up to 15% higher network bandwidth and 20% higher EBS bandwidth on average across sizes compared to the previous generation, with the largest 48xlarge size delivering up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 72 Gbps of EBS bandwidth, a 2x increase.

C9gd instances add local NVMe SSD storage with up to 30% higher storage performance compared to previous-generation local storage instances.

Both families are well-suited for high-performance computing (HPC), batch processing, gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based machine learning inference, and ad serving.

Here are some additional capabilities:

• Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC) lets you adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networking by up to 25%, helping you optimize performance for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements such as databases and caching.
• ENA Express support for enhanced networking.
• Up to 128 EBS volumes can be attached to virtual instances.
• Support for Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.

Nitro Isolation Engine
C9g and C9gd instances are the first compute optimized Amazon EC2 instances to feature the AWS Nitro Isolation Engine, a new capability of the AWS Nitro System. The Nitro Isolation Engine is a purpose-built component of the Nitro Hypervisor, implemented in Rust, that enforces isolation between virtual machines. It mediates all access to VM memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs.

To learn more about the Nitro Isolation Engine, visit the blog post. For details on the formal verification results, including scope and assumptions, see our technical white paper.

Now available
Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances are now available in US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt). Additional regions will follow.

You can launch C9g and C9gd instances today using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs. For pricing information, visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing page.

To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances page and send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— seb

The post Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors are now available first appeared on Azalio.

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 become untenable. You need automation.

Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME) is an open protocol for requesting, renewing, and revoking TLS certificates without human intervention. It’s the same protocol behind Let’s Encrypt, and it’s supported by dozens of clients across every platform.

Today we’re announcing ACME support for public certificates in AWS Certificate Manager (ACM). ACM now provides a fully managed ACME server endpoint that works with any ACMEv2-compatible client, such as Certbot, cert-manager for Kubernetes, acme.sh, or any other client you already use. You can issue public TLS certificates from Amazon Trust Services through the standard ACME protocol.

Before today, if you wanted automated certificate management using the ACME protocol, you relied on external certificate authorities alongside ACM, leading to a fragmented visibility experience. Some certificates lived in ACM, others were managed externally with no central dashboard. PKI administrators had limited ability to control who could request certificates or which domains were allowed.

With ACME support in ACM, you can now set up one or more managed ACME endpoint that allows you to centrally manage and monitor ACME certificate usage across your organization.

As a PKI administrator, you get centralized controls that go beyond basic certificate issuance. You can bind IAM roles to ACME accounts for fine-grained access control over which domains each client can request. You can define domain scopes at the endpoint level to enforce organization-wide policies. And you get centralized monitoring and visibility in the same place: AWS CloudTrail logs every certificate request for auditability, Amazon CloudWatch tracks operational metrics, and ACM sends expiry notifications when certificates are approaching renewal. Using ACM, your PKI team can search all certificates, whether issued through the ACM console, an API call, or ACME.

How it works
To get started, you first set up a dedicated ACME endpoint, configure authorization controls using External Account Binding (EAB), validate which domains the endpoint can issue certificates for, and point your existing ACME clients to the new endpoint.

The domain validation step is important: it separates who can set up certificate issuance from who can request certificates. The PKI administrator validates domains once at the endpoint level, using DNS credentials that stay with the admin. Application owners who need certificates never touch DNS. They register with an EAB credential, and the endpoint enforces which domains and scopes they’re allowed to request. This means you can distribute certificate automation broadly across your organization without distributing DNS keys along with it.

I start this demo from the ACME certificates page in the AWS Certificate Manager console.

I already have a few endpoints and certificates in this account, I walk you through creating a new one from scratch. First, I select Create ACME endpoint.

I give my endpoint a name. The Endpoint type is Public. ACME clients will connect over the public internet. The Certificate type is Public. The certificate will be issued by Amazon Trust Services and trusted by browsers and operating systems by default. For the certificate key type, I keep the default ECDSA P-256. RSA 2048 and ECDSA P-384 are also available if your clients require them.

Scrolling down, I configure the domain. I enter my domain name and select the domain scope. The scope controls exactly what certificate patterns your ACME clients are allowed to request for this domain. If I check only Exact domain, clients can only request certificates for that specific domain name. Adding Subdomains allows certificates for any subdomain (for example, api.example.com or dev.example.com). Adding Wildcards allows wildcard certificates (*.example.com). By leaving a scope unchecked, you prevent any client using this endpoint from requesting that type of certificate, even if their ACME request is otherwise valid. For a production endpoint, you might enable only Exact domain and Subdomains while leaving Wildcards unchecked to enforce a stricter security posture.

I also select my Amazon Route 53 hosted zone from the drop down menu. ACM then automatically creates the DNS CNAME records needed for domain validation, so I don’t have to do it manually. When my domain is hosted outside of Route 53, I manually create the provided CNAME record at my DNS provider instead. This is a meaningful difference from typical ACME setups where each client handles its own domain verification independently.

These centralized controls give PKI administrators a single place to authenticate domains, restrict which certificate types (ECDSA or RSA) clients can request, and further limit wildcard issuance. Having these governance capabilities built in means you don’t need to purchase a separate certificate lifecycle management product or invest in building a custom policy layer yourself, both of which come at significant cost and operational overhead.

I select Create ACME endpoint

After a few seconds, the endpoint is created. The console shows a Setup progress tracker with the next steps. My domain shows a “Validating” status. The validation method is DNS validation, where ACM verifies that you control the domain by checking for a specific CNAME record. Because I selected my Route 53 hosted zone during creation, I select Create records in Route 53 to let ACM handle the DNS validation automatically.

The validation completes in a few seconds and the status changes to Success.

Now I need to create External Account Binding (EAB) credentials. EAB credentials are a key identifier and HMAC key pair that lets your ACME client register an account with the ACME server. Once registered, the client generates its own asymmetric key pair, which is then used to authenticate all subsequent certificate requests. On the endpoint details page, I select the External account binding tab, then select Create EAB. I give the credential a name and optionally set an expiration time, ideally no longer than needed to complete client registration.

After I select Create EAB credential, the console shows the Key ID and HMAC Key. I note these values because I need them to configure my ACME client. The setup progress now shows four green checkmarks.

I’m ready to request a certificate. On the endpoint details page, I expand the CLI reference section. The console provides ready-to-use command examples for both Certbot and acme.sh. I copy the Certbot command and run it inside a container using the certbot/certbot image.

certbot certonly --standalone --non-interactive --agree-tos 
    --email <EMAIL> 
    --server https://acm-acme-enroll.us-east-1.api.aws/<ENDPOINT_ID>/directory 
    --eab-kid <EAB_KID> 
    --eab-hmac-key <EAB_HMAC_KEY> 
    --issuance-timeout <ISSUANCE_TIMEOUT> 
    -d <DOMAIN>

I replace the placeholders with my endpoint URL, EAB credentials, and domain name. The --eab-kid and --eab-hmac-key arguments are how Certbot registers with your ACME endpoint using the External Account Binding credentials I generated earlier. Each ACME client has its own syntax for this step, so check your client’s documentation for the exact flags.

Certbot contacts the ACME endpoint and returns a valid certificate signed by Amazon Trust Services.

I use openssl to view the certificate before installing it.

The certificate is now visible in the ACM console under the ACME certificates tab, alongside any certificates issued through the console or API.

Availability and pricing
ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager is available today in all commercial AWS Regions and will be available in AWS GovCloud (US), the China Regions, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud partitions at a later date.

Pricing is per domain included in each certificate at the time of issuance, with a different price for fully qualified domain names and wildcards. Volume tiers are calculated based on total domain occurrences across all certificates issued per month in your AWS account. For details, see the ACM pricing page.

To get started, visit the ACM section on the AWS console or read the documentation.

— seb

The post Automate public TLS certificate issuance with ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager first appeared on Azalio.

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 innovation in the public sector. If you are going to be there, come say hello.

A question I hear a lot at these events is how teams can put AI to work without waiting on a long engineering backlog, and this week’s biggest launch speaks directly to that, with Amazon Connect Customer introducing a no-code way for business teams to design AI powered customer experiences themselves. Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news.

Headlines

Amazon Connect Customer launched the Agentic CX designer (NLX) in preview, a no-code canvas for designing and deploying AI powered self service experiences. Business teams can build and launch voice and digital experiences that bring agentic and deterministic AI together in one governed flow, going from design to testing and simulation to production ready experiences in weeks rather than months. The launch also includes Live Sync in preview, a patented technology that drives a customer’s web or mobile experience in real time as they speak or type. A caller can complete a form or pull up the right product page without ever leaving the conversation. To see how this reshapes who designs customer experience, read the blog post on how the business user is the new architect of customer experience and visit the Amazon Connect Customer page.

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• AWS Lambda MicroVMs – A new serverless compute primitive that gives each user or job VM level isolation with near instant launch and resume speeds, plus the ability to suspend and resume execution for up to 8 hours. Built on Firecracker, it is made for running user or AI generated code in multi-tenant applications without managing virtualization infrastructure or trading off isolation, speed, and state.
• Amazon EC2 AMI Watermarks – Lets you embed custom identifiers in your private AMIs that automatically carry forward to every derived AMI across copies, Regions, and account shares. You can combine watermarks with Allowed AMIs and Declarative Policies to restrict launches to approved images, available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions.
• AWS Outposts self-service lifecycle management – Adds self service configuration, quoting, ordering, subscription management, renewal, and decommissioning directly from the console, CLI, and API. A new quoting tool generates real time cost estimates in seconds and surfaces account and regional constraints before you submit an order.
• Amazon MSK AI Agent Skills – Gives AI coding assistants like Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor expert, up-to-date guidance for operating Amazon MSK, covering troubleshooting, sizing, configuring, monitoring, and migrating external Kafka clusters to MSK Express. Tasks that once required specialized knowledge become a guided experience developers can complete on their own.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service AI-assisted migrations – Migration Assistant now includes an agent guided experience that helps you move self managed Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch deployments to OpenSearch Serverless or Managed Clusters using tools like Kiro and Claude Code, with new live traffic capture and replay support for Solr.
• Amazon GuardDuty AI-powered investigations (preview) – Automatically analyzes findings and accounts to help you separate true threats from benign activity, examining context and related activity from the last 90 days with knowledge graphs and threat intelligence. Each investigation returns a disposition assessment with confidence scoring, MITRE ATT&CK classification, and actionable recommendations in minutes.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Open Governance for MySQL – Oracle announced a community governance model for MySQL that gives organizations outside Oracle a defined role in the project, including four non Oracle seats on a new Steering Committee and a public GitHub presence. AWS holds a seat and shares why it supports the move and how it already contributes fixes upstream for everyone running MySQL.
• A new way to keep your AWS Certification current -You can now maintain an eligible AWS Certification for an additional year by completing curated training and hands on labs on AWS Skill Builder instead of retaking a full exam. The option is available today in open beta for several Associate and Professional certifications, with more coming later this year.
• The All Builders Welcome Grant insider’s guide for 2026 applicants – A community guide on AWS Builder Center that walks early career builders through applying for the grant, which covers a full conference pass, airfare, and hotel for AWS re:Invent 2026. Applications are open now and close on July 14.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Looking for ways to connect with builders in person? Check out the AWS Summits coming to a city near you, find a local AWS Community Day led by user groups around the world, and explore tutorials, community content, and ways to grow your skills over at the AWS Builder Center.

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

-Micah

The post AWS Weekly Roundup, Agentic CX designer for Amazon Connect Customer, EC2 AMI Watermarks, Open Governance for MySQL, and more (June 29, 2026) first appeared on Azalio.

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 in complex virtualization technologies. Lambda MicroVMs are powered by Firecracker, the same lightweight virtualization technology that has powered over 15 trillions of monthly Lambda function invocations.

Why customers need this
Over the past few years a new class of multi-tenant applications has emerged that all share the need to hand each end user their own dedicated execution environment in which to safely run code that the application developer did not write. AI coding assistants, interactive code environments, data analytics platforms, vulnerability scanners, and game servers that run user-supplied scripts all fit this pattern. Building that capability today means making a difficult choice. Virtual machines deliver strong isolation but take minutes to start. Containers launch in seconds, yet their shared-kernel architecture requires significant custom hardening to safely contain untrusted code. Functions as a service are optimized for event-driven, request-response workloads, but are not designed for long-running interactive sessions that need to retain environment state across user interactions. That leaves developers either accepting tradeoffs between performance and isolation, or investing significant engineering resources to build and operate custom virtualization infrastructure to achieve isolated execution while delivering low-latency experiences to end-users. This presents an effort that demands deep expertise and pulls engineering time away from the product they are actually trying to build.

Lambda MicroVMs is purpose-built for exactly this gap. Each MicroVM gives a single end user or session its own isolated environment that launches rapidly, retains memory and disk state for the length of the session, and pauses to a low idle cost when the user steps away. Because the same Firecracker technology already underpins AWS Lambda Functions, you inherit the operational maturity of a service that has been running this stack at scale.

Let’s try it out
To get started, I navigated to the AWS Lambda console, where Lambda MicroVMs now appears in the left-hand navigation menu. I first need to create a MicroVM Image.

I packaged a Flask web app and its Dockerfile into a zip file, uploaded it to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.

My Flask API – app.py

import logging

from flask import Flask, jsonify

app = Flask(__name__)
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO)


@app.route("/")
def hello():
    app.logger.info("Received request to hello world endpoint")
    return jsonify(message="Hello, World!")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(host="0.0.0.0", port=5000)

My Dockerfile

FROM public.ecr.aws/lambda/microvms:al2023-minimal
RUN dnf install -y python3 python3-pip && dnf clean all

WORKDIR /app

COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

COPY app.py .

EXPOSE 5000

CMD ["gunicorn", "--bind", "0.0.0.0:5000", "app:app"]

I used the following command to create my MicroVM Image.

aws lambda-microvms create-microvm-image 
--code-artifact uri=<path/to/s3/artifact.zip> --name <VM_image_name> 
--base-image-arn arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:aws:microvm-image:al2023-1 
--build-role-arn <IAM role ARN>

You can also create the MicroVM Image in the AWS Console as in the image above. Once I ran the command, Lambda retrieved the zip, ran the Dockerfile, initialized the application, and took a Firecracker snapshot of the running disk and memory state. Build logs streamed in real time to Amazon CloudWatch under /aws/lambda/microvms/<image-name>, and when the image was ready it appeared in the console with its Amazon Resource Name (ARN) and version number.

aws lambda-microvms run-microvm 
--image-identifier arn:aws:lambda:<region>:<acct>:microvm-image:my-image 
--execution-role-arn arn:aws:iam::<acct>:role/MicroVMExecutionRole 
--idle-policy '{"maxIdleDurationSeconds":900,"suspendedDurationSeconds":300,"autoResumeEnabled":true}'

Launching can also be done via the AWS Console or the CLI. I passed the image ARN and an idle policy configured to auto-suspend after 15 minutes of inactivity and auto-resume on the next incoming request. No networking setup was required. Lambda assigned the MicroVM a unique ID, returned a dedicated endpoint URL, and started a new MicroVM with my Flask app already running, since it was resumed from a snapshot. My Flask app was already running the moment the launch completed. One API call to get a fully initialized, bootstrapped compute environment.

To send traffic, I generated a short-lived auth token with the CLI and attached it to a plain HTTPS request using the X-aws-proxy-auth header. The request landed on my Flask app immediately. I then let the MicroVM sit idle past the suspend threshold, at which point the MicroVM was suspended, with its memory and disk state snapshotted and stored. I then sent another request, and it resumed with the application state fully intact. From the client side, the pause never happened.

How it works
Under the covers, Lambda MicroVMs delivers three capabilities that, until today, no single AWS compute service offered together. The first is virtual machine level isolation, which comes from Firecracker. Each session runs in its own dedicated MicroVM with no shared kernel and no shared resources between users, so untrusted code supplied by one user is contained to their execution environment, without access to other environments or the underlying system. The second is rapid launch and resume. The model is image-then-launch: you create a MicroVM Image by supplying a Dockerfile and code packaged as a zip artifact in Amazon S3, and Lambda runs your Dockerfile, initializes your application, and takes a Firecracker snapshot of the running environment’s memory and disk state. Every subsequent MicroVM launched from that image resumes from the pre-initialized snapshot rather than booting cold, which means launches and idle resumes both achieve near-instant startup latency. Even a multi-gigabyte interactive session comes back online quickly enough to feel responsive to the end user. The third is stateful execution. A running MicroVM retains memory, disk, and running processes across the user’s session. During idle periods, a MicroVM can be suspended – with memory and disk state intact – and resumed when traffic arrives. Installed packages, loaded models, and working filesets are readily available when the user resumes their session. MicroVMs support up to 8 hours of total runtime and can be suspended automatically after a configurable idle window, which makes it straightforward to build products as varied as software vulnerability scans that complete in minutes, data analytics applications that run for hours, and interactive coding sessions with extended idle periods. As Lambda MicroVMs are started from pre-initialized snapshots, applications generating unique content, establishing network connections, or loading ephemeral data during initialization may need to integrate with service-provided hooks for compatibility.

Lambda MicroVMs is a new resource within AWS Lambda, with a distinct API surface. Lambda Functions remain the right choice for event-driven, request-response workloads, and Lambda MicroVMs is purpose-built for multi-tenant applications that need to hand each end user or session their own isolated environment to execute user- or AI-generated code. The two complement each other. An application using Lambda Functions for its event-driven backbone can call into Lambda MicroVMs for the steps that need to run untrusted code in isolation. You bring the application, and the service delivers the execution environment.

Now available
AWS Lambda MicroVMs is available today in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions, on the ARM64 architecture, with up to 16 vCPUs, 32 GB of memory, and 32 GB of disk per MicroVM. Idle MicroVMs can be suspended explicitly through an API call or automatically through a lifecycle policy, which reduces the running cost while preserving full state for fast resume. Pricing details can be found on the AWS Lambda pricing page.

To get started, visit the AWS Lambda console, or learn more on the Lambda MicroVMs product page. For documentation, see the Lambda MicroVMs Developer Guide.

The post Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control: AWS Lambda introduces MicroVMs first appeared on Azalio.

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 autonomous agents and access a smarter activity feed with new Amazon Quick features, which now let you create and run multi-step agents directly in the desktop app and consolidates email, Slack, calendar, and tasks into a single prioritized view with personalized rules.
• Agents for securing – You can shift from reactive to proactive security with AWS Continuum, a new AI-native security service that reasons, validates, and acts at machine speed across the full code vulnerability lifecycle. AWS Security Agent (now part of AWS Continuum) adds new features: threat modeling; pull request code scanning with remediation across major Git platforms; and IDE integrations via Kiro power, Claude Code plugin, and MCP.
• Agents for building – You can write, ship, and modernize code in one continuous loop with Kiro, AWS DevOps Agent, and AWS Transform. Kiro introduces a native iOS app; AWS DevOps Agent adds release management capabilities to assess code changes before production; and AWS Transform continuous modernization reduces tech debt autonomously.
• Agents customers create – You can go from agent idea to production in minutes with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, which now includes a GA harness for infrastructure and orchestration, Web Search, Managed Knowledge Base, policy integrations with Guardrails, and the new AWS Context service for mapping organizational data relationships.

To learn more, visit the Summit recap from our top announcements blog post and Amazon News post.

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

• AWS Local Zone in Hanoi, Vietnam  —This new Local Zone is one of the first AWS Local Zones in the Asia Pacific with support for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots, enabling customers to meet data residency requirements by storing and backing up data locally. To get started, enable the Hanoi Local Zone (ap-southeast-1-han-1a) from the Regions and Zones tab in the AWS Global View or by using the ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API.
• AWS Blocks, an open-source TypeScript framework for application developers (preview) — AWS Blocks runs a fully functional local environment with Postgres, authentication, and real-time messaging, no AWS account required. When you’re ready to deploy, the same application code runs on production AWS services with zero changes, and you can drop into AWS CDK at any point for direct resource configuration.
• Grok 4.3 from xAI in Amazon Bedrock —You can use the Grok 4.3 model on Amazon Bedrock, giving you even more choice as you build generative AI applications across reasoning, agentic, and enterprise workflows. Grok 4.3 runs on a new inference engine in Bedrock designed for price performance, with support for tool calling, structured output, and response streaming.
• Amazon S3 annotations: attach rich, queryable context directly to your objects — Amazon S3 now lets you attach up to 1 GB of rich, mutable, and queryable context directly to your objects using annotations, purpose-built for AI agents and autonomous workflows that need to discover, understand, and act on data at scale without maintaining separate metadata systems.
• Amazon ECS announces faster service auto scaling — Amazon ECS service auto scaling now detects and responds to load changes faster with support for high resolution (20-second) metrics and metric publishing optimizations. In AWS benchmarking tests, time to trigger scale-out improved from 363 seconds to 86 seconds (76% faster), and total time to scale and provision new tasks improved from 386 seconds to 109 seconds (72% faster).
• Amazon EC2 G7 instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs — 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-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, delivering up to 4.6x AI inference performance and up to 2.1x graphics performance compared to G6 instances.
• Strands Agents introduces new capabilities — Strands is an open source toolkit for building production agents. You can now use better context management in Harness SDK, a new isolated execution environment with Strands Shell, and chaos testing and red teaming in Strands Evals.
• AWS Management Console Private Access – You can access the AWS Console from VPCs without internet connectivity, allowing enterprises to manage their AWS infrastructure through the console while maintaining strict network security controls in air-gapped environments.
• AWS Marketplace Storefront is now generally available – AWS Partners can create and deploy their own branded catalog of solutions and services on their website or application in hours. Channel Partners and Independent Software Vendors can now simplify how they manage their cloud marketplace business and make it easier for customers to discover and purchase their solutions from AWS Marketplace.
• Palo Alto Networks (PANW) Advanced DNS Security on Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall (preview) – You can now enforce DNS threat protections from Palo Alto Networks directly on Route 53 DNS Firewall rules, without deploying separate firewalls or modifying VPC configurations — by subscribing to PANW from the DNS Firewall console through the embedded AWS Marketplace widget.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Price reductions 
AWS continues to look for ways to increase performance and lower prices for our customers. I noticed a few such efforts last week, so I’d like to share them:

• Amazon S3 Vectors reduces query charges by up to 80% for large vector indexes — This reduction lowers costs for customers running similarity search across large-scale AI, RAG, and semantic search workloads. The new pricing applies automatically with no application changes required.
• Amazon GameLift Servers introduces free network bandwidth — Amazon GameLift Servers provides network bandwidth in and out of AWS at no additional charge for all instance types from generation 6 and later, including On-Demand and Spot, with no commitment required. You now pay only for your Amazon GameLift Servers instance hours; all network bandwidth is free.
• AWS Marketplace reduces listing fee for professional services to 0.5% from 2.5% — This reduction makes it more cost-effective for consulting partners, systems integrators, managed services providers and independent software vendors to transact their services through AWS Marketplace, while retaining the procurement and billing benefits that come with it.

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events as well as AWS Summits and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

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

— Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: NY Summit recap, Local Zone in Hanoi, Grok 4.3 in Bedrock, price reductions, and more (June 22, 2026) first appeared on Azalio.