Last week, the AWS Summit in New York City gathered thousands of customers, partners, and cloud builders for a complimentary, single-day event highlighting the newest advances in cloud computing and artificial intelligence. During his keynote address, Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Agentic AI at AWS, introduced a series of AI-powered launches, all centered on a single core idea: AI agents that grow more valuable the longer they’re used.
- Agents for working – You can now spin up autonomous AI agents and tap into a more intelligent activity feed through new Amazon Quick capabilities. These allow you to build and execute multi-step agents right within the desktop application, while also pulling together email, Slack, calendar, and task items into one unified, prioritized dashboard with customizable rules.
- Agents for securing – You can move from a reactive security posture to a proactive one with AWS Continuum, a newly introduced AI-native security service that reasons, validates, and takes action at machine speed across the entire code vulnerability lifecycle. AWS Security Agent (now integrated into AWS Continuum) brings additional capabilities: threat modeling, pull request code scanning with automated remediation across leading Git platforms, and IDE integrations powered by Kiro, the Claude Code plugin, and MCP.
- Agents for building – You can write, deploy, and modernize code within a seamless, continuous workflow using Kiro, AWS DevOps Agent, and AWS Transform. Kiro now offers a native iOS application; AWS DevOps Agent introduces release management features to evaluate code changes before they hit production; and AWS Transform autonomously handles ongoing modernization to reduce technical debt.
- Agents customers create – You can take an agent concept and move it into production within minutes using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, which now provides a generally available harness for infrastructure and orchestration, Web Search, a Managed Knowledge Base, policy integrations with Guardrails, and the new AWS Context service for mapping relationships across organizational data.
For further details, check out the Summit recap in our top announcements blog post and the Amazon News article.
Last week’s launches
Here are the announcements from last week that stood out to me:
- AWS Local Zone in Hanoi, Vietnam — This newly launched Local Zone is among the first AWS Local Zones in the Asia Pacific region, offering support for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots. It enables customers to satisfy data residency requirements by storing and backing up data within the local region. To begin, activate 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 provides a fully operational local development environment complete with Postgres, authentication, and real-time messaging — no AWS account needed. When you’re ready to go live, the identical application code runs on production AWS services without any modifications, and you can seamlessly incorporate AWS CDK at any stage for direct resource configuration.
- Grok 4.3 from xAI in Amazon Bedrock — The Grok 4.3 model is now available on Amazon Bedrock, expanding your options for building generative AI applications across reasoning, agent-driven, and enterprise workflows. Grok 4.3 operates on a new inference engine within Bedrock optimized 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 allows you to attach up to 1 GB of rich, mutable, and queryable context directly to your objects through annotations. This feature is purpose-built for AI agents and autonomous workflows that need to discover, interpret, and act on data at scale without the overhead of maintaining separate metadata systems.
- Amazon ECS announces faster service auto scaling — Amazon ECS service auto scaling now identifies and reacts to load changes more quickly, with support for high-resolution (20-second) metrics and optimized metric publishing. In AWS benchmarking tests, the time to initiate scale-out dropped from 363 seconds to 86 seconds (76% faster), and the total time to scale and provision new tasks decreased 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 offer support for NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. G7 instances are powered by these GPUs alongside custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, delivering up to 4.6x improvement in AI inference performance and up to 2.1x boost in graphics performance compared to G6 instances.
- Strands Agents introduces new capabilities — Strands is an open-source toolkit for building production-grade agents. New additions include improved context management in the Harness SDK, a new isolated execution environment via Strands Shell, and chaos testing and red teaming capabilities in Strands Evals.
- AWS Management Console Private Access — You can now access the AWS Management Console from within VPCs without requiring internet connectivity, enabling enterprises to manage their AWS infrastructure through the console while upholding strict network security controls in air-gapped environments.
- AWS Marketplace Storefront is now generally available — AWS Partners can now build and launch their own branded catalog of solutions and services on their website or application within hours. Channel Partners and Independent Software Vendors can streamline how they manage their cloud marketplace business, making it simpler for customers to discover and purchase their solutions through AWS Marketplace.
- Palo Alto Networks (PANW) Advanced DNS Security on Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall (preview) — You can now apply DNS threat protections from Palo Alto Networks directly on Route 53 DNS Firewall rules without deploying separate firewalls or altering VPC configurations — simply subscribe to PANW from the DNS Firewall console using the embedded AWS Marketplace widget.
For a comprehensive list of all AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.
Price reductions
AWS continues to seek out ways to boost performance and reduce costs for our customers. I noticed several such efforts last week and wanted to share them:
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That wraps up this week’s roundup. Come back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
— Channy
