Last week, I spent some downtime in York, England, a place widely known as the country’s most haunted city. I explored the ruins of abbeys that have been standing for close to a millennium, strolled along medieval walls, and joined an evening ghost tour filled with stories passed down over the centuries. Standing in a place that has seen so much history is deeply grounding. Now that I’m back at my desk, the contrast is impossible to ignore: those ancient abbey stones have remained nearly unchanged for a thousand years, yet in just one week away, technology took yet another leap forward.
The ruins of Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. Stones that have witnessed a thousand years of history, while this past week alone brought another wave of change.
Now, let’s dive into this week’s AWS news.
Headlines
On April 28, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, Colleen Aubrey, SVP of Amazon Applied AI Solutions, Julia White, CMO of AWS, alongside OpenAI leaders, took the stage to discuss how customers are reshaping business operations with agents. The event featured a packed lineup of announcements spanning Amazon Quick, Amazon Connect, and an expanded partnership with OpenAI. Here’s a summary of the biggest reveals from the event.
Amazon Quick expands with a desktop app, new pricing plans, and visual asset generation – Amazon Quick is an AI assistant built for work that connects to your apps, learns your priorities, and takes action for you. This week, Quick rolled out a new desktop app (Preview) that keeps you connected to your local files, calendar, and communications — no browser needed. Sign up in just a few minutes using your personal email or existing Google, Apple, GitHub, or Amazon credentials — no AWS account necessary. Quick can now create polished documents, presentations, infographics, and images right from the chat interface, and native integrations now include Google Workspace, Zoom, Airtable, Dropbox, and Microsoft Teams. A new capability called Build custom apps with Quick (Preview) lets you create smart apps, dashboards, and web pages tied to the rest of your business using natural language.
Amazon Connect grows into four agentic AI solutions – Amazon Connect is evolving from a single product into a suite of four agentic AI solutions built to fit into your existing workflows. Amazon Connect Decisions is a supply chain planning and intelligence tool that helps teams move from crisis management to proactive planning, combining 30 years of Amazon operational expertise with more than 25 specialized supply chain tools. Amazon Connect Talent (Preview) is an AI-powered hiring solution offering AI-led interviews, science-backed assessments, and consistent evaluation for talent acquisition teams managing large-scale hiring. Amazon Connect Customer, formerly known as Amazon Connect, delivers personalized customer experiences across voice, chat, and digital channels, with new configuration tools that allow organizations to set up conversational AI in weeks instead of months. Amazon Connect Health provides agentic patient verification, appointment scheduling, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding — getting patients faster access to care and giving clinicians more time to deliver it.
AWS and OpenAI deepen their partnership across Amazon Bedrock – AWS and OpenAI are bringing the newest OpenAI models to Amazon Bedrock, launching Codex on Amazon Bedrock, and introducing Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI — all in limited preview. OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock (Limited Preview) bring the latest OpenAI models, including GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4, to the Bedrock APIs you already rely on, with unified security, governance, and cost controls. No extra infrastructure to set up, no new security model to adapt to. Codex on Amazon Bedrock (Limited Preview) lets you access the OpenAI coding agent within your existing AWS environment, authenticating with your AWS credentials, processing inference through Bedrock, and applying Codex usage toward your AWS cloud commitments. Codex on Bedrock is available through the Bedrock API, starting with the Codex CLI, the Codex desktop app, and a Visual Studio Code extension. Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI (Limited Preview) combine OpenAI’s leading-edge models with AWS infrastructure to build production-ready, OpenAI-powered agents in the cloud, built on the OpenAI harness for faster execution, sharper reasoning, and reliable handling of long-running tasks.
To learn more, visit Top announcements of the What’s Next with AWS, 2026.
Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from the past week that caught my eye:
- Amazon EC2 M8in and M8ib instances are now generally available – Powered by custom 6th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 6th-gen AWS Nitro cards, these instances deliver up to 43% better performance compared to M6in and M6ib. M8in offers 600 Gbps network bandwidth, while M8ib provides up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth. Available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Spain).
- Amazon EC2 R8in and R8ib instances are now generally available – Memory-optimized instances built on the same 6th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Nitro cards, featuring the same 600 Gbps network and 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth profiles. Ideal for large-scale commercial databases, data lakes, and in-memory databases such as SAP HANA. Available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Spain).
- Amazon EC2 C8ine and M8ine instances are now generally available – Network-optimized instances offering up to 2.5x better packet performance per vCPU and up to 2x greater network throughput for traffic through internet gateways compared to C6in and M6in. Designed for security and network virtual appliances including virtual firewalls, load balancers, and 5G UPF workloads. Available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) for C8ine; US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) for M8ine.
- Amazon Bedrock AgentCore adds optimization capabilities (Preview) – AgentCore now provides recommendations, batch evaluations, and A/B tests to close the observe-evaluate-improve loop for agents running in production. Recommendations analyze production traces and evaluation results to suggest improved system prompts and tool descriptions, which you can verify with batch evaluations against predefined test cases or A/B tests against live traffic. Every recommendation requires your approval before it goes live.
- AWS Lambda adds support for Ruby 4.0 – Ruby 4.0, the latest LTS release, is now available as a Lambda managed runtime and container base image. It includes support for Lambda advanced logging controls, including JSON structured logs, configurable
logging levels, and target CloudWatch log group settings. Available across all AWS Regions, including China Regions and AWS GovCloud (US).
For a complete rundown of the latest AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.
Other AWS News
Here are a few more posts and resources you may find useful:
- Amazon Q Developer end-of-support announcement – Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins and paid subscriptions will reach end of support on April 30, 2027, giving customers a full 12 months to migrate to Kiro. New registrations will be blocked starting May 15, 2026, although current subscriptions can still add users. Beginning May 29, 2026, Opus 4.6 will be removed from Q Developer Pro; Opus 4.5 and other existing models will remain accessible, while the newest coding models, including Opus 4.7, will be available only on Kiro. Amazon Q Developer within the AWS Management Console and first-party AWS experiences (documentation, mobile app, Slack, and Microsoft Teams) are unaffected.
- AWS 10,000 AIdeas Competition: Meet the Winners – AWS has revealed the 20 winners of the 10,000 AIdeas Competition, a global challenge inviting builders to submit AI applications created entirely with Kiro and the AWS Free Tier. Submissions came from 115 countries and were narrowed down through four rounds of evaluation and two rounds of community voting. Winners were selected across Global Champions, Regional Champions, Innovation Awards, and Creative Track categories, with cash prizes and AWS credits awarded at each tier.
- AWS Student Builder Groups – AWS Cloud Clubs is evolving into AWS Student Builder Groups. The community now spans more than 600 colleges and universities across 63 countries. All existing Cloud Club memberships, badges, and progress carry over, and Cloud Club Captains will transition to Group Leaders. Any learner aged 18 or older is welcome to join. You can find a group near you on the AWS Builder Center or apply to start a new group at your campus.
Upcoming AWS Events
Mark your calendar and register for these upcoming AWS events:
- AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free, in-person events focused on cloud and AI. Coming up in May: Singapore (May 6), Tel Aviv (May 6), Warsaw (May 6), Stockholm (May 7), Sydney (May 13–14), Hamburg (May 20), Seoul (May 20), Amsterdam (May 27), Milano (May 28), and Mumbai (May 28).
- AWS Community Days – Community-organized conferences planned and led by local community leaders. Upcoming events include İstanbul, Türkiye (May 9) and Panama City, Panama (May 23).
Visit the AWS Builder Center to connect with fellow builders, share solutions, and discover resources to keep you building. You can also browse upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, along with developer-focused sessions.
— Esra
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick recap of the latest news and announcements from AWS!
