Summit season is in full throttle! If you haven’t been to an AWS Summit, I highly recommend you check one out that’s nearby. They are large-scale all-day events where you can attend talks, watch interesting demos and activities, connect with AWS and industry people, and more. Best of all, they are free—so all you need to do is register! You can find a list of them here in the AWS Events page. Incidentally, you can also discover other AWS events going in your area on that same page; just use the filters on the side to find something that interests you.
Speaking of AWS Summits, this week is the AWS Summit London (April 30). It’s local for me, and I have been heavily involved in the planning. You do not want to miss this! Make sure to check it out and hopefully I’ll be seeing you there.
Ready to find out some highlights from last week’s exciting AWS launches? Let’s go!
New features and capabilities highlights
Let’s start by looking at some of the enhancements launched last week.
- Amazon Q Developer releases state of the art agent for feature development — AWS has announced an update to Amazon Q Developer’s software development agent, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on industry benchmarks and can generate multiple candidate solutions for coding problems. This new agent provides more reliable suggestions helping to reduce debugging time and enabling developers to focus on higher-level design and innovation.
- Amazon Cognito now supports refresh token rotation — Amazon Cognito now supports OAuth 2.0 refresh token rotation, allowing user pool clients to automatically replace existing refresh tokens with new ones at regular intervals, enhancing security without requiring users to re-authenticate. This feature helps customers achieve both seamless user experience and improved security by automatically updating refresh tokens frequently, rather than having to choose between long-lived tokens for convenience, or short-lived tokens for security.
- Amazon Bedrock Intelligent Prompt Routing is now generally available — Amazon Bedrock’s Intelligent Prompt Routing, now generally available, automatically routes prompts to different foundation models within a model family to optimize response quality and cost. The service now offers increased configurability across multiple model families including Claude (Anthropic), Llama (Meta), and Nova (Amazon), allowing users to choose any two models from a family and set custom routing criteria.
- Upgrades to Amazon Q Business integrations for M365 Word and Outlook — Amazon Q Business integrations for Microsoft Word and Outlook now have the ability to search company knowledge bases, support image attachments, and handle larger context windows for more detailed prompts. These enhancements enable users to seamlessly access indexed company data and incorporate richer content while working on documents and emails, without needing to switch between different applications or contexts.
Security
There were a few new security improvements released last week, but these are the ones that caught my eye:
- AWS Account Management now supports account name update via authorized IAM principals — AWS now allows IAM principals to update account names, removing the previous requirement for root user access. This applies to both standalone accounts and member accounts within AWS Organizations, where authorized IAM principals in management and delegated admin accounts can manage account names centrally.
- AWS Resource Explorer now supports AWS PrivateLink — AWS Resource Explorer now supports AWS PrivateLink across all commercial Regions, enabling secure resource discovery and search capabilities across AWS Regions and accounts within your VPC, without requiring public internet access.
- Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse now supports attribute based access control — Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse now supports attribute-based access control (ABAC), allowing administrators to manage data access permissions using dynamic attributes associated with IAM identities rather than creating individual policies. This simplifies access management by enabling permissions to be automatically granted to any IAM principal with matching tags, making it more efficient to handle access control as teams grow.
Networking
As you may be aware, there is a growing industry push to adopt IPv6 as the default protocol for new systems while migrating existing infrastructure where possible. This week, two more services have added their support to help customers towards that goal:
- Amazon SQS now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) — Amazon SQS now supports IPv6 for API requests, allowing customers to communicate using IPv6, IPv4, or dual stack clients through public endpoints.
- AWS AppConfig now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) — Now supports both IPv4 and IPv6 endpoints while preserving existing IPv4 functionality.
Capacity and costs
Customers using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams can enjoy higher default quotas, while Amazon Redshift Serverless customers get a new cost saving opportunity.
- Amazon Kinesis Data Streams increases default shard limits to up to 20,000 per AWS account — Amazon Kinesis Data Streams now supports higher default processing capacity with up to 20,000 shards per account in certain Regions, enabling customers to handle 10 GB/sec input and 20 GB/sec output without requesting limit increases.
- Serverless Reservations for Amazon Redshift Serverless — You can now reduce Amazon Redshift Serverless costs by up to 24% by committing to a specific RPU capacity for one year, choosing either to pay nothing upfront for a 20% discount or pay all upfront for maximum savings.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to visit the What’s New with AWS? page.
Recommended Learning Resources
Everyone’s talking about MCP recently! Here are two great blog posts that I think will help you catch up and learn more about the possibilities of how to use MCP on AWS.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Amazon Bedrock — In this post, Giuseppe Battista shows you how to use MCP with Amazon Bedrock.
- Scaling MCP Across Your Organization Through AWS Lambda — A very cool take by Chris Williams on how you can keep your MCP server locally while registering remote tools running on AWS Lambda for scalability and security.
Our Weekly Roundup is published every Monday to help you keep up with AWS launches, so don’t forget to check it again next week for more exciting news!
Enjoy the rest of your day!
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