Many events are taking place in this period! Last week I was at the AI Week in Italy. This week I’ll be in Zurich for the AWS Community Day – Switzerland. On May 22, you can join us remotely for AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day to learn about cutting-edge advances across compute, AI/ML, storage, networking, serverless technologies, and global infrastructure. Look for events near you for an opportunity to share your knowledge and learn from others.
What got me particularly excited last Friday was the introduction of Strands Agents, an open source SDK that you can use to build and run AI agents in just a few lines of code. It can scale from simple to complex use cases, including local development and production deployment. By default, it uses Amazon Bedrock as model provider, but many others are supported, including Ollama (to run models locally), Anthropic, Llama API, and LiteLLM (to provide a unified interface for other providers such as Mistral). With Strands, you can use any Python function as a tool for your agent with the @tool decorator. Strands provides many example tools for manipulating files, making API requests, and interacting with AWS APIs. You can also choose from thousands of published Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, including this suite of specialized MCP servers that help you get the most out of AWS. Multiple teams at AWS already use Strands for their AI agents in production, including Amazon Q Developer, AWS Glue, and VPC Reachability Analyzer. Read it all in Clare’s post.
Last week’s launches
Here are the other launches that got my attention:
- AWS Transform for .NET, the first agentic AI service for modernizing .NET applications at scale – Compared to the preview, we added new capabilities to support projects with private NuGet packages, porting model-view-controller (MVC) Razor views to ASP .NET Core Razor views, and running the ported unit tests.
- Accelerate the modernization of Mainframe and VMware workloads with AWS Transform – To automate assessment, planning, and transformation of both mainframe and VMware workloads into cloud-based architectures, streamlining the entire process.
- Amazon Bedrock Guardrails now supports cross-Region inference – Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides configurable safeguards when invoking any model including those hosted in Amazon Bedrock, self-hosted models, and third-party models outside Bedrock using the ApplyGuardrail API, providing a consistent experience to help standardize safety and privacy controls. With this new capability, you get consistent throughput and enhanced resilience during periods of peak demand.
- Amazon VPC adds CloudTrail logging for VPC resources created by default – Now, at the time of creation or deletion of the VPC, you can con view events that trigger the creation or deletion of default resources such as security group, network access control list (ACL), and route table. This provides improved visibility of VPC resources and can help you in auditing and governance.
- AWS EC2 instances now support ENA queue allocation for your network interfaces – Elastic network adapter (ENA) queues are key components of elastic network interfaces (ENIs) to help efficiently manage network traffic by load balancing sent and received data across available queues. This flexible ENA queue allocation enables maximum vCPU utilization through optimized resource distribution. Network-intensive applications can be allocated more queues, and CPU-intensive applications can operate with fewer queues.
- New Amazon EC2 P6-B200 instances powered by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to accelerate AI innovations – These instances are especially well-suited for large-scale distributed AI training and inferencing for foundation models (FMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) and distillation, multimodal training and inference, and high performance computing (HPC) applications such as climate modeling, drug discovery, seismic analysis, and insurance risk modeling.
- AWS Control Tower introduces account-level reporting for baseline APIs – Now you can use baseline status to view enrollment for your accounts and use drift status to identify when account and organizational unit (OU) baseline configurations are out of sync.
- Simplify AWS AppSync Events integration with Powertools for AWS Lambda – Powertools for AWS is a developer toolkit that includes observability, batch processing, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store integration, idempotency, feature flags, Amazon CloudWatch metrics, structured logging, and more. Powertools for AWS now supports AppSync Events through the new resolver, available in Python, TypeScript, and .NET.
- Accelerate CI/CD pipelines with the new AWS CodeBuild Docker Server capability – You can now provision a fully managed Docker server that reduces wait times, increases overall efficiency, and can maintain a persistent cache across builds.
- AWS CodePipeline now supports deploying to AWS Lambda with traffic shifting – To publish Lambda function updates using either linear or canary deployment patterns.
- Amazon Cognito now supports OIDC prompt parameter – To choose if users should reauthenticate explicitly (maintaining their existing authenticated sessions) or have a silent check on their authentication state.
Additional updates
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that you might find interesting:
- Securing Amazon S3 presigned URLs for serverless applications – Focusing on the security ramifications of using Amazon S3 presigned URLs, explaining mitigation steps that developers can take to improve the security of their systems using S3 presigned URLs, and walking through an AWS Lambda function that adheres to the provided recommendations.
- Running GenAI Inference with AWS Graviton and Arcee AI Models – While large language models (LLMs) are capable of a wide variety of tasks, they require compute resources to support hundreds of billions and sometimes trillions of parameters. Small language models (SLMs) in contrast typically have a range of 3 to 15 billion parameters and can provide responses more efficiently. In this post, we share how to optimize SLM inference workloads using AWS Graviton based instances.
Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events:
- AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Dubai (May 21), Tel Aviv (May 28), Singapore (May 29), Stockholm (June 4), Sydney (June 4–5), Washington (June 10-11), and Madrid (June 11)
- AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day – On May 22, discover the latest innovations in AWS Cloud infrastructure technologies at this exclusive technical event.
- AWS re:Inforce – Mark your calendars for AWS re:Inforce (June 16–18) in Philadelphia, PA. AWS re:Inforce is a learning conference focused on AWS security solutions, cloud security, compliance, and identity.
- AWS Partners Events – You’ll find a variety of AWS Partner events that will inspire and educate you, whether you’re just getting started on your cloud journey or you’re looking to solve new business challenges.
- AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Zurich, Switzerland (May 22), Bengaluru, India (May 23), Yerevan, Armenia (May 24), Milwaukee, USA (June 5), and Nairobi, Kenya (June 14)
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
– Danilo