AWS Weekly Review: Amazon S3 Express One Zone price cuts, Pixtral Large on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Nova Sonic, and more (April 14, 2025)

By Dustin Ward

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit 2025 season launched this week, starting with the Paris Summit. These free events bring together the global cloud computing community for learning and collaboration. AWS Community Day Romania, held on April 11th, showcased how the local community creates opportunities for collective growth and inclusion. Last week’s launches Announcing up…

Announcing up to 85% price reductions for Amazon S3 Express One Zone

By Dustin Ward

At re:Invent 2023, we introduced Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a high-performance, single-Availability Zone (AZ) storage class purpose-built to deliver consistent single-digit millisecond data access for your most frequently accessed data and latency-sensitive applications. S3 Express One Zone delivers data access speed up to 10 times faster than S3 Standard, and it can support up…

AWS announces Pixtral Large 25.02 model in Amazon Bedrock serverless

By Dustin Ward

Today, we announce that the Pixtral Large 25.02 model is now available in Amazon Bedrock as a fully managed, serverless offering. AWS is the first major cloud provider to deliver Pixtral Large as a fully managed, serverless model. Working with large foundation models (FMs) often requires significant infrastructure planning, specialized expertise, and ongoing optimization to…

Introducing Amazon Nova Sonic: Human-like voice conversations for generative AI applications

By Dustin Ward

Voice interfaces are essential to enhance customer experience in different areas such as customer support call automation, gaming, interactive education, and language learning. However, there are challenges when building voice-enabled applications. Traditional approaches in building voice-enabled applications require complex orchestration of multiple models, such as speech recognition to convert speech to text, language models to…

Amazon Bedrock Guardrails enhances generative AI application safety with new capabilities

By Dustin Ward

Since we launched Amazon Bedrock Guardrails over one year ago, customers like Grab, Remitly, KONE, and PagerDuty have used Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to standardize protections across their generative AI applications, bridge the gap between native model protections and enterprise requirements, and streamline governance processes. Today, we’re introducing a new set of capabilities that helps customers…

Amazon Nova Reel 1.1: Featuring up to 2-minutes multi-shot videos

By Dustin Ward

At re:Invent 2024, we announced Amazon Nova models, a new generation of foundation models (FMs), including Amazon Nova Reel, a video generation model that creates short videos from text descriptions and optional reference images (together, the “prompt”). Today, we introduce Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, which provides quality and latency improvements in 6-second single-shot video generation,…