Tag Archives: announcements

Amazon FSx for Lustre launches new storage class with the lowest-cost and only fully elastic Lustre file storage

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-fsx-for-lustre-adds-new-storage-class-with-the-lowest-cost-and-only-fully-elastic-lustre-file-storage/

Seismic imaging is a geophysical technique used to create detailed pictures of the Earth’s subsurface structure. It works by generating seismic waves that travel into the ground, reflect off various rock layers and structures, and return to the surface where they’re detected by sensitive instruments known as geophones or hydrophones. The huge volumes of acquired data often reach petabytes for a single survey and this presents significant storage, processing, and management challenges for researchers and energy companies.

Customers who run these seismic imaging workloads or other high performance computing (HPC) workloads, such as weather forecasting, advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) training, or genomics analysis, already store the huge volumes of data on either hard disk drive (HDD)-based or a combination of HDD and solid state drive (SSD) file storage on premises. However, as these on premises datasets and workloads scale, customers find it increasingly challenging and expensive due to the need to make upfront capital investments to keep up with performance needs of their workloads and avoid running out of storage capacity.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of the Amazon FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering, a new storage class that delivers virtually unlimited scalability, the only fully elastic Lustre file storage, and the lowest cost Lustre file storage in the cloud. With a starting price of less than $0.005 per GB-month, FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering offers the lowest cost high-performance file storage in the cloud, reducing storage costs for infrequently accessed data by up to 96 percent compared to other managed Lustre options. Elasticity means you no longer need to provision storage capacity upfront because your file system will grow and shrink as you add or delete data, and you pay only for the amount of data you store.

FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering automatically optimizes costs by tiering cold data to the applicable lower-cost storage tier based on access patterns and includes an optional SSD read cache to improve performance for your most latency sensitive workloads. Intelligent-Tiering delivers high performance whether you’re starting with gigabytes of experimental data or working with large petabyte-scale datasets for your most demanding artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and HPC workloads. With the flexibility to adjust your file system’s performance independent of storage, Intelligent-Tiering delivers up to 34 percent better price performance than on premises HDD file systems. The Intelligent-Tiering storage class is optimized for HDD-based or mixed HDD/SSD workloads that have a combination of hot and cold data. You can migrate and run such workloads to FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering without application changes, eliminating storage capacity planning and management, while paying only for the resources that you use.

Prior to this launch, customers used the FSx for Lustre SSD storage class to accelerate ML and HPC workloads that need all-SSD performance and consistent low-latency access to all data. However, many workloads have a combination of hot and cold data and they don’t need all-SSD storage for colder portions of the data. FSx for Lustre is increasingly used in AI/ML workloads to increase graphics processing unit (GPU) utilization, and now it’s even more cost optimized to be one of the options for these workloads.

FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering
Your data moves between three storage tiers (Frequent Access, Infrequent Access, and Archive) with no effort on your part, so you get automatic cost savings with no upfront costs or commitments. The tiering works as follows:

Frequent Access – Data that has been accessed within the last 30 days is stored in this tier.

Infrequent Access – Data that hasn’t been accessed for 30 – 90 days is stored in this tier, at a 44 percent cost reduction from Frequent Access.

Archive – Data that hasn’t been accessed for 90 or more days is stored in this tier, at a 65 percent cost reduction compared to Infrequent Access.

Regardless of the storage tier, your data is stored across multiple AWS Availability Zones for redundancy and availability, compared to typical on-premises implementations, which are usually confined within a single physical location. Additionally, your data can be retrieved instantly in milliseconds.

Creating a file system
I can create a file system using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), API, or AWS CloudFormation. On the console, I choose Create file system to get started.


I select Amazon FSx for Lustre and choose Next.


Now, it’s time to enter the rest of the information to create the file system. I enter a name (veliswa_fsxINT_1) for my file system, and for deployment and storage class, I select Persistent, Intelligent-Tiering. I choose the desired Throughput capacity and the Metadata IOPS. The SSD read cache will be automatically configured by FSx for Lustre based on the specified throughput capacity. I leave the rest as the default, choose Next, and review my choices to create my file system.

With Amazon FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering, you have the flexibility to provision the necessary performance for your workloads without having to provision any underlying storage capacity upfront.


I wanted to know which values were editable after creation, so I paid closer attention before finalizing the creation of the file system. I noted that Throughput capacity, Metadata IOPS, Security groups, SSD read cache, and a few others were editable later. After I start running the ML jobs, it might be necessary to increase the throughput capacity based on the volumes of data I’ll be processing, so this information is important to me.

The file system is now available. Considering that I’ll be running HPC workloads, I anticipate that I’ll be processing high volumes of data later, so I’ll increase the throughput capacity to 24 GB/s. After all, I only pay for the resources I use.



The SSD read cache is scaled automatically as your performance needs increase. You can adjust the cache size any time independently in user-provisioned mode or disable the read cache if you don’t need low-latency access.


Good to know

  • FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering is designed to deliver up to multiple terabytes per second of total throughput.
  • FSx for Lustre with Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA)/GPU Direct Storage (GDS) support provides up to 12x (up to 1200 Gbps) higher per-client throughput compared to the previous FSx for Lustre systems.
  • It can deliver up to tens of millions of IOPS for writes and cached reads. Data in the SSD read cache has submillisecond time-to-first-byte latencies, and all other data has time-to-first-byte latencies in the range of tens of milliseconds.

Now available
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

FSx Intelligent-Tiering storage class is available in the new FSx for Lustre file systems in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo) AWS Regions.

You pay for data and metadata you store on your file system (GB/months). When you write data or when you read data that is not in the SSD read cache, you pay per operation. You pay for the total throughput capacity (in MBps/month), metadata IOPS (IOPS/month), and SSD read cache size for data and metadata (GB/month) you provision on your file system. To learn more, visit the Amazon FSx for Lustre Pricing page. To learn more about Amazon FSx for Lustre including this feature, visit the Amazon FSx for Lustre page.

Give Amazon FSx for Lustre Intelligent-Tiering a try in the Amazon FSx console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon FSx for Lustre or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

Veliswa.


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Introducing AWS Serverless MCP Server: AI-powered development for modern applications

Post Syndicated from Shridhar Pandey original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-aws-serverless-mcp-server-ai-powered-development-for-modern-applications/

Modern application development demands faster, more efficient ways to build and deploy software. Over the past decade, serverless computing has emerged as a transformative approach to software development, enabling developers to focus on building applications without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. As developers build their applications using AWS Serverless Compute, they seek guidance on selecting appropriate services, understanding best practices, and implementation patterns to make the most of this paradigm.

Today, AWS announces the open-source AWS Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, a tool that combines the power of AI assistance with serverless expertise to enhance how developers build modern applications. The Serverless MCP Server provides contextual guidance specific to serverless development, helping developers make informed decisions about architecture, implementation, and deployment.

This post describes how the Serverless MCP Server works with AI coding assistants to streamline serverless development. Learn how to use this solution to accelerate your serverless development workflow and build robust, high-performing applications more efficiently.

Overview 

Serverless computing enables development teams to significantly reduce time-to-market while improving operational efficiency. Developers can focus on creating business value, while AWS services automatically handle scaling, availability, and infrastructure maintenance. AWS Lambda provides a seamless compute service where code runs in response to events, scaling instantly from a few requests per day to thousands per second. Through integration with over 200 AWS services, Lambda enables developers to build sophisticated applications using triggers from Amazon API Gateway, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and many others. Whether you’re building data processing pipelines, real-time stream processing, or web applications, Lambda’s support for popular programming languages and development frameworks helps development teams leverage their existing skills while embracing the serverless paradigm.

MCP Server

MCP is an open protocol for AI agents to interact with external tools and data sources. It defines how AI assistants can discover, understand, and use various capabilities provided by external systems. This protocol allows AI models to extend their functionality beyond their own training data by accessing real-time information and executing specific tasks through standardized interfaces.

MCP servers implement this protocol by providing tools, resources, and contextual information that AI assistants can use via MCP clients. They serve as a knowledge bridge that gives AI assistants, such as Amazon Q Developer, Cline, and Cursor, the additional context needed to make informed decisions about cloud architecture and implementation. This is particularly valuable for serverless applications, where developers navigate multiple services, event patterns, and integration points to build scalable, performant applications.

AWS currently offers the AWS Lambda Tool MCP Server, which allows AI models to directly interact with existing Lambda functions as MCP tools without any code changes. This MCP server acts as a bridge between MCP clients and Lambda functions, allowing AI assistants to access and invoke Lambda functions.

Serverless MCP Server

The open-source AWS Serverless MCP launched today enhances the serverless development experience by providing AI coding assistants with comprehensive knowledge of serverless patterns, best practices, and AWS services. This MCP server acts as an intelligent companion, guiding developers through the entire application development lifecycle, from initial design to deployment, offering contextual assistance at each stage.

The new Serverless MCP server provides tools that cover many areas of serverless development. During the initial planning and setup phase, the MCP server helps developers initialize new projects using AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) templates, select appropriate Lambda runtimes, and set up project dependencies. This enables developers to quickly bootstrap new serverless applications with the right configuration and structure.

As development progresses, the MCP server assists with building and deploying serverless applications. It provides tools for local testing, building deployment artifacts, and managing deployments. For web applications, the MCP server offers specialized support for deploying backend, frontend, or full-stack applications, and setting up custom domains.

The MCP server also emphasizes operational excellence through comprehensive observability tools, helping developers to effectively monitor application performance and troubleshoot issues. Throughout the development process, the server provides contextual guidance for infrastructure as code (IaC) decisions, Lambda-specific best practices, and event schemas for Lambda event source mappings (ESMs).

Serverless MCP Server in action

To demonstrate the capabilities of the Serverless MCP Server, this example walks you through a scenario of creating, deploying, and troubleshooting a serverless application.

Prerequisites and installation

To get started, download the AWS Serverless MCP Server from GitHub or Python Package Index (PyPi) and follow the installation instructions. You can use this MCP server with any AI coding assistant of your choice, such as Q Developer, Cursor, Cline, etc. The walkthrough example in this post uses Cline.

Add the following code to your MCP client configuration. The Serverless MCP Server uses the default AWS profile by default. Specify a value in AWS_PROFILE if you want to use a different profile. Similarly, adjust the AWS Region and log level values as needed.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "awslabs.aws-serverless-mcp": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": [
        "awslabs.aws_serverless_mcp_server@latest"
      ],
      "env": { 
        "AWS_PROFILE": "your-aws-profile",
        "AWS_REGION": "us-east-1",
        "FASTMCP_LOG_LEVEL": "ERROR"
      }
    }
  }
}

The Serverless MCP Server incorporates built-in guardrails to ensure secure and controlled development. By default, the MCP server operates in a read-only mode, allowing only non-mutating actions. This safety-first approach allows you to explore serverless capabilities and architectural patterns while preventing unintended changes to your applications or infrastructure. The server also restricts access to Amazon CloudWatch Logs by default, protecting sensitive operational data from exposure to AI assistants.

As your development needs evolve, you can selectively override these security defaults. The --allow-write flag enables mutating operations for tasks such as deployments and updates, while --allow-sensitive-data-access provides access to CloudWatch Logs for debugging and troubleshooting. Consider enabling these permissions only when necessary and in appropriate development contexts.

Creating and deploying a serverless application

Imagine that you want to build a to-do list web application. Start by prompting your AI assistant.

I want to build a new to-do list web application in a new workspace. I want to add, list, and delete to-dos. Would AWS Lambda be a good choice for this?

The agent uses the get_lambda_guidance_tool to receive tailored guidance based on the use case and the inferred event source, API Gateway in this case. Then, you want to better understand how to deploy the application to AWS.

I later want to deploy the application to AWS. Which Infrastructure as Code tool would be best for this?

There are several ways to deploy your functions to AWS such as AWS SAM or the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). The model opts to get more information before making a recommendation. It selects the get_iac_guidance_tool from the Serverless MCP Server.

The Serverless MCP Server can also assist you with interacting with the AWS Serverless Application Model Command Line Interface (AWS SAM CLI) as well as deploying application-based blueprints such as backend, frontend, or full-stack applications.

Before the deployment, test the function locally to verify that it works correctly.

I want to test my Lambda function locally before deploying it. Can you invoke the “TodoFunction” from my SAM project with a GET request?

Now that you are confident that the application works, you want to deploy the backend logic to AWS. So, you prompt the agent to deploy your app. It selects the deploy_webapp tool and provides the tool with arguments to deploy the app, including backend deploymentType. This tool uses the AWS Lambda Web Adapter framework, allowing you to easily deploy applications written in standard web frameworks like Express or Next.js, without any additional web adapters.

The agent can also check on the status of a deployment to make sure that it completes successfully.

Your application is now deployed to AWS and ready to serve traffic.

Troubleshooting the serverless application

The Serverless MCP Server also supports you in testing and troubleshooting your Lambda functions. It provides valuable context to AI assistants in identifying and remediating issues. For example, you can use your agent to check for any issues with your application.

Check the logs and metrics of the todo app for any issues

The model can analyze the logs and metrics and offer recommendations such as adjusting memory allocation.

The Serverless MCP Server tools provide the assistant with the additional context it needs to identify issues and generate recommendations.

In this example, the analysis and recommendations are:

Log Analysis

I’ve checked the logs for all three Lambda functions of your todo app, looking specifically for errors:

ListTodosFunction: No errors detected
AddTodoFunction: No errors detected
DeleteTodoFunction: No errors detected

All functions are operating normally with successful executions and no error logs.

Performance Metrics

Lambda Function Performance
• Memory usage is reasonable at 100–106 MB out of 512 MB allocated (about 20% utilization)
• Fast execution durations for warm starts: 85–195 ms range
• No throttling or out-of-memory errors detected
• No function errors or exceptions in the logs

API Gateway Metrics
• Total Requests: 11 requests recorded
• Average Latency: 797 ms
• P95 Latency: 3364 ms (high)
• 4XX Errors: 0 (no client errors)
• 5XX Errors: 1 (one server error detected)

Issues Identified

The log analysis is clean with no errors, but the metrics reveal one potential issue:

  1. One 5XX Error in API Gateway: There was a single server-side error recorded in the API Gateway logs. Since there are no corresponding errors in the Lambda function logs, this might be related to:
    • A timeout (API Gateway taking too long to respond)
    • An integration issue between API Gateway and Lambda
    • A temporary network issue
  2. Relatively High P95 Latency: The 95th percentile latency of 3364 ms is quite high compared to the average. This suggests some outlier requests are taking significantly longer to complete.

Recommendations

  1. Monitor the 5XX error rate as it resurfaces.
  2. Consider implementing more detailed logging at the edge of the error path.
  3. Investigate the cause of the high P95 latency. Check for cold starts, payload size, or network latency as likely culprits.
  4. Consider enabling API Gateway and Lambda performance dashboards for more granular, historical latency and error metrics.
  5. Continue to monitor memory and duration metrics to ensure performance remains healthy as traffic increases.

Features supported by the Serverless MCP Server

The Serverless MCP Server provides several MCP tools, which can be classified into four categories.

  1. Serverless application lifecycle
    • sam_init_tool: Initializes a new AWS SAM project with the chosen runtime and dependencies.
    • sam_build_tool: Builds a serverless application using the AWS SAM CLI and prepares deployment artifacts.
    • sam_deploy_tool: Deploys a serverless application to AWS, managing artifact upload and stack creation.
    • sam_local_invoke_tool: Locally invokes a Lambda function for testing with custom events and environments.
  2. Web application deployment and management
    • deploy_webapp_tool: Deploys backend, frontend, or fullstack web applications to Lambda using the Lambda Web Adapter.
    • update_frontend_tool: Updates the frontend assets and optionally invalidates the Amazon CloudFront cache.
    • configure_domain_tool: Configures a custom domain, includes certificate and DNS setup.
  3. Observability
    • sam_logs_tool: Retrieves logs, and supports filtering and time range selection.
    • get_metrics_tool: Fetches specified metrics.
  4. Guidance, IaC templates, and deployment help
    • get_iac_guidance_tool: Provides guidance for selecting IaC tools.
    • get_lambda_guidance_tool: Offers advice on when to use Lambda for specific runtimes and use cases.
    • get_lambda_event_schemas_tool: Returns event schemas for Lambda integrations.
    • get_serverless_templates_tool: Supplies example AWS SAM templates for different serverless application types.
    • deployment_help_tool: Provides help and status information about deployments.
    • deploy_serverless_app_help_tool: Offers instructions for deploying serverless applications to Lambda.

Visit the Serverless MCP Server documentation for the full list of tools and resources.

Best practices and considerations

When building serverless applications with the AWS Serverless MCP Server, start by using its AI-assisted guidance for architectural decisions. Throughout development, use its guidance tools to make informed decisions about service selection, event patterns, and infrastructure design. Before deploying to AWS, use the Serverless MCP Server’s local testing capabilities to validate your application’s behavior. This approach helps ensure your application aligns with AWS best practices.

Robust monitoring and observability are critical to reliably operate your applications running in production. Use the Serverless MCP Server tools for deployment monitoring and setting up logging and metrics. This helps track application performance and quickly identify potential issues.

Conclusion

The open-source AWS Serverless MCP Server streamlines serverless application development by providing AI-assisted guidance throughout the development lifecycle. By combining AI assistance with serverless expertise, it enables developers to build and deploy applications more efficiently. The Serverless MCP Server’s toolset supports the complete development process, from initialization to observability, while helping developers implement AWS best practices.

As organizations continue to adopt serverless computing, tools that streamline development and accelerate delivery become increasingly valuable. AWS will continue to expand the collection of MCP servers for developers building serverless applications and refine existing tools based on customer feedback and emerging serverless development patterns.

To get started, visit the GitHub repository and explore the documentation. Share your experiences and suggestions through the GitHub repository to improve the MCP server’s capabilities and help shape the future of AI-assisted serverless development.

For more serverless learning resources, visit Serverless Land.

Elevate your AI security: Must-see re:Inforce 2025 sessions

Post Syndicated from Margaret Jonson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/reinforce-2025-genai-sessions/

AWS re:Inforce 2025: June 16-18 in Philadelphia, PA

A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code flashsale150 to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.

From proof of concepts to large scale production deployments, the rapid advancement of generative AI has ushered in unique opportunities for innovation, but it also introduces a new set of security challenges (and opportunities) that organizations must address. How do you protect retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or training data while maintaining model effectiveness? What controls are needed for large language model (LLM) interactions? How can I take full advantage of AI agents and model context protocol (MCP) while minimizing risk? At AWS re:Inforce 2025, we’re bringing together security experts, practitioners, and industry leaders to answer these questions with real-world, prescriptive guidance and more.

This year, our generative AI security sessions have been specifically curated and designed to help you build and maintain secure, production AI systems at scale. Whether you’re just beginning your AI security journey or leading mature, enterprise-wide AI initiatives, you’ll find deep practical guidance, hands-on experience, and strategic insights to advance your organization’s security posture.

From foundational concepts to advanced defensive techniques, these sessions encompass critical areas including data protection, model security, identity management, and AI agent resilience. You’ll learn directly from AWS security experts, customers who have successfully implemented secure AI systems, and industry leading partners who are setting new standards in AI safety and security.

In this blog, we highlight some “can’t miss” sessions that cover how to secure AI, but also how security practitioners can leverage AI to help with their critical security missions as well! Join in on the fun, and register for re:Inforce 2025!

Innovation talk

Engage with top AWS executives in our Innovation Talks series, where you’ll gain invaluable insights into the forefront of cloud technology. Explore the latest advancements in generative AI, discover robust cloud security strategies, and uncover pioneering architectural concepts that are revolutionizing application development and expanding the possibilities of the AWS Cloud.

SEC301 | Innovation Talk | From possibility to production: A strong, flexible foundation for AI security
Speakers: Hart Rossman (AWS) & Becky Weiss (AWS)
Discover how AWS removes the heavy lifting of AI security, enabling you to accelerate from development to production. This session reveals how the proven AWS security foundation, combined with flexible controls and automated reasoning, helps organizations confidently deploy AI innovations. Through real-world examples, learn how to transform security from a potential roadblock into an innovation enabler. Leave with practical guidance for securing AI workloads today and strategic insights into addressing emerging security challenges, including data security and agentic AI. Learn how the AWS approach to AI security helps you start ahead while maintaining strong security controls.

Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks

Breakout sessions are lecture-style, one-hour sessions delivered by AWS experts, customers, and partners—perfect for deepening your knowledge on important topics, gaining actionable insights, and connecting with industry leaders.

Chalk talks are one-hour long, highly interactive sessions with a small audience. This format is ideal for diving deep into specific topics, engaging directly with AWS experts, and getting your questions answered in real time.

Lightning talks are short (20 minute) theater presentations dedicated to a specific customer story, service demo, or AWS Partner offering.

SEC303 | Breakout session | Behind the shields: AWS and Anthropic’s approach to secure AI
Speakers: Matt Saner (AWS) & Shahzeb Jiwani (Anthropic)
Enterprise AI adoption demands robust security. In this session, Join Anthropic’s head of risk governance along with AWS security leaders to reveal how AWS and Anthropic collaborate to deliver enterprise-grade security for LLMs and the generative AI workloads they enable. Learn about the multi-layered security approach spanning infrastructure, data, and models. We’ll explore real-world security architectures, governance frameworks, and risk mitigation strategies. You will leave with a deeper understanding of how to leverage AWS and Anthropic’s security capabilities to accelerate your organization’s AI initiatives while maintaining stringent security and compliance requirements.

SEC304 | Breakout session | Amazon.com testing frameworks and tools for GenAI security and privacy
Speakers: Alex Torres (AWS), Josh Haycraft (Amazon), & Jess Clark (Amazon)
GenAI solutions are launching in a unique, rapidly-shifting security landscape: they may be trained on customer data, they may integrate with internal services or datastores, and they will provide generated content to customers or to other systems. Learn how Amazon.com creates toolkits, systems and frameworks to leverage Large Language Models and Generative AI to enrich customer interactions to promote agility and innovation.

TDR301 | Breakout session | Innovations in AWS detection and response for integrated security outcomes
Speakers: Himanshu Verma (AWS) & Ryan Holland (AWS)
Discover how the latest AWS detection and response capabilities can help secure your cloud environment more effectively. Learn practical ways to achieve integrated security outcomes through enhanced threat detection, automated vulnerability management, and streamlined response – all at scale. We’ll show you how to use AWS security services to protect workloads and data, centralize security monitoring, manage security posture continuously, and unify security data, while leveraging generative AI for security operations. Walk away with actionable insights on integrating AWS detection and response services to strengthen and simplify your security across AWS.

SEC431 | Chalk talk | Dive deep into data protection architectures for Amazon Bedrock Agents
Speakers: Andrew Kane (AWS) & Gabrielle Dompreh (AWS)
Join this chalk talk to understand how Amazon Bedrock protects your data across Agents and related features, such as Knowledge Bases and Guardrails. Learn about security considerations for cross-region deployments, multi-agent collaboration, and prompt caching. Gain deep insights into architecting secure generative AI solutions that maintain data protection, and discover architectural patterns that keep your applications safe and secure.

APS231 | Chalk talk | Using AWS services to mitigate the OWASP Top 10 for LLM threats
Speakers: Mark Keating (AWS) & Cameron Smith (AWS)
You’ve identified your generative AI use case, tested it and are creating a secure application architecture design. How do you know what generative AI specific threats you should be protecting against, and what tools or services are available that can help? You may have heard of the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, but where or how do you start? Join us as we discuss the OWASP Top 10 threats, the differences between versions, and how AWS can help you mitigate these threats.

DAP332 | Chalk talk | Executive perspective: Risk management for generative AI workloads
Speakers: Jason Garman (AWS) & Mark Ryland (AWS)
Don’t let the perceived complexity of responsible AI keep you from deploying generative AI applications on AWS. In this chalk talk, we will present a framework for breaking down AI safety and security risks, introduce AWS best practices for keeping enterprise data secure in generative AI applications using zero trust principles, and mitigate safety risks using technologies such as Bedrock Guardrails. Discover as a group with fellow security leaders how to identify safety and security risks relevant to your workload, implement appropriate mitigation strategies, and measure efficacy over time.

GRC337 | Chalk talk | Build compliant AI: Implementing controls for emerging regulations
Speakers: Samuel Waymouth (AWS) & Mark Keating (AWS)

As AI adoption accelerates, organizations face increasing regulatory scrutiny and compliance requirements. In this session, learn about the evolving global regulatory landscape for AI, data privacy, and data sovereignty, then see how you can map regulatory requirements and security controls to AWS services and features. We will demonstrate how generative AI can work as a tool for assessment, risk classification and generating compliance guidance. We also show you how to use the latest threat modelling resources developed by AWS. Security professionals and AI practitioners will learn actionable strategies for building AI systems aligned with compliance standards while also maintaining innovation velocity.

SEC221 | Lightning talk | Raising the tide: How AWS is shaping the future of secure AI
Speakers: Matt Saner (AWS)
AI security is a top priority for AWS. By building AI solutions that are secure by design, AWS helps customers innovate quickly with confidence while mitigating emerging threats. But securing AI goes beyond individual organizations—it requires industry-wide standards and best practices. AWS actively contributes to global AI security efforts, including its participation industry standards bodies such as CoSAI (The Coalition for Secure AI), to make sure AI technologies are safe, resilient, and trustworthy. This session will explore how AWS is leading AI security innovation, protecting customers, and collaborating to help shape the future of AI security for the entire industry.

SEC322 | Lightning talk | Managing digital identity in the age of generative AI
Speakers: Arthur Mnev (AWS) & Lily Ashidam (AWS)
In this session, we will explore the challenges and solutions for managing identities in generative AI workloads. This session covers securing API access for LLMs, implementing proper authentication for, in, and with AI services, and maintaining data lineage. Learn practical approaches towards securing generative AI applications while maintaining compliance and governance requirements.

SEC323 | Lightning talk | A practical guide to generative AI agent resilience
Speakers: Yiwen Zhang (AWS) & Jennifer Moran (AWS)
As generative AI agents dominate headlines and technological discussions, enterprise adoption remains in its infancy. GenAI agent resilience is a crucial factor in successful implementation and building user trust. While traditional workload resilience practices—such as database availability, workload capacity, observability, and disaster recovery—remain relevant, GenAI agents present unique challenges. This session delves into the critical dimensions of GenAI agent resilience, including LLM model adaptability, latency management, tool availability, observability, and financial sustainability. We will share practical strategies for building robust, reliable GenAI agents that enterprises can trust and maintain.

SEC326 | Lightning Talk | Secure remote MCP server deployment for Gen AI on AWS
Speakers: Aaron Brown (AWS) & James Ferguson (AWS)
Discover how to securely build and deploy remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers on AWS that implement the protocol’s security and trust principles. This session demonstrates OAuth 2.1 authorization patterns that enforce user consent, data privacy, and tool safety requirements. Learn to implement robust security controls using Amazon Cognito, API Gateway, and Lambda while maintaining protocol compliance. Explore practical examples of authorization flows, access controls, and security monitoring that align with MCP specifications.

TDR322 | Lightning talk | How AWS uses generative AI to advance native security services
Speakers: Marshall Jones (AWS) & Himanshu Verma (AWS)
Discover how AWS leverages generative AI to enhance native security services. This session demonstrates how AWS implements AI capabilities across its security portfolio to improve threat detection, investigation, and response. Explore practical implementations in Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Inspector that enable automated analysis and natural language security queries. Leave with insights into how AWS makes security more intelligent and efficient through generative AI.

Interactive sessions (builders’ sessions, code talks, and workshops)

Interact with small groups led by an AWS expert providing interactive learning about how to build on AWS. Each builders’ session begins with a short explanation or demonstration of what attendees are building—then it’s your turn to build! The expert will guide you end-to-end through this hands-on experience. Or join Code Talks, our code-focused interactive sessions where AWS experts lead a discussion featuring live coding or code samples as they illuminate the “why” behind AWS solutions. Attendees are encouraged to ask questions and follow along.

Workshops are two-hour interactive sessions where you collaborate in teams or work individually to solve real-world challenges by using AWS services, making them perfect for hands-on learning. Each workshop begins with a brief lecture, followed by dedicated time to work through the problem.

Note: Don’t forget to bring your laptop to build alongside AWS experts.

SEC351 | Builders’ session | Accelerating incident response, compliance & auditing using generative AI
Speakers: Snehal Nahar (AWS), Ravindra Kori (AWS), Rayette Toles-Abdullah (AWS), & Abhijit Barde (AWS)
In this session, we will learn how to use AWS native generative AI capabilities to reduce time to recovery after an incident using enterprise communication tools such as Slack. We will also learn how to use detective controls to identify events that may result in an incident, and also how to use preventive controls to mitigate the risk of an incident occurring. We will use services like Amazon Q Developer, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail Lake, Amazon CloudWatch and other observability features.

SEC352 | Builders’ session | Agentic AI for security: Building intelligent egress traffic controls
Speakers: Ranjith Rayaprolu (AWS), Anil Nadiminti (AWS), Michael Leighty (AWS), & Dwaragha Sivalingam (AWS)
Learn to build AI-powered security agents that protect your cloud infrastructure. This hands-on session shows you how to use Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock Agents to create intelligent systems that watch over your network. You’ll build Generative AI agents that monitor egress traffic, spot potential threats, and automatically update network firewall to block malicious traffic. Walk away with the skills to implement AI-powered security agents that can reason, decide, and act to protect your cloud infrastructure.

SEC353 | Builders’ session | Threat modeling for generative AI applications
Speakers: Laura Verghote (AWS), Isabelle Mos (AWS), Samuel Waymouth (AWS), & Omar Zoma (AWS)
In this builders’ session, you will learn how to systematically identify and analyze security threats specific to generative AI applications. As organizations rapidly adopt large language models and other generative AI capabilities, understanding the unique security challenges – from prompt injection to data poisoning – becomes critical. You will be guided through the process of creating threat models for common generative AI architectures, with a particular focus on applications built using AWS services like Amazon Bedrock.

SEC451 | Builders’ session | From logs to defense: Generative AI for security automation
Speakers: Ravindra Kori (AWS), Siavash Iran (AWS), Lily Ashidam (AWS), & Yiwen Zhang (AWS)
In this technical session, we’ll demonstrate how to transform traditional operating system log analysis into an intelligent, automated defense system using AWS native services and generative AI. We’ll explore how to build a comprehensive solution that captures security-relevant logs from Windows and Linux systems.

APS351 | Builders’ session | Securing generative AI agents using AWS Well-Architected Framework
Speakers: Krupanidhi Jay (AWS), Ryan Dsouza (AWS), Birender Pal (AWS), & Omkar Mukadam (AWS)
Learn hands-on how to build secure generative AI agent solutions following the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s Generative AI Lens security best practices. Work through practical implementations of endpoint security, prompt engineering guardrails, monitoring systems, and protection against excessive agency while building a production-ready generative AI agent. Through hands-on exercises, build a secure generative AI agent solution incorporating these controls on AWS, involving Amazon Bedrock, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and more. You must bring your laptop to participate.

APS353 | Builders’ session | Red teaming your LLM security at scale
Speakers: Otto Kruse (AWS), Owen Hawkins (AWS), Aaron Brown (AWS), & Jeff Lombardo (AWS)
Step into the shoes of an AI-powered red team adversary in the GenAI Red Team Challenge. In this intensive workshop, you’ll deploy an AI security agent to orchestrate sophisticated threat chains against GenAI applications, systematically discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities from prompt injection to boundary testing while mastering automated security testing workflows. In addition, you’ll learn to apply countermeasures, from prompt templating to guardrails. This hands-on, gamified experience helps you think like a threat actor and equips you with practical skills in automated vulnerability testing and risk mitigation against common MITRE and OWASP vulnerabilities for LLM-based applications. You must bring your laptop to participate.

GRC354 | Builders’ session | Best practices for using generative AI to manage cloud compliance
Speakers: Adnan Bilwani (AWS), Ali Maaz (AWS), Artur Rodrigues (AWS), & Peter Pereira (AWS)
Learn how to leverage Amazon Q Developer to streamline cloud compliance management using AWS Config. This hands-on builders’ session demonstrates how to create intelligent compliance checks, automate remediation workflows, and generate detailed compliance reports using generative AI capabilities. Through practical exercises, learn to implement automated compliance monitoring that combines the power of generative AI with AWS Config’s robust compliance framework. You must bring your laptop to participate.

IAM451 | Builders’ session | Securing GenAI apps: Fine-grained access control for Bedrock Agents
Speakers: Edward Sun (AWS), Pravin Nair (AWS), Dustin Ellis (AWS), & Kevin Hakanson (AWS)
Want to secure generative AI applications accessing your organizational data? Learn how to implement intelligent access controls for Amazon Bedrock-powered applications accessing your organizational data. In this builders’ session, you’ll build a defense-in-depth approach that combines authentication using Amazon Cognito and fine-grained authorization with Amazon Verified Permissions to secure access for Bedrock AI agents. Implement layered permissions that protect sensitive data without limiting your GenAI capabilities. You must bring your laptop to participate.

TDR251 | Builders’ session | Build your first AI security assistant with Amazon Q
Speakers: Scott Taggart (AWS), Joe Wagner (AWS), Laura Verghote (AWS), & Riggs Goodman III (AWS)
Discover how to build your first AI-powered security assistant using Amazon Q Business – no AI expertise required. In this hands-on session, you’ll create three practical security workflows: an automated Amazon GuardDuty incident investigator that contextualizes security findings, an AWS Security Hub compliance report generator that streamlines policy assessments, and an Amazon Inspector-based vulnerability management helper that accelerates remediation. Perfect for security practitioners who want to enhance AWS security operations with generative AI while mastering core AWS security services through practical application. You must bring your laptop to participate.

IAM441 | Code talk | The right way to secure AI agents with code examples
Speakers: Jeff Lombardo (AWS) & Fei Yuan (AWS)
Generative AI agents run tasks on behalf of human users and often interact with each other across on-premises environments and different cloud providers. This brings new challenges in identity authentication, propagation, delegation, and resource authorization in the overall agentic AI solution. Learn how Amazon Cognito’s OAuth2-based identity management, machine-to-machine authentication, combined with Amazon Verified Permissions fine-grained authorization can enable secure delegation patterns for AI agents, while preserving human identity and consent, agent machine identity, and other request context throughout the agent chain. We will walk through real-world examples with agents built on Amazon Bedrock or other frameworks.

TDR341 | Code talk | Build AI security agents with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Security Lake
Speakers: Chris Lamont-Smith (AWS) & Pratima Singh (AWS)
In this code talk, explore how to enhance security operations by creating AI agents using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Security Lake. Through live coding demonstrations, learn to build automated workflows that combine autonomous decision-making capabilities with generative AI for security analysis and response. See how to implement agents that analyze logs, provide contextual insights, and execute response procedures. Discover practical approaches for integrating custom tools and leveraging large language models in your security workflows.

SEC371 | Workshop | Red Team approaches to practical generative AI defenses
Speakers: Mac Stevens (AWS) & Cameron Smith (AWS)
This workshop takes a hands-on approach to Generative AI security, focusing on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and related services. We’ll begin by examining Bedrock’s core security principles, including data protection during inference and in features like Agents, Guardrails, and Knowledge Bases. Participants will gain insights into the internal architectures and security implications of context windows, system prompts, agent orchestration, and more. The session then transitions into hands-on red teaming exercises using SageMaker. We’ll subsequently explore defensive strategies against these threat vectors and discuss methods for integrating these practices into development workflows. Participants will leave equipped with a holistic understanding of Generative AI security, from individual model protection to safeguarding complex, multi-component systems.

APS371 | Workshop | Securing your generative AI applications on AWS
Speakers: Mark Keating (AWS) & Maitreya Ranganath (AWS)
In this workshop, discover how to secure generative AI applications using AWS services and features. Explore how to deploy a vulnerable sample generative AI application and then layer security controls to protect, detect, and respond to security issues. Learn how to apply similar controls to the generative AI applications in your organization. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DAP371 | Workshop | Defend your AI: Mitigate prompt injection with Amazon Bedrock
Speakers: Mark Keating (AWS) & Maitreya Ranganath (AWS)
Master the art of identifying and mitigating prompt injection vulnerabilities in generative AI systems through this hands-on workshop. Using Amazon Bedrock, participants will explore both offensive and defensive prompt engineering techniques to understand the security implications of large language models in production environments. In this session you will understand how prompt injection attacks work, complete an interactive ‘capture the flag’ style challenge attempting to exploit a simulated AI environment, and learn to implement defensive controls using Amazon Bedrock Guardrails. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Register now

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from industry experts and AWS leaders about securing your AI implementations. Register for AWS re:Inforce 2025 today to reserve your spot in these sessions. Browse the full re:Inforce catalog to learn more about sessions in other tracks, plus partner sessions and code talks.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

Margaret Jonson

Margaret Jonson

Margaret is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for AWS generative AI security, where she partners with AI/ML teams to help customers implement secure and governed AI solutions across Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Q, and other AI/ML solutions.

Matt Saner

Matt Saner

As a Senior Manager at AWS, Matt leads a team of security specialists who help the world’s most complex organizations tackle critical security challenges. Matt and his team work to transform security organizations into strategic business enablers. Before joining AWS, Matt spent close to two decades in the financial services industry. Outside of work, Matt is a pilot who finds joy in flying general aviation aircraft.

Navigating the threat detection and incident response track at re:Inforce 2025

Post Syndicated from Nisha Amthul original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/navigating-the-threat-detection-and-incident-response-track-at-reinforce-2025/

AWS re:Inforce 2025: June 16-18 in Philadelphia, PA

A full conference pass is $1,099. Register today with the code flashsale150 to receive a limited time $150 discount, while supplies last.

We’re counting down to AWS re:Inforce, our annual cloud security event! We are thrilled to invite security enthusiasts and builders to join us in Philadelphia, PA June 16–18, 2025, for an immersive three-day journey into cloud security learning. At AWS re:Inforce, you’ll have the chance to explore the breadth of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) security landscape, learn how to operationalize security services, and enhance your skills and confidence in cloud security to improve your organization’s security posture. As an attendee, you will have access to over 250 sessions across multiple topic tracks, including data protection; identity and access management; threat detection and incident response; network and infrastructure security; generative AI; governance, risk, and compliance; and application security. Plus, get ready to be inspired by our lineup of customer speakers, who will share their firsthand experiences of innovating securely on AWS.

In this post, we provide an overview of the key sessions that include lecture-style presentations featuring real-world use cases from our customers and interactive small-group sessions led by AWS experts that guide you through practical problems and solutions.

The threat detection and incident response track is designed to demonstrate how to detect and respond to security risks to help protect workloads at scale. AWS experts and customers will present key topics such as unified cloud security, threat detection, vulnerability management, cloud security posture management, integrated detection-to-response, threat intelligence, operationalization of AWS security services, container security, effective security investigation, security analytics, and incident response best practices. We’ll also explore both strengthening security through the use of generative AI and securing generative AI workloads.

Breakout sessions, chalk talks, and lightning talks

TDR301 | Breakout session | Innovations in AWS detection and response for integrated security outcomes
Discover how AWS’s latest detection and response capabilities can help secure your cloud environment more effectively. Learn practical ways to achieve integrated security outcomes through enhanced threat detection, automated vulnerability management, and streamlined response—all at scale. We’ll show you how to use AWS security services to protect workloads and data, centralize security monitoring, manage security posture continuously, and unify security data, while leveraging generative AI for security operations. Walk away with actionable insights on integrating AWS detection and response services to strengthen and simplify your security across AWS.

TDR302 | Breakout session | Multi-stage threat detection using GuardDuty and MITRE
Enhance your threat detection capabilities by leveraging Amazon GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection alongside MITRE frameworks. In this session, Shane Steiger Esq. from MITRE Corp demonstrates how to effectively identify and respond to multi-stage security events in your AWS environment. Learn practical strategies for implementing detection controls, developing response procedures, and building resilient cloud architectures. Discover how integrating GuardDuty with MITRE frameworks can strengthen your event detection and response strategy.

TDR303 | Breakout session | Building secure generative AI security tools, featuring Trellix
Learn how to build enterprise-grade generative AI security tools that unify security data and enable natural language investigations. This session demonstrates practical approaches for developing secure generative AI solutions, including implementation patterns for data privacy and compliance controls. Explore real-world architectures combining AWS foundation models with security orchestration. Hear how Trellix achieved 23x cost savings while maintaining 95% accuracy using Amazon Bedrock models. Leave with strategies to build secure AI assistants that support your security teams.

TDR304 | Breakout session | Scaling AWS threat intelligence to protect customers
Discover how AWS builds and operates threat intelligence at unprecedented scale to protect millions of customers. In this session, dive deep into two critical security functions: Amazon Threat Intelligence, which tracks and defends against sophisticated threats, and Active Defense, our security data processing architecture that analyzes over 4 billion records per second. Learn how these capabilities work together to power AWS security services and provide automated protection for your applications. See how AWS uses this intelligence to continuously enhance security services that help keep your workloads safe.

TDR305 | Breakout session | Scale Vulnerability Management Using Amazon Inspector
Want to strengthen Lambda security and streamline vulnerability management? Learn how Amazon Inspector uses generative AI to provide in-context code patches and automate SBOM management. Discover practical techniques for CI/CD integration, cross-account scanning, and automated remediation workflows. Explore built-in integrations with Security Hub and EventBridge to enhance security operations across your AWS environment.

TDR306 | Breakout session | Enterprise Security at Scale: SAP’s AWS Blueprint
How does SAP protect thousands of AWS accounts? Learn their blueprint for implementing Amazon GuardDuty protection plans alongside Extended Threat Detection to identify sophisticated threat patterns. Discover their framework for standardizing AWS Security Hub controls and automated remediation workflows at scale. Walk away with practical strategies to enhance enterprise security operations across AWS Organizations.

TDR331 | Chalk talk | Ask AWS: Your ransomware questions answered
Get answers to your most critical ransomware questions in this interactive Q&A session. Learn how AWS security features and best practices can help you detect, respond to, and recover from ransomware threats. Our experts will share practical guidance on identifying early warning signs, implementing effective incident response, and strengthening your overall ransomware resilience. Bring your toughest questions about emerging ransomware tactics and cloud protection strategies. Walk away with actionable insights to help secure your data and operations using AWS security capabilities.

TDR332 | Chalk talk | Decoding AWS CIRT tactics & techniques for proactive defense
Learn directly from AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) experts who help customers respond to critical security events. Discover real-world insights about emerging threat tactics and techniques observed across AWS environments. We’ll share practical detection and mitigation strategies that align with the Shared Responsibility Model, helping you strengthen your security posture. Walk away with actionable best practices from CIRT’s frontline experience defending against evolving threats, and learn how to apply these insights to protect your AWS workloads.

TDR333 | Chalk talk | Strategy for prioritization and response
Join this session to discuss managing security posture and risk across multiple accounts, regions, and resources. We will explore the decision-making process around how you prioritize security alerts and risk using AWS security services. After prioritization, we will discuss a framework for responding to and remediating security findings. We will talk through the decision-making process of responding to findings, considerations for auto-remediation, and how to facilitate a quick and thorough response to the most critical security findings.

TDR334 | Chalk talk | Strengthen Security: Making GuardDuty Protection Plans Work for You
Discover how to maximize your threat detection capabilities by selecting the right Amazon GuardDuty protection plans for your environment. Learn to evaluate protection features that matter most for your AWS workloads and understand the value each plan brings to your security strategy. Through practical scenarios, explore cost-effective implementation strategies across your AWS accounts. Leave with actionable insights for optimizing your Amazon GuardDuty deployment to enhance protection of your AWS workloads and data.

TDR431 | Chalk talk | Best practices for containing AWS resources during incident response
Learn best practices for implementing isolation controls for AWS resources and accounts during security events. Through practical scenarios, discover effective approaches for isolating Amazon EC2 instances, AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon ECS containers. Explore comprehensive strategies for account-level isolation including identity, resource, and network controls. This session provides guidance on implementing and safely removing isolation controls as part of your response procedures. Leave with actionable patterns for strengthening your AWS incident response capabilities. To help businesses move faster and deliver security outcomes, modern security teams need to identify opportunities to automate and simplify their workflows. One way of doing so is through generative AI. Join this chalk talk to learn how to identify use cases where generative AI can help with investigating, prioritizing, and remediating findings from Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Security Hub. Then find out how you can develop architectures from these use cases, implement them, and evaluate their effectiveness. The talk offers tenets for generative AI and security that can help you safely use generative AI to reduce cognitive load and increase focus on novel, high-value opportunities.

TDR336 | Chalk talk | Secure generative AI models and agents on AWS
Learn how to strengthen security controls for generative AI models and Amazon Bedrock agents in your AWS environment. This session explores implementation patterns for protecting API endpoints and securing agent interactions. Discover practical approaches for implementing protective controls and maintaining data security for your AI/ML workloads. Leave with actionable strategies for building secure generative AI implementations using AWS services.

TDR337 | Chalk talk | Implementing AWS security best practices: Insights & strategies
Learn how to optimize your AWS security services implementation including Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and AWS WAF. AWS security experts share practical insights and proven patterns derived from thousands of customer deployments. This session provides actionable strategies for operationalizing security services effectively in your environment. Discover implementation best practices and architectural approaches that help you maximize the value of your AWS security services.

TDR338 | Chalk talk | Building cloud-native forensic investigation architectures on AWS
Join this chalk talk to explore the advantages of cloud-native digital forensics and incident response on AWS. Engage in interactive discussions on best practices for establishing secure forensic investigation environments. We’ll explore architectural patterns for safely collecting and storing forensic artifacts, leveraging ephemeral resources to enhance security, and implementing effective network, account, and organizational designs. Bring your questions and scenarios as we collaboratively examine how to build scalable, standardized investigation processes using AWS services. Leave with practical strategies for enhancing your forensic and incident response capabilities in the cloud.

TDR231 | Chalk talk | Resilient security teams: Reduce burnout and boost performance
Learn strategies for building resilient security and incident response teams that prioritize wellbeing while maintaining high performance. This session explores approaches for implementing regular team check-ins, data-informed wellbeing initiatives, and a supportive team culture. Discover practical methods for fostering open communication, maintaining team engagement, and recognizing team contributions. Through real-world examples, develop actionable plans to enhance team resilience, improve retention, and sustain security excellence. Leave with strategies to build and maintain high-performing security teams.

TDR321 | Lightning talk | From Incidents to Insights: Creating a Security Learning Organization
Learn how to transform security events into organizational improvements. This session demonstrates practical approaches for building effective feedback loops, preserving institutional knowledge, and implementing sustainable enhancements to security operations. Discover AWS strategies for measuring the impact of improvements and fostering a culture of continuous learning. Leave with actionable frameworks for strengthening your security program through systematic learning and adaptation.

TDR322 | Lightning talk | How AWS uses generative AI to advance native security services
Discover how AWS leverages generative AI to enhance native security services. This session demonstrates how AWS implements AI capabilities across its security portfolio to improve threat detection, investigation, and response. Explore practical implementations in Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Inspector that enable automated analysis and natural language security queries. Leave with insights into how AWS makes security more intelligent and efficient through generative AI.

TDR323 | Lightning talk | How Autodesk scales threat detection with Amazon GuardDuty
Learn how Autodesk elevated their threat detection strategy using Amazon GuardDuty. This lightning talk explores their implementation approach, operational insights, and best practices for leveraging the advanced detection capabilities of GuardDuty, including malware protection. Discover how they maintain robust security while efficiently managing their growing cloud footprint.

TDR421 | Lightning talk | Accelerating Incident Response with AWS Security Incident Response
Learn how AWS Security Incident Response helps security teams streamline investigation and response procedures. This session demonstrates service integration capabilities with Amazon GuardDuty, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Security Hub to provide centralized incident management. Through customer examples and implementation patterns, discover practical approaches for building automated response strategies. Leave with actionable insights for enhancing your security operations using AWS services.

Interactive sessions (builders’ sessions, code talks, and workshops)

TDR251 | Builders’ session | Build your first AI security assistant with Amazon Q
Discover how to build your first AI-powered security assistant using Amazon Q Business—no AI expertise required. In this hands-on session, you’ll create three practical security workflows: an automated Amazon GuardDuty incident investigator that contextualizes security findings, an AWS Security Hub compliance report generator that streamlines policy assessments, and an Amazon Inspector-based vulnerability management helper that accelerates remediation. Perfect for security practitioners who want to enhance AWS security operations with generative AI while mastering core AWS security services through practical application.

TDR252 | Builders’ session | Detect ransomware events in Amazon S3 using Amazon GuardDuty
In this builders’ session, join the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) to implement Amazon S3 ransomware detection using Amazon GuardDuty. Through hands-on scenarios, learn to identify unauthorized encryption operations and implement effective response procedures. Build detection patterns using AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Athena, Amazon GuardDuty, and Amazon CloudWatch. Practice investigating events and implementing preventive measures aligned with AWS Security’s latest guidance for Amazon S3 object protection. You must bring your laptop to participate.

TDR351 | Builders’ session | Build an OCSF security log pipeline with AWS
Build a complete security log pipeline that leverages the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) in this hands-on session. Work alongside AWS experts to ingest, transform, and enrich your security data. Learn practical techniques to standardize security logs, whether using your own schema or our provided examples. Walk away with implementable solutions to enhance your threat detection capabilities through normalized security data flows. Bring your laptop and optional custom log samples to create solutions tailored to your use cases.

TDR451 | Builders’ session | Automate incident response for Amazon EC2 and Amazon EKS
Learn how to streamline incident response using the Automated Forensics Orchestrator solution for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This session demonstrates how to implement automated workflows triggered by AWS Security Hub findings. Explore implementation prerequisites, customization options, and best practices for enhancing your security operations through automated forensics capabilities. Discover how to standardize response procedures across your Amazon EC2 and Amazon EKS environments.

TDR452 | Builders’ session | Build generative AI security runbooks with Amazon Bedrock
In this builders’ session, learn how to enhance security operations using generative AI-powered runbooks with Amazon Bedrock and Bedrock Agents. Create intelligent workflows that analyze AWS Security Hub findings and provide contextual remediation guidance. Through hands-on exercises, build Bedrock Agents that leverage AWS documentation and implement natural language interfaces for security investigations. Learn how to configure knowledge bases with organization-specific content and implement appropriate guardrails. Leave with a practical solution for streamlining security operations using generative AI. You must bring your laptop to participate.

TDR341 | Code talk | Build AI security agents with Amazon Bedrock and Security Lake
In this code talk, explore how to enhance security operations by creating AI agents using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Security Lake. Through live coding demonstrations, learn to build automated workflows that combine autonomous decision-making capabilities with generative AI for security analysis and response. See how to implement agents that analyze logs, provide contextual insights, and execute response procedures. Discover practical approaches for integrating custom tools and leveraging large language models in your security workflows.

TDR342 | Code talk | Operationalizing Amazon Security Lake with analytics and generative AI
Roll up your sleeves for this hands-on coding session where we’ll build modern security analytics tools on top of Amazon Security Lake. Through interactive demos, we’ll craft queries and visualizations to operationalize your security data using AWS services like Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Athena, and Amazon Bedrock. Leave with practical code samples and architectures to analyze security data. Get inspired with ideas on how to transform your threat detection and incident response stack.

TDR343 | Code talk | From detection to code: GuardDuty attack sequences with Amazon Q
In this code talk, explore how Amazon GuardDuty attack sequence detection capabilities work alongside Amazon Q to enhance security operations. Through live coding demonstrations, learn hoGuardDuty machine learning models identify connected security events and create comprehensive event sequences. See how to build automated response procedures using Amazon Q AI-assisted development capabilities. Discover practical approaches for implementing context-aware security automation. Leave with implementation patterns for enhancing your security operations using generative AI tools.

TDR371 | Workshop | Hands-on Threat Detection & Response using AWS Security
Get hands-on experience with AWS security services in this interactive workshop. Learn to detect and respond to simulated threats using Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub, and Amazon Detective. Practice both manual and automated response techniques with AWS Lambda as you investigate security events across different resource types. Walk away with practical skills to operationalize threat detection and response in your AWS environment. Bring your laptop to participate in this hands-on workshop.

TDR372 | Workshop | Secure container workloads with AWS security services
In this workshop, learn how to implement AWS security services to protect container workloads end-to-end from code to operations. Gain hands-on experience with static code analysis, detective controls, threat detection, vulnerability management, and incident response for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Through guided scenarios, discover how to use AWS security services to enhance your container security posture. Leave with practical strategies for implementing security controls in your container environments. You must bring your laptop to participate.

TDR471 | Workshop | AWS Security Incident Response Challenge: Defense in action
Put your AWS security incident response skills to the test in this interactive session. Assume the role of an AWS Security Engineer responding to a time-sensitive scenario. Using provided intelligence, you’ll have a limited time to implement security controls in your AWS environment. Learn to prioritize actions and leverage AWS security services effectively under realistic conditions. This hands-on exercise helps you practice rapid decision-making and security implementation in AWS environments. Leave with practical experience in incident response strategies. You must bring your laptop to participate.

TDR472 | Workshop | Active defense strategies using AWS AI/ML services
This workshop will help you learn how to develop and deploy active defense strategies, such as deception, using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker. Gain hands-on experience developing AI-driven responses for security operations. You will learn how to develop adaptive responses that mimic what an actor may be trying use against you. You will Learn implementation patterns for prompt engineering, deployment strategies, and monitoring methodologies. You must bring your laptop to participate.

Browse the full re:Inforce catalog to learn more about sessions in other tracks, plus gamified learning, innovation sessions, partner sessions, and labs. Discover how to optimize your re:Inforce journey with our attendee guides—your essential resource for selecting perfect learning sessions and getting the greatest value from your experience.

Our comprehensive track content is designed to help arm you with the knowledge and skills needed to securely manage your workloads and applications on AWS. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to stay updated with the latest best practices in threat detection and incident response. Join us in Philadelphia for re:Inforce 2025 by registering today. We can’t wait to welcome you!

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

Nisha Amthul

Nisha Amthul

Nisha is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AWS Security, specializing in detection and response solutions. She has a strong foundation in product management and product marketing within the domains of information security and data protection. When not at work, you’ll find her cake decorating, strength training, and chasing after her two energetic kiddos.

AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude 4 in Amazon Bedrock, EKS Dashboard, community events, and more (May 26, 2025)

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-claude-4-in-amazon-bedrock-eks-dashboard-community-events-and-more-may-26-2025/

As the tech community we continue to have many opportunities to learn and network with other like-minded folks. This past week AWS customers attended the AWS Summit Dubai for an action-packed day featuring live demos, hands-on experiences with cutting-edge AI/ML tools, and more. Right here in South Africa I attended the Data & AI Community in Durban for a day of inspiration and learning from the community. In India, the AWS Community Day Bengaluru brought together hundreds of passionate tech enthusiasts for a day of learning and networking.

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention:

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS? page.

Additional updates
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that you might find interesting:

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: Tel Aviv (May 28), Singapore (May 29), Stockholm (June 4), Sydney (June 4–5), Washington (June 10-11), and Madrid (June 11).
  • 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 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: Milwaukee, USA (June 5), and Nairobi, Kenya (June 14).

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

Veliswa.

OpenSearch UI: Six months in review

Post Syndicated from Muthu Pitchaimani original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/opensearch-ui-six-months-in-review/

OpenSearch UI has been adopted by thousands of customers for various use cases since its launch in November 2024. Exciting customer stories and feedback have helped shape our feature improvements. As we complete 6 months since its general availability, we are sharing major enhancements that have improved OpenSearch UI’s capability, especially in observability and security analytics, in this post.

OpenSearch UI is a serverless, fully managed dashboard to provide a scalable, zero-downtime, web-based interface for data analytics and visualizations. With OpenSearch UI, you can have a unified interface to gain actionable insights across multiple data sources, including Amazon OpenSearch Service domains, Amazon OpenSearch Serverless collections, and AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Security Lake.

Use natural language for your AI-powered analytics with Amazon Q Developer

OpenSearch UI has transformed complex data analysis to be as simple as asking questions in natural language with its integration with Amazon Q Developer in OpenSearch. You can access the conversational chat pane by choosing the Amazon Q Developer icon in the top right corner of the UI. Amazon Q Developer will answer generic questions such as how to use the features in OpenSearch UI and how to use OpenSearch UI with additional data sources.

You can use the search bar on the Discover page to use the generative AI capabilities with your OpenSearch data. You can enter your question about your data in natural language. The query assistant feature will translate your question to Piped Processing Language (PPL), run the query, and show the results. There will also be an Amazon Q Summary section generated from the query results to answer your question. The query assistant feature now also works with data connections from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Additionally, you can use the generative AI feature for anomaly detection and visualizations for your data, so it’s straightforward to identify potential issues earlier and faster, reducing the mean time to resolution.

When an alert is triggered, you can choose the Amazon Q icon to generate a summary of the alert, so you can catch up on the context of this alert. The View insights button will provide further analysis of the alerts in combination with OpenSearch knowledge through a process called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). If you want to further investigate the alert, you can choose View in Discover to proceed to log analytics.

Amazon Q Developer in OpenSearch Service will help you reduce troubleshooting time, resolve more issues without escalation, and extract actionable insights from your operational data using natural language instead of specialized queries. Refer to Amazon Q Developer in Amazon OpenSearch Service to get started with the AI assisted analytics experience.

Enhance enterprise security

We have improved OpenSearch UI’s security capability to meet the demanding needs of large enterprises. Through these enhancements, we’re making it seamless to manage secure access at scale so you can have precise control over who can access your analytics workspaces and data that resides in them.

Use SAML workflows through IAM federation

OpenSearch UI now supports Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) federation so that you can create a single sign-on (SSO) experience for your end-users that initiates authentication workflows from your external identity providers (IdPs), typically called IdP-initiated SSO. You might find this process familiar if your organization is using external IdPs (such as Okta) to manage user permissions and track user activities in accessing AWS services. You can now define a default relay state URL to share with your end-users with this support. Your end-users can use this URL to land directly in OpenSearch UI after authenticating with their IdP. You can also achieve fine-grained access control by defining different permissions for each IAM role assumed by different end-users. To get started, refer to Enabling SAML federation with AWS Identity and Access Management.

Secure access with AWS PrivateLink

OpenSearch UI now supports AWS PrivateLink. You can now access OpenSearch UI privately from within your virtual private cloud (VPC). To learn more, see Managing access to the OpenSearch UI from a VPC endpoint.

Enhancing workspace privacy

There are also new workspace-level privacy settings, so you can quickly configure your workspace with the right permissions with collaborators. For more details, refer to Using Amazon OpenSearch Service workspaces.

Expanded data access capabilities

OpenSearch UI now also offers following additional data access capabilities.

Support for cross-cluster search

Cross-cluster search is an OpenSearch feature with which you can query multiple connected OpenSearch Service domains across accounts and across AWS Regions. We added the capability to support these connected domains as data sources in OpenSearch UI. With this support, you can view remote connected clusters with an index pattern under the data source for the source cluster. To learn more, see Cross-Region and cross-account data access with cross-cluster search.

Regional expansion

To further expand the data access capabilities of OpenSearch UI, we expanded its availability to two more regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) and Europe (Stockholm).

Conclusion

The past 6 months after general availability of OpenSearch UI have seen significant progress in making OpenSearch UI more user-friendly, more available, and more secure. From natural language-based exploration to enterprise security, these feature enhancements reflect our commitment to simplify and improve your data analytics experience. To learn more, refer to Using OpenSearch UI in Amazon OpenSearch Service and get updates through Amazon OpenSearch Service user interface release history.


About the Authors

Muthu Pitchaimani is a Search Specialist with Amazon OpenSearch Service. He builds large-scale search applications and solutions. Muthu is interested in the topics of networking and security, and is based out of Austin, Texas.

Hang (Arthur) Zuo is a Senior Product Manager with Amazon OpenSearch Service. Arthur leads generative AI, workspaces, and infrastructural features in OpenSearch UI. Arthur is passionate about cloud technologies and building data products that help users and businesses gain actionable insights and achieve operational excellence.

Introducing Claude 4 in Amazon Bedrock, the most powerful models for coding from Anthropic

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/claude-opus-4-anthropics-most-powerful-model-for-coding-is-now-in-amazon-bedrock/

Anthropic launched the next generation of Claude models today—Opus 4 and Sonnet 4—designed for coding, advanced reasoning, and the support of the next generation of capable, autonomous AI agents. Both models are now generally available in Amazon Bedrock, giving developers immediate access to both the model’s advanced reasoning and agentic capabilities.

Amazon Bedrock expands your AI choices with Anthropic’s most advanced models, giving you the freedom to build transformative applications with enterprise-grade security and responsible AI controls. Both models extend what’s possible with AI systems by improving task planning, tool use, and agent steerability.

With Opus 4’s advanced intelligence, you can build agents that handle long-running, high-context tasks like refactoring large codebases, synthesizing research, or coordinating cross-functional enterprise operations. Sonnet 4 is optimized for efficiency at scale, making it a strong fit as a subagent or for high-volume tasks like code reviews, bug fixes, and production-grade content generation.

When building with generative AI, many developers work on long-horizon tasks. These workflows require deep, sustained reasoning, often involving multistep processes, planning across large contexts, and synthesizing diverse inputs over extended timeframes. Good examples of these workflows are developer AI agents that help you to refactor or transform large projects. Existing models may respond quickly and fluently, but maintaining coherence and context over time—especially in areas like coding, research, or enterprise workflows—can still be challenging.

Claude Opus 4
Claude Opus 4 is the most advanced model to date from Anthropic, designed for building sophisticated AI agents that can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks with minimal oversight. Anthropic benchmarks show it is the best coding model available on the market today. It excels in software development scenarios where extended context, deep reasoning, and adaptive execution are critical. Developers can use Opus 4 to write and refactor code across entire projects, manage full-stack architectures, or design agentic systems that break down high-level goals into executable steps. It demonstrates strong performance on coding and agent-focused benchmarks like SWE-bench and TAU-bench, making it a natural choice for building agents that handle multistep development workflows. For example, Opus 4 can analyze technical documentation, plan a software implementation, write the required code, and iteratively refine it—while tracking requirements and architectural context throughout the process.

Claude Sonnet 4
Claude Sonnet 4 complements Opus 4 by balancing performance, responsiveness, and cost, making it well-suited for high-volume production workloads. It’s optimized for everyday development tasks with enhanced performance, such as powering code reviews, implementing bug fixes, and new feature development with immediate feedback loops. It can also power production-ready AI assistants for near real-time applications. Sonnet 4 is a drop-in replacement from Claude Sonnet 3.7. In multi-agent systems, Sonnet 4 performs well as a task-specific subagent—handling responsibilities like targeted code reviews, search and retrieval, or isolated feature development within a broader pipeline. You can also use Sonnet 4 to manage continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, perform bug triage, or integrate APIs, all while maintaining high throughput and developer-aligned output.

Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 are hybrid reasoning models offering two modes: near-instant responses and extended thinking for deeper reasoning. You can choose near-instant responses for interactive applications, or enable extended thinking when a request benefits from deeper analysis and planning. Thinking is especially useful for long-context reasoning tasks in areas like software engineering, math, or scientific research. By configuring the model’s thinking budget—for example, by setting a maximum token count—you can tune the tradeoff between latency and answer depth to fit your workload.

How to get started
To see Opus 4 or Sonnet 4 in action, enable the new model in your AWS account. Then, you can start coding using the Bedrock Converse API with model IDanthropic.claude-opus-4-20250514-v1:0 for Opus 4 and anthropic.claude-sonnet-4-20250514-v1:0 for Sonnet 4. We recommend using the Converse API, because it provides a consistent API that works with all Amazon Bedrock models that support messages. This means you can write code one time and use it with different models.

For example, let’s imagine I write an agent to review code before merging changes in a code repository. I write the following code that uses the Bedrock Converse API to send a system and user prompts. Then, the agent consumes the streamed result.

private let modelId = "us.anthropic.claude-sonnet-4-20250514-v1:0"

// Define the system prompt that instructs Claude how to respond
let systemPrompt = """
You are a senior iOS developer with deep expertise in Swift, especially Swift 6 concurrency. Your job is to perform a code review focused on identifying concurrency-related edge cases, potential race conditions, and misuse of Swift concurrency primitives such as Task, TaskGroup, Sendable, @MainActor, and @preconcurrency.

You should review the code carefully and flag any patterns or logic that may cause unexpected behavior in concurrent environments, such as accessing shared mutable state without proper isolation, incorrect actor usage, or non-Sendable types crossing concurrency boundaries.

Explain your reasoning in precise technical terms, and provide recommendations to improve safety, predictability, and correctness. When appropriate, suggest concrete code changes or refactorings using idiomatic Swift 6
"""
let system: BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.SystemContentBlock = .text(systemPrompt)

// Create the user message with text prompt and image
let userPrompt = """
Can you review the following Swift code for concurrency issues? Let me know what could go wrong and how to fix it.
"""
let prompt: BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.ContentBlock = .text(userPrompt)

// Create the user message with both text and image content
let userMessage = BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.Message(
    content: [prompt],
    role: .user
)

// Initialize the messages array with the user message
var messages: [BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.Message] = []
messages.append(userMessage)

// Configure the inference parameters
let inferenceConfig: BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.InferenceConfiguration = .init(maxTokens: 4096, temperature: 0.0)

// Create the input for the Converse API with streaming
let input = ConverseStreamInput(inferenceConfig: inferenceConfig, messages: messages, modelId: modelId, system: [system])

// Make the streaming request
do {
    // Process the stream
    let response = try await bedrockClient.converseStream(input: input)

    // Iterate through the stream events
    for try await event in stream {
        switch event {
        case .messagestart:
            print("AI-assistant started to stream"")

        case let .contentblockdelta(deltaEvent):
            // Handle text content as it arrives
            if case let .text(text) = deltaEvent.delta {
                self.streamedResponse + = text
                print(text, termination: "")
            }

        case .messagestop:
            print("\n\nStream ended")
            // Create a complete assistant message from the streamed response
            let assistantMessage = BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.Message(
                content: [.text(self.streamedResponse)],
                role: .assistant
            )
            messages.append(assistantMessage)

        default:
            break
        }
    }

To help you get started, my colleague Dennis maintains a broad range of code examples for multiple use cases and a variety of programming languages.

Available today in Amazon Bedrock
This release gives developers immediate access in Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed, serverless service, to the next generation of Claude models developed by Anthropic. Whether you’re already building with Claude in Amazon Bedrock or just getting started, this seamless access makes it faster to experiment, prototype, and scale with cutting-edge foundation models—without managing infrastructure or complex integrations.

Claude Opus 4 is available in the following AWS Regions in North America: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon). Claude Sonnet 4 is available not only in AWS Regions in North America but also in APAC, and Europe: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (Spain). You can access the two models through cross-Region inference. Cross-Region inference helps to automatically select the optimal AWS Region within your geography to process your inference request.

Opus 4 tackles your most challenging development tasks, while Sonnet 4 excels at routine work with its optimal balance of speed and capability.

Learn more about the pricing and how to use these new models in Amazon Bedrock today!

— seb

Centralize visibility of Kubernetes clusters across AWS Regions and accounts with EKS Dashboard

Post Syndicated from Micah Walter original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/centralize-visibility-of-kubernetes-clusters-across-aws-regions-and-accounts-with-eks-dashboard/

Today, we are announcing EKS Dashboard, a centralized display that enables cloud architects and cluster administrators to maintain organization-wide visibility across their Kubernetes clusters. With EKS Dashboard, customers can now monitor clusters deployed across different AWS Regions and accounts through a unified view, making it easier to track cluster inventory, assess compliance, and plan operational activities like version upgrades.

As organizations scale their Kubernetes deployments, they often run multiple clusters across different environments to enhance availability, ensure business continuity, or maintain data sovereignty. However, this distributed approach can make it challenging to maintain visibility and control, especially in decentralized setups spanning multiple Regions and accounts. Today, many customers resort to third-party tools for centralized cluster visibility, which adds complexity through identity and access setup, licensing costs, and maintenance overhead.

EKS Dashboard simplifies this experience by providing native dashboard capabilities within the AWS Console. The Dashboard provides insights into 3 different resources including clusters, managed node groups, and EKS add-ons, offering aggregated insights into cluster distribution by Region, account, version, support status, forecasted extended support EKS control plane costs, and cluster health metrics. Customers can drill down into specific data points with automatic filtering, enabling them to quickly identify and focus on clusters requiring attention.

Setting up EKS Dashboard

Customers can access the Dashboard in EKS console through AWS Organizations’ management and delegated administrator accounts. The setup process is straightforward and includes simply enabling trusted access as a one-time setup in the Amazon EKS console’s organizations settings page. Trusted access is available from the Dashboard settings page. Enabling trusted access will allow the management account to view the Dashboard. For more information on setup and configuration, see the official AWS Documentation.

Screenshot of EKS Dashboard settings

A quick tour of EKS Dashboard

The dashboard provides both graphical, tabular, and map views of your Kubernetes clusters, with advanced filtering, and search capabilities. You can also export data for further analysis or custom reporting.

Screenshot of EKS Dashboard interface

EKS Dashboard overview with key info about your clusters.

Screenshot of EKS Dashboard interface

There is a wide variety of available widgets to help visualize your clusters.

Screenshot of EKS Dashboard interface

You can visualize your managed node groups by instance type distribution, launch templates, AMI versions, and more

Screenshot of EKS Dashboard interface

There is even a map view where you can see all of your clusters across the globe.

Beyond EKS clusters

EKS Dashboard isn’t limited to just Amazon EKS clusters; it can also provide visibility into connected Kubernetes clusters running on-premises or on other cloud providers. While connected clusters may have limited data fidelity compared to native Amazon EKS clusters, this capability enables truly unified visibility for organizations running hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

Available now

EKS Dashboard is available today in the US East (N. Virginia) Region and is able to aggregate data from all commercial AWS Regions. There is no additional charge for using the EKS Dashboard. To learn more, visit the Amazon EKS documentation.

This new capability demonstrates our continued commitment to simplifying Kubernetes operations for our customers, enabling them to focus on building and scaling their applications rather than managing infrastructure. We’re excited to see how customers use EKS Dashboard to enhance their Kubernetes operations.

— Micah;

Amazon Q Developer CLI supports image inputs in your terminal

Post Syndicated from Keerthi Sreenivas Konjety original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/amazon-q-developer-cli-supports-image-inputs-in-your-terminal/

In this post I will explore how the image support feature in Amazon Q Developer Command Line Interface (CLI) transforms development workflows. Q Developer CLI recently added image support, expanding its capabilities to process visual information and enhancing developer productivity. This new feature allows developers to interact with diagrams, architecture blueprints, and other visual assets directly through the command line.

Modern software development increasingly relies on visual representations to communicate ideas. For example, architecture diagrams illustrate system components and their interactions, while entity-relationship diagrams map out database structures. Translating visual assets into working code is usually a manual, error-prone process of interpretation and implementation.

The new image support in Q Developer CLI bridges this gap by allowing developers to provide images directly to the Q Developer CLI agent for analysis. I’m excited to use this feature to transform my architecture diagrams from scrappy, hand-drawn ideas to polished design documents, and then to infrastructure as code. I look forward to applying it in various use cases, whether I’m getting started on a new project or streamlining my daily workflows.

At the time of launch, the Q Developer CLI supports JPEG, PNG, WEBP, and GIF image formats along with the ability to upload 10 images per request. You must use the latest version (1.10.0 or above) of Q developer CLI to enjoy the image support feature in Q Developer CLI. Use this guide to upgrade or install the latest version.

I will use the following four scenarios as examples to demonstrate the benefit of image support for Q Developer CLI.

Use-case 1: Generating infrastructure as code from an architecture diagram

The following diagram depicts an application that resizes images. It includes a source Amazon S3 bucket into which a user uploads an image, and an AWS Lambda function that resizes the image and stores it in a destination S3 Bucket. I can now convert architecture diagrams to code using Q Developer CLI.

AWS architecture diagram showing an image resizing workflow. The diagram illustrates a source S3 bucket connected to an AWS Lambda function, which then connects to a destination S3 bucket. The flow represents an automated image resizing pipeline.

Architecture for an image resizing application

In the following screenshot, I asked the Q Developer CLI to “Please provide me with a reference terraform template using best practices”. Note that dragging and dropping the image into the CLI will add the path to your prompt.

Screenshot of Amazon Q Developer CLI interface showing generated Terraform code for S3 buckets and Lambda function configuration based on the uploaded architecture diagram

CLI with Terraform code generated by Q Developer

The prior image shows a portion of the response that Q Developer CLI has generated.

Q Developer responds with the terraform template required to get started with building the image resizing application. Q Developer CLI analyzed the image, identified the components and their relationships, and generated the corresponding Terraform code. While not shown in the image, the response included the Lambda function’s code in Python and the IAM permissions needed for the Lambda function.

Previously, transforming this diagram into infrastructure as code would require me to manually interpret each component and write the corresponding configuration. With image support, I can now automate much of this process and refine the generated code through a conversation with Q Developer. I can then have a conversation with Q Developer to refine the generated code, ask questions about specific implementation details, or request modifications based on additional requirements and output the code to a .tf file.

Use-case 2: Converting ER diagrams to database schemas

For our second scenario, let’s consider a use case where I’m a part of a data modeling team developing a course management software for universities. I have created an entity-relationship (ER) diagram for their core data structures. I can now use Q developer to help me convert the ER diagram to SQL.

Image shows an Entity Relationship Diagram with relationships between entities such as Courses, Students, Instructors, and Departments with their attributes.

Course management Entity Relationship Diagram

In the following screenshot, I asked the Q Developer CLI to use the ER diagram to create the database schema.

Screenshot of Amazon Q Developer CLI interface showing the beginning of a generated design document with system architecture and process flow sections based on the hand-drawn diagram

CLI with user prompt and SQL generated by Q Developer

The image shows a continuation of SQL Code response from Amazon Q Developer CLI for table creation generated from the ER Diagram reference.

CLI with SQL generated by Q Developer

The prior image shows the response the that Q Developer CLI generated.

Q Developer analyzed the diagram, identified entities, attributes, and relationships, then generated the appropriate SQL code for creating the database schema.

After Q Developer produces the results, I can refine this schema through a conversation with Q Developer by requesting changes to string lengths, indexes, etc., or requesting explanations of design decisions.

Use-case 3: Converting a hand drawn image to a design document

Consider a scenario where I have brainstormed an idea on paper and I would like to share this with my team. In the following image, I have hand drawn the order flow for a website. When the website user orders books from the website, the application updates inventory, then calls the payment and delivery actions. I can now use the Q Developer CLI to draft documentation from the hand drawn idea.

Hand-drawn flowchart showing the order process for a book website, including steps for order placement, inventory update, payment processing, and delivery actions

Hand drawn order flow for a website

In the following example, I asked Q Developer to write a design document using this image as a reference.

Amazon Q Developer CLI interface showing a command prompt with image input and the resulting generated code response.

CLI with user prompt and response generated by Q Developer

The above screenshot shows that, Q Developer first read the image and understood the content from the hand drawn diagram image.

The image shows a continuation of Design documentation response from Amazon Q Developer CLI for table creation generated from the ER Diagram reference.

CLI with the response generated by Q Developer

The prior screen shot is a portion of the response that Q Developer CLI has generated.

Q Developer converted the idea into a design document including system architecture, process flow, data model, functional requirements, and technical requirements. I can also ask Q Developer to output the context to a .md file. This reduces the amount of time going from idea to execution and streamlines document writing.

Use-case 4: Building a UI mockup/wireframe from a screen shot

Let’s say, I want to get started with building a User Interface (UI) from my design document from use-case 3. I can provide a reference image to Q Developer for generating initial wireframes for my UI.

Screenshot of a sample book sales website.

Sample book sales website home page

In this example, I asked Q Developer to help generate a front-end for a new website in Vue.js

Amazon Q Developer CLI interface showing a command prompt with image input and the resulting generated code response. The screenshot shows Amazon Q Developer CLI generating Vue.js setup instructions

CLI with the user prompt and response generated by Q Developer

The image shows a continuation of Vue.js code response from Amazon Q Developer CLI that uses the book wesbite screenshot as a reference.

CLI with Vue.js code generated by Q Developer

The prior image shows a portion of the Vue.js code generated by the Q Developer CLI to re-produce the front-end of the website in the screenshot. Once I verify the code, I can then ask Q Developer CLI to create these files locally.

This approach reduces the error-prone aspects of wireframe creation, allowing me to focus on creative design decisions instead of repetitive setup tasks. In this way, I can accelerate development cycles, ensure consistency across components, and provide a foundation that can be easily customized to meet specific project requirements.

Additional possibilities:

Apart from the prior examples, Q Developer CLI can analyze many types of images, including:

  • Flow charts and process diagrams
  • Class diagrams for object-oriented design
  • Network topology diagrams
  • Screenshots of error messages or application states

This versatility makes Q Developer CLI a powerful tool for various development workflows.

Conclusion:

The addition of image support to Amazon Q Developer CLI represents a significant step forward in bridging the gap between visual and textual representations in software development. By allowing me to work with diagrams and other visual assets directly from the command line, Amazon Q Developer improves my efficiency in translating design into implementation, reducing errors and accelerating development cycles. I encourage you to explore this new capability and discover how it can enhance your development workflow.

To learn more about Q Developer and its capabilities, visit the documentation.

About the Author: 

Authors-image

Keerthi Sreenivas Konjety

Keerthi Sreenivas Konjety is a Specialist Solutions Architect for Amazon Q Developer, with over 3.5 years of experience in AI, ML and Data Engineering. Her expertise lies in enabling developer productivity for AWS customers. Outside work, she enjoys photography and AI content creation.

Configure System Integrity Protection (SIP) on Amazon EC2 Mac instances

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/configure-system-integrity-protection-sip-on-amazon-ec2-mac-instances/

I’m pleased to announce developers can now programmatically disable Apple System Integrity Protection (SIP) on their Amazon EC2 Mac instances. System Integrity Protection (SIP), also known as rootless, is a security feature introduced by Apple in OS X El Capitan (2015, version 10.11). It’s designed to protect the system from potentially harmful software by restricting the power of the root user account. SIP is enabled by default on macOS.

SIP safeguards the system by preventing modification of protected files and folders, restricting access to system-owned files and directories, and blocking unauthorized software from selecting a startup disk. The primary goal of SIP is to address the security risk linked to unrestricted root access, which could potentially allow malware to gain full control of a device with just one password or vulnerability. By implementing this protection, Apple aims to ensure a higher level of security for macOS users, especially considering that many users operate on administrative accounts with weak or no passwords.

While SIP provides excellent protection against malware for everyday use, developers might occasionally need to temporarily disable it for development and testing purposes. For instance, when creating a new device driver or system extension, disabling SIP is necessary to install and test the code. Additionally, SIP might block access to certain system settings required for your software to function properly. Temporarily disabling SIP grants you the necessary permissions to fine-tune programs for macOS. However, it’s crucial to remember that this is akin to briefly disabling the vault door for authorized maintenance, not leaving it permanently open.

Disabling SIP on a Mac requires physical access to the machine. You have to restart the machine in recovery mode, then disable SIP with the csrtutil command line tool, then restart the machine again.

Until today, you had to operate with the standard SIP settings on EC2 Mac instances. The physical access requirement and the need to boot in recovery mode made integrating SIP with the Amazon EC2 control plane and EC2 API challenging. But that’s no longer the case! You can now disable and re-enable SIP at will on your Amazon EC2 Mac instances. Let me show you how.

Let’s see how it works
Imagine I have an Amazon EC2 Mac instance started. It’s a mac2-m2.metal instance, running on an Apple silicon M2 processor. Disabling or enabling SIP is as straightforward as calling a new EC2 API: CreateMacSystemIntegrityProtectionModificationTask. This API is asynchronous; it starts the process of changing the SIP status on your instance. You can monitor progress using another new EC2 API: DescribeMacModificationTasks. All I need to know is the instance ID of the machine I want to work with.

Prerequisites
On Apple silicon based EC2 Mac instances and more recent type of machines, before calling the new EC2 API, I must set the ec2-user user password and enable secure token for that user on macOS. This requires connecting to the machine and typing two commands in the terminal.

# on the target EC2 Mac instance
# Set a password for the ec2-user user
~ % sudo /usr/bin/dscl . -passwd /Users/ec2-user
New Password: (MyNewPassw0rd)

# Enable secure token, with the same password, for the ec2-user
# old password is the one you just set with dscl
~ % sysadminctl -newPassword MyNewPassw0rd -oldPassword MyNewPassw0rd
2025-03-05 13:16:57.261 sysadminctl[3993:3033024] Attempting to change password for ec2-user…
2025-03-05 13:16:58.690 sysadminctl[3993:3033024] SecKeychainCopyLogin returned -25294
2025-03-05 13:16:58.690 sysadminctl[3993:3033024] Failed to update keychain password (-25294)
2025-03-05 13:16:58.690 sysadminctl[3993:3033024] - Done

# The error about the KeyChain is expected. I never connected with the GUI on this machine, so the Login keychain does not exist
# you can ignore this error.  The command below shows the list of keychains active in this session
~ % security list
    "/Library/Keychains/System.keychain"

# Verify that the secure token is ENABLED
~ % sysadminctl -secureTokenStatus ec2-user
2025-03-05 13:18:12.456 sysadminctl[4017:3033614] Secure token is ENABLED for user ec2-user

Change the SIP status
I don’t need to connect to the machine to toggle the SIP status. I only need to know its instance ID. I open a terminal on my laptop and use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to retrieve the Amazon EC2 Mac instance ID.

 aws ec2 describe-instances \
         --query "Reservations[].Instances[?InstanceType == 'mac2-m2.metal' ].InstanceId" \
         --output text

i-012a5de8da47bdff7

Now, still from the terminal on my laptop, I disable SIP with the create-mac-system-integrity-protection-modification-task command:

echo '{"rootVolumeUsername":"ec2-user","rootVolumePassword":"MyNewPassw0rd"}' > tmpCredentials
aws ec2 create-mac-system-integrity-protection-modification-task \
--instance-id "i-012a5de8da47bdff7" \
--mac-credentials fileb://./tmpCredentials \
--mac-system-integrity-protection-status "disabled" && rm tmpCredentials

{
    "macModificationTask": {
        "instanceId": "i-012a5de8da47bdff7",
        "macModificationTaskId": "macmodification-06a4bb89b394ac6d6",
        "macSystemIntegrityProtectionConfig": {},
        "startTime": "2025-03-14T14:15:06Z",
        "taskState": "pending",
        "taskType": "sip-modification"
    }
}

After the task is started, I can check its status with the aws ec2 describe-mac-modification-tasks command.

{
    "macModificationTasks": [
        {
            "instanceId": "i-012a5de8da47bdff7",
            "macModificationTaskId": "macmodification-06a4bb89b394ac6d6",
            "macSystemIntegrityProtectionConfig": {
                "debuggingRestrictions": "",
                "dTraceRestrictions": "",
                "filesystemProtections": "",
                "kextSigning": "",
                "nvramProtections": "",
                "status": "disabled"
            },
            "startTime": "2025-03-14T14:15:06Z",
            "tags": [],
            "taskState": "in-progress",
            "taskType": "sip-modification"
        },
...

The instance initiates the process and a series of reboots, during which it becomes unreachable. This process can take 60–90 minutes to complete. After that, when I see the status in the console becoming available again, I connect to the machine through SSH or EC2 Instance Connect, as usual.

➜  ~ ssh [email protected]
Warning: Permanently added '54.99.9.99' (ED25519) to the list of known hosts.
Last login: Mon Feb 26 08:52:42 2024 from 1.1.1.1

    ┌───┬──┐   __|  __|_  )
    │ ╷╭╯╷ │   _|  (     /
    │  └╮  │  ___|\___|___|
    │ ╰─┼╯ │  Amazon EC2
    └───┴──┘  macOS Sonoma 14.3.1

➜  ~ uname -a
Darwin Mac-mini.local 23.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 23.3.0: Wed Dec 20 21:30:27 PST 2023; root:xnu-10002.81.5~7/RELEASE_ARM64_T8103 arm64

➜ ~ csrutil --status 
System Integrity Protection status: disabled.

When to disable SIP
Disabling SIP should be approached with caution because it opens up the system to potential security risks. However, as I mentioned in the introduction of this post, you might need to disable SIP when developing device drivers or kernel extensions for macOS. Some older applications might also not function correctly when SIP is enabled.

Disabling SIP is also required to turn off Spotlight indexing. Spotlight can help you quickly find apps, documents, emails and other items on your Mac. It’s very convenient on desktop machines, but not so much on a server. When there is no need to index your documents as they change, turning off Spotlight will release some CPU cycles and disk I/O.

Things to know
There are a couple of additional things to know about disabling SIP on Amazon EC2 Mac:

  • Disabling SIP is available through the API and AWS SDKs, the AWS CLI, and the AWS Management Console.
  • On Apple silicon, the setting is volume based. So if you replace the root volume, you need to disable SIP again. On Intel, the setting is Mac host based, so if you replace the root volume, SIP will still be disabled.
  • After disabling SIP, it will be enabled again if you stop and start the instance. Rebooting an instance doesn’t change its SIP status.
  • SIP status isn’t transferable between EBS volumes. This means SIP will be disabled again after you restore an instance from an EBS snapshot or if you create an AMI from an instance where SIP is enabled.

These new APIs are available in all Regions where Amazon EC2 Mac is available, at no additional cost. Try them today.

— seb


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Introducing the AWS Product Lifecycle page and AWS service availability updates

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-aws-product-lifecycle-page-and-aws-service-availability-updates/

Today, we’re introducing the AWS Product Lifecycle page, a centralized resource that provides comprehensive information about service availability changes across AWS.

The new AWS Product Lifecycle page consolidates all service availability information in one convenient location. This dedicated resource offers detailed visibility into three key categories of changes: 1) services closing access to new customers, 2) services that have announced end of support, and 3) services that have reached their end of support date. For each service listed, you can access specific end-of-support dates, recommended migration paths, and links to relevant documentation, enabling more efficient planning for service transitions.

The AWS Product Lifecycle page helps you stay informed about changes that may affect your workloads and enables more efficient planning for service transitions. The centralized nature of this resource reduces the time and effort needed to track service lifecycle information, allowing you to focus more on your core business objectives and less on administrative overhead.

Today on the new Product Lifecycle page, you will see updates about the following changes to services and capabilities:

AWS service availability updates in 2025
After careful consideration, we’re announcing availability changes for a select group of AWS services and features. We understand that the decision to end support for a service or feature significantly impacts your operations. We approach such decisions only after thorough evaluation, and when end of support is necessary, we provide detailed guidance on available alternatives and comprehensive support for migration.

Services closing access to new customers
We’re closing access to new customers after June 20, 2025, for the following services or capabilities listed. Existing customers will be able to continue to use the service.

Services that have announced end of support
The following services will no longer be supported. To find out more about service specific end-of-support dates, as well as detailed migration information, please visit individual service documentation pages.

Services that have reached their end of support
The following services have reached their end of support date and can no longer be accessed:

  • AWS Private 5G
  • AWS DataSync Discovery

The AWS Product Lifecycle page is available and all the changes described in this post are listed on the new page now. We recommend that you bookmark this page and check out What’s New with AWS? for upcoming AWS service availability updates. For more information about using this new resource, contact us or your usual AWS Support contacts for specific guidance on transitioning affected workloads.

— seb

Exploring the latest features of the Amazon Q Developer CLI

Post Syndicated from Brian Beach original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/exploring-the-latest-features-of-the-amazon-q-developer-cli/

It’s been a few weeks since my last post about the Amazon Q Developer Command Line Interface (CLI), and I’m excited to share all the great new features and improvements the team has been working on. The CLI has been evolving rapidly with a focus on enhancing user experience, improving context management, and adding powerful new capabilities. In this post, I’ll walk you through the most significant changes that make the Amazon Q Developer CLI even more powerful and user-friendly.

Conversation Persistence

One of the most requested features has been the ability to persist conversations, and I’m thrilled to share that this is now available. With the new q chat --resume command, your conversations are now automatically saved by a working directory. This means you can pick up right where you left off when you return to a project, without having to rebuild context or repeat information.

Q Developer has also added two new commands to give you more control over your conversation state:

  • /save allows you to explicitly save the current conversation state
  • /load lets you restore a previously saved conversation

These commands make it easier to manage multiple conversation threads related to different aspects of your project. You can save a conversation about one feature, switch to working on something else, and then load the previous conversation when you’re ready to continue.

A terminal interface showing the Amazon Q logo in dotted cyan text. Below it displays a 'Did you know?' tip explaining that users can resume the last conversation from their current directory using 'q chat --resume'. The bottom shows command shortcuts including '/help' for all commands, 'ctrl + j' for new lines, and 'ctrl + s' for fuzzy search. The terminal shows a successful import of conversation state from 'order-service.json'.

MCP and Tool Use Enhancements

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a key part of the Amazon Q Developer CLI, allowing for extensibility through additional tools and servers. Q Developer has made several improvements to how MCP servers are loaded and managed:

First, Q Developer has implemented background MCP server loading, which significantly improves startup time for q chat. Instead of waiting for all MCP servers to initialize before you can start interacting with Q Developer, the CLI now loads servers in the background while you begin your conversation. This means you can start working immediately, with tools becoming available as their servers finish loading.

The team has also added a new subcommand, q mcp, which provides a dedicated interface for updating and managing your MCP server configuration. This makes it easier to add, remove, or modify the MCP servers that extend your CLI’s capabilities.

For more granular control over which tools can be used, Q Developer has added the /tools command in q chat. This allows you to manage permissions for individual tools, giving you more control over what Q Developer can do in your environment. You can also reset permissions for a specific tool if you change your mind.

A terminal window showing a tools permission list with two main sections. The first section shows SQLite (MCP) commands, all marked as 'not trusted' including operations like list_tables, read_query, create_table, etc. The second 'Built-in' section lists system commands with varying trust levels: fs_read and report_issue are marked as 'trusted', while fs_write is 'not trusted', and use_aws and execute_bash are marked for 'trust read-only commands'. At the bottom, there's a note stating 'Trusted tools can be run without confirmation'.

Improved Context Control

Context is crucial for getting the most out of Q Developer, and the team has made several improvements to how you can manage and view context:

The file selection in q chat‘s fuzzy finder is now git-aware, making it easier to include relevant files from your repository. This is particularly useful when working with large codebases, as it helps you focus on the files that matter for your current task.

Q Developer has added fuzzy search for slash commands with Ctrl + s, allowing you to quickly find and execute commands without remembering their exact syntax. This makes the CLI more accessible, especially for new users or those who don’t use certain commands frequently.

The /context show --expand command has been improved to provide more detailed information about the current context, helping you understand what Q Developer knows about your environment. The team has also enhanced the context file display in q chat to make it more informative and easier to read.

One of the most exciting additions is the new capability for dynamically adding context to messages with context hooks. This allows the CLI to automatically include relevant context based on your conversation, improving the quality of responses without requiring manual context management.

A terminal window showing an expanded context view with two main sections. The 'global' section (marked with a globe icon) lists three markdown files: amazonq/rules/**/*.md, README.md, and AmazonQ.md. It includes hooks for 'On Session Start' and 'Per User Message', both showing '<none>‘. Below that, a ‘profile (default)’ section (marked with a user icon) shows ~/python-coding-standards.md and has the same hook structure, also with ‘<none>‘ values. The command shown at the top is ‘/context show –expand’.” width=”1140″ height=”624″></p>
<h2>Context Window Awareness and Optimization</h2>
<p>As conversations grow longer, managing the context window becomes increasingly important. Q Developer has added two new commands to help with this:</p>
<ul>
<li><code>/usage</code> displays an estimate of the context window usage, helping you understand how much of the available context space you’re using</li>
<li><code>/compact</code> summarizes the conversation history, allowing you to reduce the size of the context while preserving the important information</li>
</ul>
<p>These tools help you make the most of the available context window, ensuring that Q Developer has access to the most relevant information without running into token limits.</p>
<p><img decoding=

Image Support

I’m particularly excited to announce that q chat now supports images! This opens up a whole new dimension of interaction, allowing you to share screenshots, diagrams, or other visual information with Q Developer. This can be incredibly useful for debugging UI issues, discussing design concepts, or explaining complex ideas that are difficult to convey through text alone.

A text explanation of a UML sequence diagram for a Sales Transaction process. The text describes three main components: 1) Participants including an Actor (represented by a stick figure) and a System (represented by a rectangle), 2) Interaction Flow showing message exchanges and lifelines represented by vertical dashed lines, and 3) Loop Structure with a box labeled 'for as many items as needed' representing an iteration where the Actor scans items with product ID and amount parameters.

Editor for Long Prompts

For complex queries or detailed instructions, you may want multiple paragraphs. Q Developer supports Ctrl + j, allowing you to add a newline character to the prompt. In addition, the team has added the /editor command, which opens your configured text editor for composing prompts. This makes it much easier to craft detailed, multi-paragraph prompts or to edit and refine your questions before sending them to Q Developer.

A screenshot showing instructions for performing a threat model analysis using the STRIDE framework. The text requests threat analysis details in markdown format, including threat source, prerequisites, actions, impacts, and affected assets. It asks for severity ratings (low/medium/high) and AWS-based mitigation suggestions with documentation links. The image includes a template structure showing how to format the markdown response, with sections for "Threat Model Analysis," "Spoofing," and individual threat entries.

Expanded Region Support

I’m happy to announce that Q Developer has expanded its regional availability. Professional tier users can now access Q Developer in the Frankfurt region (eu-central-1). This expansion is part of Q Developer’s ongoing effort to provide lower latency and better service to customers across the globe. By adding support for the Frankfurt region, Amazon Q Developer is more accessible to European customers, allowing them to benefit from reduced latency and improved performance.

A terminal screenshot showing a prompt to select an IAM Identity Center profile. Two options are displayed: "q-dev-america" with an ARN in the us-east-1 region, and "q-dev-emea" with an ARN in the eu-central-1 region. The command being executed is "% q profile".

Ability to Manage Issues in CLI

Amazon Q Developer has made it easier to report issues directly from the CLI with two new features:

  • The /issue command in q chat allows you to create new GitHub issues
  • The report_issue tool provides a programmatic way for Q Developer to help you create detailed issue reports

These features streamline the feedback process, making it easier for you to report bugs or request features, and for the team to improve the CLI based on your input.

A terminal screenshot showing an issue reporting interface. The prompt explains how to submit feedback or feature requests to a GitHub repository, listing required information including: 1) a title and 2) optional details about actual behavior, expected behavior, and reproduction steps. At the bottom is a user comment stating "I just wanted you to know that all these new features are awesome!"

Keeping Up with Future Changes

To help you stay informed about new features and improvements, Q Developer has added a --changelog flag to the q version command. This displays the change log directly from the CLI, making it easy to see what’s new without having to visit the GitHub repository or read blog posts like this one.

Conclusion

The Amazon Q Developer CLI continues to evolve rapidly, with new features and improvements that make it an even more powerful tool for developers. From conversation persistence to image support, these updates reflect Q Developer’s commitment to building a CLI that helps you be more productive and effective in your daily work. I encourage you to try out these new features by installing the Amazon Q Developer CLI. Thank you for your continued support and feedback, which helps make Amazon Q Developer better every day.

Amazon Inspector enhances container security by mapping Amazon ECR images to running containers

Post Syndicated from Elizabeth Fuentes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-inspector-enhances-container-security-by-mapping-amazon-ecr-images-to-running-containers/

When running container workloads, you need to understand how software vulnerabilities create security risks for your resources. Until now, you could identify vulnerabilities in your Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) images, but couldn’t determine if these images were active in containers or track their usage. With no visibility if these images were being used on running clusters, you had limited ability to prioritize fixes based on actual deployment and usage patterns.

Starting today, Amazon Inspector offers two new features that enhance vulnerability management, giving you a more comprehensive view of your container images. First, Amazon Inspector now maps Amazon ECR images to running containers, enabling security teams to prioritize vulnerabilities based on containers currently running in your environment. With these new capabilities, you can analyze vulnerabilities in your Amazon ECR images and prioritize findings based on whether they are currently running and when they last ran in your container environment. Additionally, you can see the cluster Amazon Resource Name (ARN), number EKS pods or ECS tasks where an image is deployed, helping you prioritize fixes based on usage and severity.

Second, we’re extending vulnerability scanning support to minimal base images including scratch, distroless, and Chainguard images, and extending support for additional ecosystems including Go toolchain, Oracle JDK & JRE, Amazon Corretto, Apache Tomcat, Apache httpd, WordPress (core, themes, plugins), and Puppeteer, helping teams maintain robust security even in highly optimized container environments.

Through continual monitoring and tracking of images running on containers, Amazon Inspector helps teams identify which container images are actively running in their environment and where they’re deployed, detecting Amazon ECR images running on containers in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and any associated vulnerabilities. This solution supports teams managing Amazon ECR images across single AWS accounts, cross-account scenarios, and AWS Organizations with delegated administrator capabilities, enabling centralized vulnerability management based on container images running patterns.

Let’s see it in action
Amazon ECR image scanning helps identify vulnerabilities in your container images through enhanced scanning, which integrates with Amazon Inspector to provide automated, continual scanning of your repositories. To use this new feature you have to enable enhanced scanning through the Amazon ECR console, you can do it by following the steps in the Configuring enhanced scanning for images in Amazon ECR documentation page. I already have Amazon ECR enhanced scanning, so I don’t have to do any action.

In the Amazon Inspector console, I navigate to General settings and select ECR scanning settings from the navigation panel. Here, I can configure the new Image re-scan mode settings by choosing between Last in-use date and Last pull date. I leave it as it is by default with Last in-use date and set the Image last in use date to 14 days. These settings make it so that Inspector monitors my images based on when they were running in the last 14 days in my Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS environments. After applying these settings, Amazon Inspector starts tracking information about images running on containers and incorporating it into vulnerability findings, helping me focus on images actively running in containers in my environment.

After it’s configured, I can view information about images running on containers in the Details menu, where I can see last in-use and pull dates, along with EKS pods or ECS tasks count.

When selecting the number of Deployed ECS Tasks/EKS Pods, I can see the cluster ARN, last use dates, and Type for each image.

For cross-account visibility demonstration, I have a repository with EKS pods deployed in two accounts. In the Resources coverage menu, I navigate to Container repositories, select my repository name and choose the Image tag. As before, I can see the number of deployed EKS pods/ECS tasks.

When I select the number of deployed EKS pods/ECS tasks, I can see that it is running in a different account.

In the Findings menu, I can review any vulnerabilities, and by selecting one, I can find the Last in use date and Deployed ECS Tasks/EKS Pods involved in the vulnerability under Resource affected data, helping me prioritize remediation based on actual usage.

In the All Findings menu, you can now search for vulnerabilities within account management, using filters such as Account ID, Image in use count and Image last in use at.

Key features and considerations
Monitoring based on container image lifecycle – Amazon Inspector now determines image activity based on: image push date ranging duration 14, 30, 60, 90, or 180 days or lifetime, image pull date from 14, 30, 60, 90, or 180 days, stopped duration from never to 14, 30, 60, 90, or 180 days and status of image running on the container. This flexibility lets organizations tailor their monitoring strategy based on actual container image usage rather than only repository events. For Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS workloads, last in use, push and pull duration are set to 14 days, which is now the default for new customers.

Image runtime-aware finding details – To help prioritize remediation efforts, each finding in Amazon Inspector now includes the lastInUseAt date and InUseCount, indicating when an image was last running on the containers and the number of deployed EKS pods/ ECS tasks currently using it. Amazon Inspector monitors both Amazon ECR last pull date data and images running on Amazon ECS tasks or Amazon EKS pods container data for all accounts, updating this information at least once daily. Amazon Inspector integrates these details into all findings reports and seamlessly works with Amazon EventBridge. You can filter findings based on the lastInUseAt field using rolling window or fixed range options, and you can filter images based on their last running date within the last 14, 30, 60, or 90 days.

Comprehensive security coverage – Amazon Inspector now provides unified vulnerability assessments for both traditional Linux distributions and minimal base images including scratch, distroless, and Chainguard images through a single service. This extended coverage eliminates the need for multiple scanning solutions while maintaining robust security practices across your entire container ecosystem, from traditional distributions to highly optimized container environments. The service streamlines security operations by providing comprehensive vulnerability management through a centralized platform, enabling efficient assessment of all container types.

Enhanced cross-account visibility – Security management across single accounts, cross-account setups, and AWS Organizations is now supported through delegated administrator capabilities. Amazon Inspector shares images running on container information within the same organization, which is particularly valuable for accounts maintaining golden image repositories. Amazon Inspector provides all ARNs for Amazon EKS and Amazon ECS clusters where images are running, if the resource belongs to the account with an API, providing comprehensive visibility across multiple AWS accounts. The system updates deployed EKS pods or ECS tasks information at least one time daily and automatically maintains accuracy as accounts join or leave the organization.

Availability and pricing – The new container mapping capabilities are available now in all AWS Regions where Amazon Inspector is offered at no additional cost. To get started, visit the AWS Inspector documentation. For pricing details and Regional availability, refer to the AWS Inspector pricing page.

PS: Writing a blog post at AWS is always a team effort, even when you see only one name under the post title. In this case, I want to thank Nirali Desai, for her generous help with technical guidance, and expertise, which made this overview possible and comprehensive.

— Eli


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AWS Weekly Roundup: Strands Agents, AWS Transform, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, AWS CodeBuild, and more (May 19, 2025)

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-strands-agents-aws-transform-amazon-bedrock-guardrails-aws-codebuild-and-more-may-19-2025/

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.

Strands Agents SDK agentic loop

Last week’s launches
Here are the other launches that got my attention:

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.
    Architectural diagram.
  • 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.
    AWS Graviton processors.

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

Continue to take control over your code with Amazon Q Developer’s new context features

Post Syndicated from Eva Knight original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/continue-to-take-control-over-your-code-with-amazon-q-developers-new-context-features/

In this blog post, I explore Amazon Q Developer’s latest enhancements to the IDE chat experience including increased context control, chat history and other conversation management features. On March 11th, 2025, my colleague published Take control of your code with Amazon Q Developer’s new context features detailing several improvements to the chat experience within VS Code. These included increased context transparency, the ability to select specific files or folders as context, prompt libraries for reusing prompts across conversations and projects, and project rules to help enforce coding standards and best practices across your teams.

Since then, Amazon Q Developer released additional features in VS Code to help provide users with more control over their conversations and enhance their ability to maintain development context across longer periods. These new capabilities make your interactions with Amazon Q Developer not just more efficient, but also more contextual and persistent—helping you maintain your development flow, even when work spans hours or days. Now, let’s jump in and explore some of the new features available today.

Conversation persistence

We’ve all been there—you’re deep in conversation with Amazon Q Developer, maybe you’re debugging an authentication problem, optimizing a complex database query, or designing a new API structure. You and Amazon Q Developer have been going back and forth, uncovering insights and piecing together solutions.

Then reality intervenes. You close your IDE to focus on another task, step away for a meeting, or maybe update your computer. When you finally return to your IDE, ready to dive back in, you’re met with a blank chat window. All that context, all those valuable exchanges—gone. You find yourself trying to reconstruct your train of thought, wasting precious time and momentum.

Amazon Q Developer now preserves your conversations across your IDE sessions. Instead of starting from scratch each time you open the IDE, you can now come back to your conversation and pick up right where you left off.

Conversation History Search

It isn’t just after a closed IDE session or coming back to your computer after a long-weekend that you want Amazon Q Developer to remember what you have been working on. Sometimes you need to reference a previous solution — maybe Amazon Q Developer gave you some good advice on optimizing your database queries that you want to use elsewhere, or maybe you decided to work on some front-end components so you could have fresh eyes for the API performance issue you’ve been working at.

Now, you can access your previous conversations with Amazon Q Developer by clicking on the search icon in the top right corner of your chat window. You can quickly locate specific discussions by typing keywords into the search bar, then either review the previous exchange or continue the conversation where you left off.

Screenshot of an Amazon Q interface showing a chat window. The user has requested to add Javadocs style comments to a Java file. The AI assistant is responding with an offer to help add Javadoc comments, mentioning a TODO for adding these comments and offering to provide a template.

Fig 1 – View chat history feature in the Amazon Q Developer VS Code chat interface.

Conversation Export

But what if you need to share these insights with a teammate or want to keep a local record for future reference? You can now easily export your chat sessions as markdown files, preserving all the valuable information for offline use or collaboration. To do this, click the export button located directly to the right of the chat history button. Alternatively, when browsing your chat history, you can export individual sessions by clicking the three dots on the right side of each conversation entry.

Screenshot of an Amazon Q chat interface showing a bulleted list of test requirements or specifications. The list includes items about using temporary files, testing success/failure scenarios, verifying edge cases and invalid inputs, testing public methods of a WordList class, and including cleanup annotation.

Fig 2 – Export chat feature in the Amazon Q Developer VS Code chat interface.

Increasing your control over context

Last July, we announced the ability to use @workspace in your chat session to provide comprehensive context across your entire application within the IDE. To provide more control over what Amazon Q Developer uses as context, earlier this year we released the ability to use the @ symbol in the chat to include specific folders or files as context for your conversation.

We are now taking your level of control one step further to allow you to use @ in your conversation to find and include classes, functions, and global variables into the input context. Rather than leaving it up to Amazon Q to determine the relevant files, folders, or functions for your request, you can continue to be more explicit with your request to receive the most relevant and accurate responses.

Screenshot of an Amazon Q interface showing a file search/navigation panel with "ja:" search query displaying Java-related files. The list includes various Java source files and configuration files from a Q-Words project, including controllers, models, and utility classes. At the bottom is a search input box with "@ja" and a note about Amazon Q Developer using generative AI.

Fig 3 – Context selection in Amazon Q Developer chat, using “@” to show relevant folders, files, functions.

Conclusion

Amazon Q Developer is continuing to evolve its features that help put developers in control of their coding experience. By offering conversation persistence, history search, and export capabilities, Amazon Q Developer works to create continuity that allows developers to maintain their momentum across sessions and easily revisit past solutions. The expanded context control features empower developers to fine-tune their interactions with Amazon Q Developer, and receive more precise and relevant responses.

To get started with these features in VS Code, visit the Amazon Q Developer Getting Started guide and explore the full range of capabilities that can help you create impressive software more efficiently.

Eva Knight

Eva Knight is a Worldwide Go-To-Market specialist at Amazon Web Services (AWS) focusing on generative AI across the software development lifecycle. Her journey at AWS began in 2022 as a Business Development Intern, transitioning to a full-time role after completing her Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Information Systems from the University of Washington.

Accelerate CI/CD pipelines with the new AWS CodeBuild Docker Server capability

Post Syndicated from Donnie Prakoso original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/accelerate-ci-cd-pipelines-with-the-new-aws-codebuild-docker-server-capability/

Starting today, you can use AWS CodeBuild Docker Server capability to provision a dedicated and persistent Docker server directly within your CodeBuild project. With Docker Server capability, you can accelerate your Docker image builds by centralizing image building to a remote host, which reduces wait times and increases overall efficiency.

From my benchmark, with this Docker Server capability, I reduced the total building time by 98 percent, from 24 minutes and 54 seconds to 16 seconds. Here’s a quick look at this feature from my AWS CodeBuild projects.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages ready for deployment. Building Docker images is one of the most common use cases for CodeBuild customers, and the service has progressively improved this experience over time by releasing features such as Docker layer caching and reserved capacity features to improve Docker build performance.

With the new Docker Server capability, you can reduce build time for your applications by providing a persistent Docker server with consistent caching. When enabled in a CodeBuild project, a dedicated Docker server is provisioned with persistent storage that maintains your Docker layer cache. This server can handle multiple concurrent Docker build operations, with all builds benefiting from the same centralized cache.

Using AWS CodeBuild Docker Server
Let me walk you through a demonstration that showcases the benefits with the new Docker Server capability.

For this demonstration, I’m building a complex, multi-layered Docker image based on the official AWS CodeBuild curated Docker images repository, specifically the Dockerfile for building a standard Ubuntu image. This image contains numerous dependencies and tools required for modern continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, making it a good example of the type of large Docker builds that development teams regularly perform.


# Copyright 2020-2024 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
#
# Licensed under the Amazon Software License (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# A copy of the License is located at
#
#    http://aws.amazon.com/asl/
#
# or in the "license" file accompanying this file.
# This file is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, express or implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
FROM public.ecr.aws/ubuntu/ubuntu:20.04 AS core

ARG DEBIAN_FRONTEND="noninteractive"

# Install git, SSH, Git, Firefox, GeckoDriver, Chrome, ChromeDriver,  stunnel, AWS Tools, configure SSM, AWS CLI v2, env tools for runtimes: Dotnet, NodeJS, Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Go, .NET, Powershell Core,  Docker, Composer, and other utilities
COMMAND REDACTED FOR BREVITY
# Activate runtime versions specific to image version.
RUN n $NODE_14_VERSION
RUN pyenv  global $PYTHON_39_VERSION
RUN phpenv global $PHP_80_VERSION
RUN rbenv  global $RUBY_27_VERSION
RUN goenv global  $GOLANG_15_VERSION

# Configure SSH
COPY ssh_config /root/.ssh/config
COPY runtimes.yml /codebuild/image/config/runtimes.yml
COPY dockerd-entrypoint.sh /usr/local/bin/dockerd-entrypoint.sh
COPY legal/bill_of_material.txt /usr/share/doc/bill_of_material.txt
COPY amazon-ssm-agent.json /etc/amazon/ssm/amazon-ssm-agent.json

ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/local/bin/dockerd-entrypoint.sh"]

This Dockerfile creates a comprehensive build environment with multiple programming languages, build tools, and dependencies – exactly the type of image that would benefit from persistent caching.

In the build specification (buildspec), I use the docker buildx build . command:

version: 0.2
phases:
  build:
    commands:
      - cd ubuntu/standard/5.0
      - docker buildx build -t codebuild-ubuntu:latest .

To enable the Docker Server capability, I navigate to the AWS CodeBuild console and select Create project. I can also enable this capability when editing existing CodeBuild projects.

I fill in all details and configuration. In the Environment section, I select Additional configuration.

Then, I scroll down and find Docker server configuration and select Enable docker server for this project. When I select this option, I can choose a compute type configuration for the Docker server. When I’m finished with the configurations, I create this project.

Now, let’s see the Docker Server capability in action.

The initial build takes approximately 24 minutes and 54 seconds to complete because it needs to download and compile all dependencies from scratch. This is expected for the first build of such a complex image.

For subsequent builds with no code changes, the build takes only 16 seconds and that shows 98% reduction in build time.

Looking at the logs, I can see that with Docker Server, most layers are pulled from the persistent cache:

The persistent caching provided by the Docker Server maintains all layers between builds, which is particularly valuable for large, complex Docker images with many layers. This demonstrates how Docker Server can dramatically improve throughput for teams running numerous Docker builds in their CI/CD pipelines.

Additional things to know
Here are a couple of things to note:

  • Architecture support – The feature is available for both x86 (Linux) and ARM builds.
  • Pricing – To learn more about pricing for Docker Server capability, refer to the AWS CodeBuild pricing page.
  • Availability – This feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS CodeBuild is offered. For more information about the AWS Regions where CodeBuild is available, see the AWS Regions page.

You can learn more about the Docker Server feature in the AWS CodeBuild documentation.

Happy building! —

Donnie Prakoso


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Accelerate the modernization of Mainframe and VMware workloads with AWS Transform

Post Syndicated from Matheus Guimaraes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/accelerate-the-modernization-of-mainframe-and-vmware-workloads-with-aws-transform/

Generative AI has brought many new possibilities to organizations. It has equipped them with new abilities to retire technical debt, modernize legacy systems, and build agile infrastructure to help unlock the value that is trapped in their internal data. However, many enterprises still rely heavily on legacy IT infrastructure, particularly mainframes and VMware-based systems. These platforms have been the backbone of critical operations for decades, but they hinder organizations’ ability to innovate, scale effectively, and reduce technical debt in an era where cloud-first strategies dominate. The need to modernize these workloads is clear, but the journey has traditionally been complex and risky.

The complexity spans multiple dimensions. Financially, organizations face mounting licensing costs and expensive migration projects. Technically, they must untangle legacy dependencies while meeting compliance requirements. Organizationally, they must manage the transition of teams who’ve built careers around legacy systems and navigate undocumented institutional knowledge.

AWS Transform directly addresses these challenges with purpose-built agentic AI that accelerates and de-risks your legacy modernization. It automates the assessment, planning, and transformation of both mainframe and VMware workloads into cloud based architectures, streamlining the entire process. Through intelligent insights, automated code transformation, and human-in-the-loop workflows, organizations can now tackle even the most challenging modernization projects with greater confidence and efficiency.

Mainframe workload migration
AWS Transform for mainframe is the first agentic AI service for modernizing mainframe workloads at scale. The specialized mainframe agent accelerates mainframe modernization by automating complex, resource-intensive tasks across every phase of modernization — from initial assessment to final deployment. It streamlines the migration of legacy applications built on IBM z/OS Db2, including COBOL, CICS, DB2, and VSAM, to modern cloud environments–cutting modernization timelines from years to months.

Let’s look at a few examples of how AWS Transform can help you through different aspects of the migration process.

Code analysis – AWS Transform provides comprehensive insights into your codebase, automatically examining mainframe codebases, creating detailed dependency graphs, measuring code complexity, and identifying component relationships

Documentation – AWS Transform for mainframe creates comprehensive technical and functional documentation of mainframe applications, preserving critical knowledge about features, program logic, and data flows. You can interact with the generated documentation through an AI-powered chat interface to discover and retrieve information quickly.

Business rule extraction – AWS Transform extracts and presents complex logic in plain language so you can gain visibility into business processes embedded within legacy applications. This enables both business and technical stakeholders to gain a greater understanding of application functionality.

Code decomposition – AWS Transform offers sophisticated code decomposition tools, including interactive dependency graphs and domain separation capabilities, enabling users to visualize and modify relationships between components while identifying key business functions. The solution also streamlines migration planning through an interactive wave sequence planner that considers user preferences to generate optimized migration strategies.

Modernization Wave Planning – With its specialized agent, AWS Transform for mainframe creates prioritized modernization wave sequences based on code and data dependencies, code volume, and business priorities. It enables modernization teams to make data-driven, customized migration plans that align to their specific organizational needs.

Code refactoring – AWS Transform can refactor millions of lines of mainframe code in minutes, converting COBOL, VSAM, and DB2 systems into modern Java Spring Boot applications while maintaining functional equivalence and transforming CICS transactions into web services and JCL batch processes into Groovy scripts. The solution provides high-quality output through configurable settings and bundled runtime capabilities, producing Java code that emphasizes readability, maintainability, and technical excellence.

Deployments – AWS Transform provides customizable deployment templates that streamline the deployment process through user-defined inputs. For added efficiency, the solution bundles the selected runtime version with the migrated application, enabling seamless deployment as a complete package.

By integrating intelligent documentation analysis, business rules extraction, and human-in-the-loop collaboration capabilities, AWS Transform helps organizations accelerate their mainframe transformation while reducing risk and maintaining business continuity.

VMware modernization
With rapid changes in VMware licensing and support model, organizations are increasingly exploring alternatives despite the difficulties associated with migrating and modernizing VMware workloads. This is aggravated by the fact that the accumulation of technical debt typically creates complex, poorly documented environments managed by multiple teams, leading to vendor lock-in and collaboration challenges that hinder migration efforts further.

AWS Transform is the first agentic AI service for VMware modernization of its kind that helps you to overcome those difficulties. It can offset risk and accelerate the modernization of VMware workloads by automating application discovery, dependency mapping, migration planning, network conversion, and EC2 instance optimization, reducing manual effort and accelerating cloud adoption.

The process is organized into four phases: inventory discovery, wave planning, network conversion, and server migration. It uses agentic AI capabilities to analyze and map complex VMware environments, converting network configurations into AWS built-in constructs and helps you to orchestrate dependency-aware migration waves for seamless cutovers. In addition, it also provides a collaborative web interface that keeps AWS teams, partners, and customers aligned throughout the modernization journey.

Let’s take a quick tour to see how this works.

Setting up
Before you can start using the service, you must first enable it by navigating to the AWS Transform console. AWS Transform requires AWS IAM Identity Center (IdC) to manage users and setup appropriate permissions. If you don’t yet have IdC set up it will ask you to configure it first and return to the AWS Transform console later to continue the process.

With IdC available, you can then proceed to choosing the encryption settings. AWS Transform gives you the option to use a default AWS managed key or you can use your own custom keys through AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

After completing this step, AWS Transform will be enabled. You can manage admin access to the console by navigating to Users and using the search box to find them. You must create users or groups in IdC first if they don’t already exist. The service console will help admins provision users who will get access to the web app. Each provisioned user receives an email with a link to set password and get their personalized URL for the webapp.

You interact with AWS Transform through a dedicated web experience. To get the url, navigate to Settings where you can check your configurations and copy the links to the AWS Transform web experience where you and your teams can start using the service.

Discovery
AWS Transform can discover your VMware environment either automatically through AWS Application Discovery Service collectors or you can provide your own data by importing existing RVTools export files.

To get started, choose the Create or select connectors task and provide the account IDs for one or more AWS accounts that will be used for discovery. This will generate links that you can follow to authorize each account for usage within AWS Transform. You can then move on to the Perform discovery task, where you can choose to install AWS Application Discovery Service collectors or upload your own files such as exports from RVTools.

Provisioning
The steps for the provisioning phase are similar to the ones described earlier for discovery. You connect target AWS accounts by entering their account IDs and validating the authorization requests which will then enable the next steps such as the Generate VPC configuration step. Here, you can import your RVTools files or NSX exports from Import/Export from NSX, if applicable, and enable AWS Transform to understand your networking requirements.

You should then continue working through the job plan until you reach the point where it’s ready to deploy your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). All the infrastructure as code (IaC) code is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets in the target AWS account.

Review the proposed changes and, if you’re happy, start the deployment process of the AWS resources to the target accounts.

Deployment
AWS Transform requires you to set up AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) in the target AWS accounts to automate the migration process. Choose the Initiate VM migration task and use the link to navigate to the service console, then follow the instructions to configure it.

After setting up service permissions, you’ll proceed to the implementation phase of the waves created by AWS Transform and start the migration process. For each wave, you’ll first be asked to make various choices such as setting the sizing preference and tenancy for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Confirm your selections and continue following the instructions given by AWS Transform until you reach the Deploy replication agents stage, where you can start the migration for that wave.

After you start the waves migration process, you can switch to the dashboard at any time to check on progress.

With its agentic AI capabilities, AWS Transform offers a powerful solution for accelerating and de-risking mainframe and VMware modernization workloads. By automating complex assessment and transformation processes, AWS Transform reduces the time associated with legacy system migration while minimizing the potential for errors and business disruption enabling more agile, efficient, and future-ready IT environments within your organization.

Things to know
Availability –  AWS Transform for mainframe is available in US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions. AWS Transform for VMware offers different availability options for data collection and migrations. Please refer to the AWS Transform for VMware FAQ for more details.

Pricing –  Currently, we offer our core features—including assessment and transformation—at no cost to AWS customers.

Here are a few links for further reading.

Dive deeper into mainframe modernization and learn more about about AWS Transform for mainframe.

Explore more about VMware modernization and how to get started with your VMware migration journey.

Check out this interactive demo of AWS Transform for mainframe and this interactive demo of AWS Transform for VMware.

Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus


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AWS Transform for .NET, the first agentic AI service for modernizing .NET applications at scale

Post Syndicated from Prasad Rao original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-transform-for-net-the-first-agentic-ai-service-for-modernizing-net-applications-at-scale/

I started my career as a .NET developer and have seen .NET evolve over the last couple of decades. Like many of you, I also developed multiple enterprise applications in .NET Framework that ran only on Windows. I fondly remember building my first enterprise application with .NET Framework. Although it served us well, the technology landscape has significantly shifted. Now that there is an open source and cross-platform version of .NET that can run on Linux, these legacy enterprise applications built on .NET Framework need to be ported and modernized.

The benefits of porting to Linux are compelling: applications cost 40 percent less to operate because they save on Windows licensing costs, run 1.5–2 times faster with improved performance, and handle growing workloads with 50 percent better scalability. Having helped port several applications, I can say the effort is worth the rewards.

However, porting .NET Framework applications to cross-platform .NET is a labor-intensive and error-prone process. You have to perform multiple steps, such as analyzing the codebase, detecting incompatibilities, implementing fixes while porting the code, and then validating the changes. For enterprises, the challenge becomes even more complex because they might have hundreds of .NET Framework applications in their portfolio.

At re:Invent 2024, we previewed this capability as Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities for .NET to help port your .NET applications at scale. The experience is available as a unified web experience for at-scale transformation and within your integrated development environment (IDE) for individual project and solution porting.

Now that we’ve incorporated your valuable feedback and suggestions, we’re excited to announce today the general availability of AWS Transform for .NET. We’ve also added new capabilities to support projects with private NuGet packages, port model-view-controller (MVC) Razor views to ASP .NET Core Razor views, and execute the ported unit tests.

I’ll expand on the key new capabilities in a moment, but let’s first take a quick look at the two porting experiences of AWS Transform for .NET.

Large-scale porting experience for .NET applications
Enterprise digital transformation is typically driven by central teams responsible for modernizing hundreds of applications across multiple business units. Different teams have ownership of different applications and their respective repositories. Success requires close coordination between these teams and the application owners and developers across business units. To accelerate this modernization at scale, AWS Transform for .NET provides a web experience that enables teams to connect directly to source code repositories and efficiently transform multiple applications across the organization. For select applications requiring dedicated developer attention, the same agent capabilities are available to developers as an extension for Visual Studio IDE.

Let’s start by looking at how the web experience of AWS Transform for .NET helps port hundreds of .NET applications at scale.

Web experience of AWS Transform for .NET
To get started with the web experience of AWS Transform, I onboard using the steps outlined in the documentation, sign in using my credentials, and create a job for .NET modernization.

Create a new job for .NET Transformation

AWS Transform for .NET creates a job plan, which is a sequence of steps that the agent will execute to assess, discover, analyze, and transform applications at scale. It then waits for me to set up a connector to connect to my source code repositories.

Setup connector to connect to source code repository

After the connector is in place, AWS Transform begins discovering repositories in my account. It conducts an assessment focused on three key areas: repository dependencies, required private packages and third-party libraries, and supported project types within your repositories.

Based on this assessment, it generates a recommended transformation plan. The plan orders repositories according to their last modification dates, dependency relationships, private package requirements, and the presence of supported project types.

AWS Transform for .NET then prepares for the transformation process by requesting specific inputs, such as the target branch destination, target .NET version, and the repositories to be transformed.

To select the repositories to transform, I have two options: use the recommended plan or customize the transformation plan by selecting repositories manually. For selecting repositories manually, I can use the UI or download the repository mapping and upload the customized list.

select the repositories to transform

AWS Transform for .NET automatically ports the application code, builds the ported code, executes unit tests, and commits the ported code to a new branch in my repository. It provides a comprehensive transformation summary, including modified files, test outcomes, and suggested fixes for any remaining work.

While the web experience helps accelerate large-scale porting, some applications may require developer attention. For these cases, the same agent capabilities are available in the Visual Studio IDE.

Visual Studio IDE experience of AWS Transform for .NET
Now, let’s explore how AWS Transform for .NET works within Visual Studio.

To get started, I install the latest version of AWS Toolkit extension for Visual Studio and set up the prerequisites.

I open a .NET Framework solution, and in the Solution Explorer, I see the context menu item Port project with AWS Transform for an individual project.

Context menu for Port project with AWS Transform in Visual Studio

I provide the required inputs, such as the target .NET version and the approval for the agents to autonomously transform code, execute unit tests, generate a transformation summary, and validate Linux-readiness.

Transformation summary after the project is transformed in Visual Studio

I can review the code changes made by the agents locally and continue updating my codebase.

Let’s now explore some of the key new capabilities added to AWS Transform for .NET.

Support for projects with private NuGet package dependencies 
During preview, only projects with public NuGet package dependencies were supported. With general availability, we now support projects with private NuGet package dependencies. This has been one of the most requested features during the preview.

The feature I really love is that AWS Transform can detect cross-repository dependencies. If it finds the source code of my private NuGet package, it automatically transforms that as well. However, if it can’t locate the source code, in the web experience, it provides me the flexibility to upload the required NuGet packages.

AWS Transform displays the missing package dependencies that need to be resolved. There are two ways to do this: I can either use the provided PowerShell script to create and upload packages, or I can build the application locally and upload the NuGet packages from the packages folder in the solution directory.

Upload packages to resolve missing dependencies

After I upload the missing NuGet packages, AWS Transform is able to resolve the dependencies. It’s best to provide both the .NET Framework and cross platform .NET versions of the NuGet packages. If the cross platform .NET version is not available, then at a minimum the .NET Framework version is required for AWS Transform to add it as an assembly reference and proceed for transformation.

Unit test execution
During preview, we supported porting unit tests from .NET Framework to cross-platform .NET. With general availability, we’ve also added support for executing unit tests after the transformation is complete.

After the transformation is complete and the unit tests are executed, I can see the results in the dashboard and view the status of the tests at each individual test project level.

Dashboard after successful transformation in web showing exectuted unit tests

Transformation visibility and summary
After the transformation is complete, I can download a detailed report in JSON format that gives me a list of transformed repositories, details about each repository, and the status of the transformation actions performed for each project within a repository. I can view the natural language transformation summary at the project level to understand AWS Transform output with project-level granularity. The summary provides me with an overview of updates along with key technical changes to the codebase.

detailed report of transformed project highlighting transformation summary of one of the project

Other new features
Let’s have a quick look at other new features we’ve added with general availability:

  • Support for porting UI layer – During preview, you could only port the business logic layers of MVC applications using AWS Transform, and you had to port the UI layer manually. With general availability, you can now use AWS Transform to port MVC Razor views to ASP.NET Core Razor views.
  • Expanded connector support – During preview, you could connect only to GitHub repositories. Now with general availability, you can connect to GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket repositories.
  • Cross repository dependency – When you select a repository for transformation, dependent repositories are automatically selected for transformation.
  • Download assessment report – You can download a detailed assessment report of the identified repositories in your account and private NuGet packages referenced in these repositories.
  • Email notifications with deep links – You’ll receive email notifications when a job’s status changes to completed or stopped. These notifications include deep links to the transformed code branches for review and continued transformation in your IDE.

Things to know
Some additional things to know are:

  • Regions – AWS Transform for .NET is generally available today in the Europe (Frankfurt) and US East (N. Virginia) Regions.
  • Pricing – Currently, there is no additional charge for AWS Transform. Any resources you create or continue to use in your AWS account using the output of AWS Transform will be billed according to their standard pricing. For limits and quotas, refer to the documentation.
  • .NET versions supported – AWS Transform for .NET supports transforming applications written using .NET Framework versions 3.5+, .NET Core 3.1, and .NET 5+, and the cross-platform .NET version, .NET 8.
  • Application types supported – AWS Transform for .NET supports porting C# code projects of the following types: console application, class library, unit tests, WebAPI, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service, MVC, and single-page application (SPA).
  • Getting started – To get started, visit AWS Transform for .NET User Guide.
  • Webinar – Join the webinar Accelerate .NET Modernization with Agentic AI to experience AWS Transform for .NET through a live demonstration.

– Prasad


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Enhanced remote desktop experience: Amazon DCV with Amazon Linux 2023

Post Syndicated from Madhur Kulkarni original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/enhanced-remote-desktop-experience-amazon-dcv-with-amazon-linux-2023/

Amazon DCV has evolved as a powerful remote display protocol, enabling secure high-performance remote desktop access and application streaming. This blog talks about how DCV remote display capabilities are now integrated with Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023).

Overview

This post introduces new Graphical Desktop with AL2023 and provides an overview of new features available through DCV. The Graphical Desktop comes with GNOME 47 for a smooth UI experience that you can connect using DCV, enabling remote desktop access from anywhere. It also provides an overview of more tools such as a terminal emulator with Ptyxis for improved CLI experience, Mozilla Firefox for secure web browsing, an image viewer with Loupe, a text editor, and a file manager for file navigation, and.

Core features

AL2023 introduces an enhanced desktop experience, specifically tailored for remote access needs, as shown in the following Figure-1. DCV technology allows you to connect seamlessly to Graphical Desktop interface with GNOME 47. Users benefit from native DCV protocol support that enables high-performance remote access, featuring dynamic resolution adaptation and hardware-accelerated video encoding. Enhanced security features include advanced encryption and granular access controls.

Although DCV supports multiple desktop environments, the use of GNOME 47 is specifically part of the AL23 current release. The GNOME 47 system uses Mutter 47.0 as its window manager and compositor, alongside the GTK 4 toolkit for its user interface. This includes window management capabilities that provide more precise control over application placement and sizing, while improved multi-monitor support makes sure that workspaces expand seamlessly across displays. Most importantly, there is a native desktop-like experience with the DCV local features such as clipboard sharing, audio redirection, and multi-monitor capabilities, which deliver a seamless and responsive remote environment.

Figure 1. DCV desktop interface with AL2023

Ptyxis delivers exceptional performance with SSH, SFTP, and TLS/SSL support, as shown in the following figure. You can experience GPU-accelerated text rendering with a crystal-clear display, supporting UTF-8/16 and Unicode 15.0, while maintaining minimal input lag at 60 Hz refresh rates. The DCV 4K support enables high-resolution (3840 x 2160 pixels) remote desktop streaming, which allows users to work with graphically intensive applications while maintaining excellent visual quality. Ptyxis is deeply integrated with GNOME through D-Bus and GNOME I/O (GIO) interfaces, providing access to global search and system notifications. Users can use advanced session management with JSON-based configurations, tab groups, split views up to 16 panes, and automatic session restoration. The terminal includes full 256-color and true-color support, compatible with Bash, Zsh, and Fish shells, while maintaining robust connection stability.

Figure 2. Terminal Emulator

Firefox in AL2023 is optimized specifically for remote desktop scenarios, as shown in the following figure. The browser features hardware-accelerated rendering and WebGL 2.0 support, delivering smooth graphics and responsive page loading. Enhanced browser capabilities provide better performance for 3D applications and interactive web content. Users can experience optimized video playback with minimal frame drops and improved synchronization, which are particularly important for remote streaming needs. Integration with DCV streaming technology enables efficient resource usage and provides a local-like experience when accessing remote workstations, featuring seamless audio-video synchronization, smooth multi-monitor support, and native peripheral device integration.

Figure 3. Mozilla Firefox with DCV

More features

The GNOME Text Editor seamlessly integrates with AL2023, providing a modern, distraction-free interface for coding and text editing within the DCV environment, as shown in the following figure. As the default text editor in the AL23 GNOME desktop, it offers essential features such as syntax highlighting, dark/light themes, and autosave functionality, making it ideal for remote development work.

Figure 4. GNOME Text Editor

Loupe offers a sleek and intuitive image viewing experience in AL2023 when accessed through DCV, as shown in the following figure. It features a clean interface with smooth animations, efficient image loading, and gesture support, all while maintaining responsive performance over the DCV remote desktop connection. This makes it ideal for viewing and basic image manipulation tasks.

Figure 5. Image Viewer features and options

The GNOME File manager in AL2023 provides a robust and intuitive interface for managing files and folders when accessed through the DCV remote desktop environment, as shown in the following figure. It offers essential features such as drag-and-drop functionality, list and grid views, file search, and seamless integration with cloud storage, all while maintaining responsive performance over the DCV optimized remote connection protocol. You can use DCV to upload files to and download files from DCV session storage. For instructions on how to enable and configure session storage, go to Enabling session storage in the DCV Administrator Guide.

Figure 6. File Manager

Conclusion

The Amazon DCV team is committed to delivering the best remote desktop experience possible, and these enhancements demonstrate that commitment. In this post, we demonstrated how our integrated solution, from the GNOME 47 intuitive interface to the powerful terminal capabilities of Ptyxis, creates a seamless remote workspace. Using these improvements allows you to enhance productivity and overall user experience in remote desktop environments. These enhanced capabilities offer a significant step forward in remote computing, thereby providing tools and optimizations designed to meet the evolving needs of the distributed and flexible work environments today.

For a deeper dive into setup and advanced configurations, you should review our comprehensive DCV admin guides, which provide detailed information to help you maximize the potential of these new features.

AWS Weekly Roundup: South America expansion, Q Developer in OpenSearch, and more (May 12, 2025)

Post Syndicated from Micah Walter original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-south-america-expansion-q-developer-in-opensearch-and-more-may-12-2025/

I’ve always been fascinated by how quickly we’re able to stand up new Regions and Availability Zones at AWS. Today there are 36 launched Regions and 114 launched Availability Zones. That’s amazing!

This past week at AWS was marked by significant expansion to our global infrastructure. The announcement of a new Region in the works for South America means customers will have more options for meeting their low latency and data residency requirements. Alongside the expansion, AWS announced the availability of numerous instance types in additional Regions.

In addition to the infrastructure expansion, AWS is also expanding the reach of Amazon Q Developer into Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Last week’s launches

Instance announcements

AWS expanded instance availability for an array of instance types across additional Regions.

Additional updates

Upcoming events

We are in the middle of AWS Summit season! AWS Summits run throughout the summer in cities all around the world. Be sure to check the calendar to find out when a AWS Summit is happening near you. Here are the remaining Summits for May, 2025.


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