Since the launch of AWS Graviton processors in 2018, we have continued to innovate and deliver improved performance for our customers’ cloud workloads. Following the success of our Graviton3-based instances, we are excited to announce three new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance families powered by AWS Graviton4 processors with NVMe-based SSD local storage: compute optimized (C8gd), general purpose (M8gd), and memory optimized (R8gd) instances. These instances deliver up to 30% better compute performance, 40% higher performance for I/O intensive database workloads, and up to 20% faster query results for I/O intensive real-time data analytics than comparable AWS Graviton3-based instances.
Let’s look at some of the improvements that are now available in our new instances. These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs (up to 192 vCPUs), 3x the memory (up to 1.5 TiB), 3x the local storage (up to 11.4TB of NVMe SSD storage), 75% higher memory bandwidth, and 2x more L2 cache compared to their Graviton3-based predecessors. These features help you to process larger amounts of data, scale up your workloads, improve time to results, and lower your total cost of ownership (TCO). These instances also offer up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) bandwidth, a significant improvement over Graviton3-based instances. Additionally, you can now adjust the network and Amazon EBS bandwidth on these instances by up to 25% using EC2 instance bandwidth weighting configuration, providing you greater flexibility with the allocation of your bandwidth resources to better optimize your workloads.
Built on AWS Graviton4, these instances are great for storage intensive Linux-based workloads including containerized and micro-services-based applications built using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Kubernetes, and Docker, as well as applications written in popular programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 30% faster for web applications, 40% faster for databases, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors.
Instance specifications
These instances also offer two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl and metal-48xl), allowing you to right size your instances and deploy workloads that benefit from direct access to physical resources. Additionally, these instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software to enhance the performance and security of your workloads. In addition, Graviton4 processors offer you enhanced security by fully encrypting all high-speed physical hardware interfaces.
The instances are available in 10 sizes per family, as well as two bare metal configurations each:
Instance Name
vCPUs
Memory (GiB) (C/M/R)
Storage (GB)
Network Bandwidth (Gbps)
EBS Bandwidth (Gbps)
medium
1
2/4/8*
1 x 59
Up to 12.5
Up to 10
large
2
4/8/16*
1 x 118
Up to 12.5
Up to 10
xlarge
4
8/16/32*
1 x 237
Up to 12.5
Up to 10
2xlarge
8
16/32/64*
1 x 474
Up to 15
Up to 10
4xlarge
16
32/64/128*
1 x 950
Up to 15
Up to 10
8xlarge
32
64/128/256*
1 x 1900
15
10
12xlarge
48
96/192/384*
3 x 950
22.5
15
16xlarge
64
128/256/512*
2 x 1900
30
20
24xlarge
96
192/384/768*
3 x 1900
40
30
48xlarge
192
384/768/1536*
6 x 1900
50
40
metal-24xl
96
192/384/768*
3 x 1900
40
30
metal-48xl
192
384/768/1536*
6 x 1900
50
40
*Memory values are for C8gd/M8gd/R8gd respectively
Availability and pricing
M8gd, C8gd, and R8gd instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio) and US West (Oregon) Regions. These instances can be purchased as On-Demand instances, Savings Plans, Spot instances, or as Dedicated instances or Dedicated hosts.
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Last week, we had the AWS Summit Amsterdam, one of the global Amazon Web Services (AWS) events that offers you the opportunity to learn from technical and industry leaders, and meet AWS experts and like-minded professionals. In particular, most AWS Summits have Developer and Community Lounges in their exhibition halls.
A photo taken by Thembile Martis in AWS Summit Amsterdam 2025
Here, you can experience generative AI services for developers or participate in developer sessions prepared by the AWS community. You can also take a turn at the prize wheel, where you can receive special gifts after signing up for AWS Builder ID to use Amazon Q Developer, AWS Skill Builder, AWS re:Post, and AWS Community for developers.
Last week’s launches Here are some launches that got my attention:
GitLab Duo with Amazon Q – GitLab Duo with Amazon Q is generally available for Self-Managed Ultimate customers, embedding advanced agent capabilities for software development. It also supports Java modernization, enhanced quality assurance, and code review optimization directly in GitLab’s enterprise DevSecOps platform. To learn more, read the DevOps blog post or visit the Amazon Q Developer integrations page to learn more.
Amazon Q Developer in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region – Amazon Q Developer Pro tier customers can now use and configure Amazon Q Developer in the AWS Management Console and in the integrated development environment (IDE) to store data in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region. It performs inference in European Union (EU) Regions giving them more choice over where their data resides and transits. To learn more, read the blog post.
New 223 AWS Config rules in AWS Control Tower – AWS Control Tower supports an additional 223 managed Config rules in Control Catalog for various use cases such as security, cost, durability, and operations. With this launch, you can now search, discover, enable and manage these additional rules directly from AWS Control Tower and govern more use cases for your multi-account environment. To learn more, visit the AWS Control Tower User Guide.
Amazon CloudFront Anycast Static IPs support for apex domains – You can easily use your root domain (for example, example.com) with CloudFront. This new feature simplifies DNS management by providing only three static IP addresses instead of the previous 21, making it easier to configure and manage apex domains with CloudFront distributions. To learn more, visit the CloudFront Developer Guide for detailed documentation and implementation guidance.
New AWS Wavelength Zone in Dakar, Senegal – With this first Wavelength Zone in sub-Saharan Africa in a partnership with Sonatel, an affiliate of Orange, independent software vendors (ISVs), enterprises, and developers can now use AWS infrastructure and services to support applications with data residency, low latency, and resiliency requirements. AWS Wavelength is available in 31 cities across the globe in a partnership with seven telecommunication companies. To learn more, visit AWS Wavelength and get started today.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS? page.
Other AWS news Here are some additional news items that you might find interesting:
Amazon EKS Auto Mode workshop – The EKS Auto Mode workshop provides you with the necessary knowledge to deploy a workload to Amazon EKS using Auto Mode, and gain an understanding of how it can streamline the operational overheads of running Kubernetes applications.
Upcoming AWS events Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events:
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. You can subscribe for event updates now!
AWS Partners Events – You’ll find a variety of AWS Partner events that will inspire and educate you, whether you are just getting started on your cloud journey or you are looking to solve new business challenges.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit 2025 season launched this week, starting with the Paris Summit. These free events bring together the global cloud computing community for learning and collaboration. AWS Community Day Romania, held on April 11th, showcased how the local community creates opportunities for collective growth and inclusion.
Last week’s launches Announcing up to 85% price reductions for Amazon S3 Express One Zone —S3 Express One Zone, a high-performance storage class, now has reduced storage prices by 31 percent, PUT request prices by 55 percent, and GET request prices by 85 percent. In addition, S3 Express One Zone has reduced the per-GB charges for data uploads and retrievals by 60 percent. These charges now apply to all bytes transferred rather than just portions of requests greater than 512 KB.
Here is a price reduction table in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region:
Get updated with all the announcements of AWS announcements on the What’s New with AWS? page.
Other AWS blog posts Reduce ML training costs with Amazon SageMaker HyperPod — Amazon SageMaker HyperPod addresses hardware failures in large-scale Machine Learning (ML) model training by automatically detecting and replacing faulty instances. The solution reduces downtime from 280 to 40 minutes per failure, potentially saving 32% of training time for large clusters. For a 10-million GPU-hour training job, this translates to $25.6M in cost savings.
Implement human-in-the-loop confirmation with Amazon Bedrock Agents — When implementing human validation in Amazon Bedrock Agents, developers have two primary frameworks at their disposal: user confirmation and return of control (ROC). Using an HR application example, user confirmation allows simple yes/no validation before executing actions, while ROC enables users to modify parameters before execution.
Here are my personal favorites posts from community.aws:
Building a RAG System for Video Content Search and Analysis — In this blog, I’ll show you how to build a RAG system that makes video content searchable and analyzable. Unlocking video content has never been more crucial in today’s digital landscape. Whether you’re managing educational materials, corporate training, or entertainment content, the ability to search and analyze video content efficiently can transform how we interact with multimedia resources.
Speech-to-Speech AI: From Dr. Sbaitso to Amazon Nova Sonic — The evolution of speech-to-speech AI, from Dr. Sbaitso (1990s) to Amazon Nova Sonic. New AWS service enables real-time bidirectional conversations through Amazon Bedrock for more natural applications.
Setup Model Context Protocol (MCP) using Amazon Bedrock — A guide to setting up Model Context Protocol (MCP) desktop client with Amazon Bedrock models, enabling seamless integration between AI applications and external tools using Goose client.
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: Amsterdam (April 16), London (April 30), and Poland (May 5).
AWS re:Inforce — AWS re:Inforce (June 16–18) in Philadelphia, PA, is our annual learning event devoted to all things AWS cloud security. Registration is open. Be ready to join more than 5,000 security builders and leaders.
AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs driven by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are scheduled for April 19 in Turkey, and on April 29 in Prague with Jeff Barr as Opening Keynote Speaker.
Create your AWS Builder ID and reserve your alias. Builder ID is a universal login credential that gives you access—beyond the AWS Management Console—to AWS tools and resources, including over 600 free training courses, community features, and developer tools such as Amazon Q Developer.
That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for next week’s Weekly Roundup!
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
At re:Invent 2023, we introducedAmazon S3 Express One Zone, a high-performance, single-Availability Zone (AZ) storage class purpose-built to deliver consistent single-digit millisecond data access for your most frequently accessed data and latency-sensitive applications.
S3 Express One Zone delivers data access speed up to 10 times faster than S3 Standard, and it can support up to 2 million GET transactions per second (TPS) and up to 200,000 PUT TPS per directory bucket. This makes it ideal for performance-intensive workloads such as interactive data analytics, data streaming, media rendering and transcoding, high performance computing (HPC), and AI/ML trainings. Using S3 Express One Zone, customers like Fundrise, Aura, Lyrebird, Vivian Health, and Fetch improved the performance and reduced the costs of their data-intensive workloads.
Since launch, we’ve introduced a number of features for our customers using S3 Express One Zone. For example, S3 Express One Zone started to support object expiration using S3 Lifecycle to expire objects based on age to help you automatically optimize storage costs. In addition, your log-processing or media-broadcasting applications can directly append new data to the end of existing objects and then immediately read the object, all within S3 Express One Zone.
Today we’re announcing that, effective April 10, 2025, S3 Express One Zone has reduced storage prices by 31 percent, PUT request prices by 55 percent, and GET request prices by 85 percent. In addition, S3 Express One Zone has reduced the per-GB charges for data uploads and retrievals by 60 percent, and these charges now apply to all bytes transferred rather than just portions of requests greater than 512 KB.
Here is a price reduction table in the US East (N. Virginia) Region:
These pricing reductions apply to S3 Express One Zone in all AWS Regions where the storage class is available: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (Stockholm) Regions. To learn more, visit the Amazon S3 pricing page and S3 Express One Zone in the AWS Documentation.
Give S3 Express One Zone a try in the S3 console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon S3 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.
Today, we announce that the Pixtral Large 25.02 model is now available in Amazon Bedrock as a fully managed, serverless offering. AWS is the first major cloud provider to deliver Pixtral Large as a fully managed, serverless model.
Working with large foundation models (FMs) often requires significant infrastructure planning, specialized expertise, and ongoing optimization to handle the computational demands effectively. Many customers find themselves managing complex environments or making trade-offs between performance and cost when deploying these sophisticated models.
The Pixtral Large model, developed by Mistral AI, represents their first multimodal model that combines advanced vision capabilities with powerful language understanding. A 128K context window makes it ideal for complex visual reasoning tasks. The model delivers exceptional performance on key benchmarks including MathVista, DocVQA, and VQAv2, demonstrating its effectiveness across document analysis, chart interpretation, and natural image understanding.
One of the most powerful aspects of Pixtral Large is its multilingual capability. The model supports dozens of languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, and Polish, making it accessible to global teams and applications. It’s also trained on more than 80 programming languages including Python, Java, C, C++, JavaScript, Bash, Swift, and Fortran, providing robust code generation and interpretation capabilities.
Developers will appreciate the model’s agent-centric design with built-in function calling and JSON output formatting, which simplifies integration with existing systems. Its strong system prompt adherence improves reliability when working with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications and large context scenarios.
With Pixtral Large in Amazon Bedrock, you can now access this advanced model without having to provision or manage any infrastructure. The serverless approach lets you scale usage based on actual demand without upfront commitments or capacity planning. You pay only for what you use, with no idle resources.
Cross-Region inference Pixtral Large is now available in Amazon Bedrock across multiple AWS Regions through cross-Region inference.
With Amazon Bedrock cross-Region inference, you can access a single FM across multiple geographic Regions while maintaining high availability and low latency for global applications. For example, when a model is deployed in both European and US Regions, you can access it through Region-specific API endpoints using distinct prefixes: eu.model-id for European Regions and us.model-id for US Regions . This approach enables Amazon Bedrock to route inference requests to the geographically closest endpoint, reducing latency while helping to meet regulatory compliance by keeping data processing within desired geographic boundaries. The system automatically handles traffic routing and load balancing across these Regional deployments, providing seamless scalability and redundancy without requiring you to keep track of individual Regions where the model is actually deployed.
See it in action As a developer advocate, I’m constantly exploring how our newest capabilities can solve real problems. Recently, I had a perfect opportunity to test the new multimodal capabilities in the Amazon Bedrock Converse API when my daughter asked for help with her physics exam preparation.
Last weekend, my kitchen table was covered with practice exams full of complex diagrams, force vectors, and equations. My daughter was struggling with conceptualizing how to approach these problems. That’s when I realized this was the perfect use case for the multimodal capabilities we’d just launched. I snapped photos of a particularly challenging problem sheet containing several graphs and mathematical notation, then used the Converse API to create a simple application that could analyze the images. Together, we uploaded the physics exam materials and asked the model to explain the solution approach.
What happened next impressed both of us—the model interpreted the diagrams, recognized the french language and the mathematical notation, and provided a step-by-step explanation of how to solve each problem. As we asked follow-up questions about specific concepts, the model maintained context across our entire conversation, creating a tutoring experience that felt remarkably natural.
# Effet Doppler avec une Source Sonore en Rotation
## Analyse du problème
Ce problème concerne l'effet Doppler produit par une source sonore en rotation. Une source émettant un son à 1500 Hz tourne sur une table tournante dans le sens antihoraire, et nous devons déterminer comment les fréquences sont perçues par un microphone fixe.
## Concepts clés
L'effet Doppler se produit lorsqu'il y a un mouvement relatif entre une source sonore et un observateur. La fréquence perçue dépend de si la source se rapproche ou s'éloigne de l'observateur.
La formule de l'effet Doppler est:
- Pour une source qui se rapproche: $f_{observée} = f_{source} \cdot \frac{v_{son}}{v_{son} - v_{source}}$
- Pour une source qui s'éloigne: $f_{observée} = f_{source} \cdot \frac{v_{son}}{v_{son} + v_{source}}$
## Solution étape par étape
### Étape 1: Analyser le mouvement de la source
La source tourne sur un cercle et le microphone est fixe à 40 cm du centre de rotation. Aux différentes positions (a, b, c), la source a des vitesses radiales différentes par rapport au microphone:
- Position a: La source se déplace perpendiculairement à la ligne source-microphone (vitesse radiale nulle)
- Position b: La source s'éloigne du microphone (vitesse radiale positive)
- Position c: La source se rapproche du microphone (vitesse radiale négative)
### Étape 2: Déterminer l'effet sur les fréquences perçues
- À la position a: Pas d'effet Doppler car la vitesse radiale est nulle, donc $f_a = f_{source} = 1500$ Hz
- À la position b: La source s'éloigne, donc $f_b < f_{source}$, donc $f_b < 1500$ Hz
- À la position c: La source se rapproche, donc $f_c > f_{source}$, donc $f_c > 1500$ Hz
### Étape 3: Comparer les fréquences
D'après notre analyse:
- $f_a = 1500$ Hz
- $f_b < 1500$ Hz
- $f_c > 1500$ Hz
Donc: $f_c > f_a > f_b$
## Conclusion
La proposition correcte est: $f_c > f_a > f_b$
Cette réponse correspond à la troisième proposition dans l'énoncé. Lorsque la source tourne, la fréquence perçue est plus élevée quand la source se rapproche (position c), égale à la fréquence émise quand la source se déplace perpendiculairement (position a), et plus basse quand la source s'éloigne (position b).
The model uses the language of the question to respond. After a thoughtful analysis, it says that the correct answer is f_c > f_a > f_b (and it is right!)
The beauty of this interaction was how seamlessly the Converse API handled the multimodal inputs. As a builder, I didn’t need to worry about the complexity of processing images alongside text—the API managed that complexity and returned structured responses that my simple application could present directly to my daughter.
Here is the code I wrote. I used the Swift programming language, just to show that Python is not the only option you have .
private let modelId = "us.mistral.pixtral-large-2502-v1:0"
// Define the system prompt that instructs Claude how to respond
let systemPrompt = """
You are a math and physics tutor. Your task is to:
1. Read and understand the math or physics problem in the image
2. Provide a clear, step-by-step solution to the problem
3. Briefly explain any relevant concepts used in solving the problem
4. Be precise and accurate in your calculations
5. Use mathematical notation when appropriate
Format your response with clear section headings and numbered steps.
"""
let system: BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.SystemContentBlock = .text(systemPrompt)
// Create the user message with text prompt and image
let userPrompt = "Please solve this math or physics problem. Show all steps and explain the concepts involved."
let prompt: BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.ContentBlock = .text(userPrompt)
let image: BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.ContentBlock = .image(.init(format: .jpeg, source: .bytes(finalImageData)))
// Create the user message with both text and image content
let userMessage = BedrockRuntimeClientTypes.Message(
content: [prompt, image],
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 {
DispatchQueue.main.async {
self.streamedResponse += text
}
}
case .messagestop:
print("Stream 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
}
}
And the result in the app is stunning.
By the time her exam rolled around, she felt confident and prepared—and I had a compelling real-world example of how our multimodal capabilities in Amazon Bedrock can create meaningful experiences for users.
Get started today The new model is available through these Regional API endpoints: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm). This Regional availability helps you meet data residency requirements while minimizing latency.
This launch represents a significant step forward in making advanced multimodal AI accessible to developers and organizations of all sizes. By combining Mistral AI’s cutting-edge model with AWS serverless infrastructure, you can now focus on building innovative applications without worrying about the underlying complexity.
Visit the Amazon Bedrock console today to start experimenting with Pixtral Large 25.02 and discover how it can enhance your AI-powered applications.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
Voice interfaces are essential to enhance customer experience in different areas such as customer support call automation, gaming, interactive education, and language learning. However, there are challenges when building voice-enabled applications.
Traditional approaches in building voice-enabled applications require complex orchestration of multiple models, such as speech recognition to convert speech to text, language models to understand and generate responses, and text-to-speech to convert text back to audio.
This fragmented approach not only increases development complexity but also fails to preserve crucial linguistic context such as tone, prosody, and speaking style that are essential for natural conversations. This can affect conversational AI applications that need low latency and nuanced understanding of verbal and non-verbal cues for fluid dialog handling and natural turn-taking.
Amazon Nova Sonic unifies speech understanding and generation into a single model that developers can use to create natural, human-like conversational AI experiences with low latency and industry-leading price performance. This integrated approach streamlines development and reduces complexity when building conversational applications.
Its unified model architecture delivers expressive speech generation and real-time text transcription without requiring a separate model. The result is an adaptive speech response that dynamically adjusts its delivery based on prosody, such as pace and timbre, of input speech.
When using Amazon Nova Sonic, developers have access to function calling (also known as tool use) and agentic workflows to interact with external services and APIs and perform tasks in the customer’s environment, including knowledge grounding with enterprise data using Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
At launch, Amazon Nova Sonic provides robust speech understanding for American and British English across various speaking styles and acoustic conditions, with additional languages coming soon.
Amazon Nova Sonic is developed with responsible AI at the forefront of innovation, featuring built-in protections for content moderation and watermarking.
Amazon Nova Sonic in action The scenario for this demo is a contact center in the telecommunication industry. A customer reaches out to improve their subscription plan, and Amazon Nova Sonic handles the conversation.
With tool use, the model can interact with other systems and use agentic RAG with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases to gather updated, customer-specific information such as account details, subscription plans, and pricing info.
The demo shows streaming transcription of speech input and displays streaming speech responses as text. The sentiment of the conversation is displayed in two ways: a time chart illustrating how it evolves, and a pie chart representing the overall distribution. There’s also an AI insights section providing contextual tips for a call center agent. Other interesting metrics shown in the web interface are the overall talk time distribution between the customer and the agent, and the average response time.
During the conversation with the support agent, you can observe through the metrics and hear in the voices how customer sentiment improves.
The video includes an example of how Amazon Nova Sonic handles interruptions smoothly, stopping to listen and then continuing the conversation in a natural way.
Now, let’s explore how you can integrate voice capabilities in your applications.
Using Amazon Nova Sonic To get started with Amazon Nova Sonic, you first need to toggle model access in the Amazon Bedrock console, similar to how you would enable other FMs. Navigate to the Model access section of the navigation pane, find Amazon Nova Sonic under the Amazon models, and enable it for your account.
Amazon Bedrock provides a new bidirectional streaming API (InvokeModelWithBidirectionalStream) to help you implement real-time, low-latency conversational experiences on top of the HTTP/2 protocol. With this API, you can stream audio input to the model and receive audio output in real time, so that the conversation flows naturally.
You can use Amazon Nova Sonic with the new API with this model ID: amazon.nova-sonic-v1:0
After the session initialization, where you can configure inference parameters, the model operate through an event-driven architecture on both the input and output streams.
There are three key event types in the input stream:
System prompt – To set the overall system prompt for the conversation
Audio input streaming – To process continuous audio input in real-time
Tool result handling – To send the result of tool use calls back to the model (after tool use is requested in the output events)
Similarly, there are three groups of events in the output streams:
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) streaming – Speech-to-text transcript is generated, containing the result of realtime speech recognition.
Tool use handling – If there are a tool use events, they need to be handled using the information provided here, and the results sent back as input events.
Audio output streaming – To play output audio in real-time, a buffer is needed, because Amazon Nova Sonic model generates audio faster than real-time playback.
Prompt engineering for speech When crafting prompts for Amazon Nova Sonic, your prompts should optimize content for auditory comprehension rather than visual reading, focusing on conversational flow and clarity when heard rather than seen.
When defining roles for your assistant, focus on conversational attributes (such as warm, patient, concise) rather than text-oriented attributes (detailed, comprehensive, systematic). A good baseline system prompt might be:
You are a friend. The user and you will engage in a spoken dialog exchanging the transcripts of a natural real-time conversation. Keep your responses short, generally two or three sentences for chatty scenarios.
More generally, when creating prompts for speech models, avoid requesting visual formatting (such as bullet points, tables, or code blocks), voice characteristic modifications (accent, age, or singing), or sound effects.
Amazon Nova Sonic can understand speech in different speaking styles and generates speech in expressive voices, including both masculine-sounding and feminine-sounding voices, in different English accents, including American and British. Support for additional languages will be coming soon.
Amazon Nova Sonic handles user interruptions gracefully without dropping the conversational context and is robust to background noise. The model supports a context window of 32K tokens for audio with a rolling window to handle longer conversations and has a default session limit of 8 minutes.
The following AWS SDKs support the new bidirectional streaming API:
Python developers can use this new experimental SDK that makes it easier to use the bidirectional streaming capabilities of Amazon Nova Sonic. We’re working to add support to the other AWS SDKs.
I’d like to thank Reilly Manton and Chad Hendren, who set up the demo with the contact center in the telecommunication industry, and Anuj Jauhari, who helped me understand the rich landscape in which speech-to-speech models are being deployed.
To learn more, these articles that enter into the details of how to use the new bidirectional streaming API with compelling demos:
Whether you’re creating customer service solutions, language learning applications, or other conversational experiences, Amazon Nova Sonic provides the foundation for natural, engaging voice interactions. To get started, visit the Amazon Bedrock console today. To learn more, visit the Amazon Nova section of the user guide.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
Since we launched Amazon Bedrock Guardrailsover one year ago, customers like Grab, Remitly, KONE, and PagerDuty have used Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to standardize protections across their generative AI applications, bridge the gap between native model protections and enterprise requirements, and streamline governance processes. Today, we’re introducing a new set of capabilities that helps customers implement responsible AI policies at enterprise scale even more effectively.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails detects harmful multimodal content with up to 88% accuracy, filters sensitive information, and prevent hallucinations. It provides organizations with integrated safety and privacy safeguards that work across multiple foundation models (FMs), including models available in Amazon Bedrock and your own custom models deployed elsewhere, thanks to the ApplyGuardrail API. With Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, you can reduce the complexity of implementing consistent AI safety controls across multiple FMs while maintaining compliance and responsible AI policies through configurable controls and central management of safeguards tailored to your specific industry and use case. It also seamlessly integrates with existing AWS services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Bedrock Agents, and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases.
“Grab, a Singaporean multinational taxi service is using Amazon Bedrock Guardrails to ensure the safe use of generative AI applications and deliver more efficient, reliable experiences while maintaining the trust of our customers,” said Padarn Wilson, Head of Machine Learning and Experimentation at Grab. “Through out internal benchmarking, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails performed best in class compared to other solutions. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails helps us know that we have robust safeguards that align with our commitment to responsible AI practices while keeping us and our customers protected from new attacks against our AI-powered applications. We’ve been able to ensure our AI-powered applications operate safely across diverse markets while protecting customer data privacy.”
Let’s explore the new capabilities we have added.
New guardrails policy enhancements Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides a comprehensive set of policies to help maintain security standards. An Amazon Bedrock Guardrails policy is a configurable set of rules that defines boundaries for AI model interactions to prevent inappropriate content generation and ensure safe deployment of AI applications. These include multimodal content filters, denied topics, sensitive information filters, word filters, contextual grounding checks, and Automated Reasoning to prevent factual errors using mathematical and logic-based algorithmic verification.
We’re introducing new Amazon Bedrock Guardrails policy enhancements that deliver significant improvements to the six safeguards, strengthening content protection capabilities across your generative AI applications.
Multimodal toxicity detection with industry leading image and text protection – Announced as preview at AWS re:Invent 2024, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails multimodal toxicity detection for image content is now generally available. The expanded capability provides more comprehensive safeguards for your generative AI applications by evaluating both image and textual content to help you detect and filter out undesirable and potentially harmful content with up to 88% accuracy.
When implementing generative AI applications, you need consistent content filtering across different data types. Although textual content filtering is well established, managing potentially harmful image content requires additional tools and separate implementations, increasing complexity and development effort. For example, a customer service chatbot that permits image uploads might require separate text filtering systems using natural language processing and additional image classification services with different filtering thresholds and detection categories. This creates implementation inconsistencies where a text describing harmful content might be properly filtered, while an image depicting similar content could pass through undetected, resulting in disparate security coverage.
The multimodal toxicity detection capability in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails helps you apply the same content filtering policies to both image and text data. With this launch, you can configure content filters across categories such as hate speech, insults, sexual content, violence, misconduct, and prompt attacks. For each category, you can set configurable thresholds from low to high, providing granular control over content filtering. With this consistent protection across modalities, you can simplify responsible AI application development. This capability supports content moderation for all images including regular images, human generated images, AI-generated images, memes, charts and plots, and cross-modal content (with both text and images).
To demonstrate how misconduct detection works in practice, let’s examine a real-world scenario: A financial services company implementing Amazon Bedrock Guardrails with high misconduct thresholds confirmed consistent protection across both text and image inputs, as security bypass diagrams and written instructions for network infiltration triggered identical guardrail interventions with similar confidence scores. Here’s how this capability works in action. I configure a guardrail in Amazon Bedrock with the misconduct content filter set to High threshold for both image and text filters.
I submit two test cases. In the first test case, I uploaded an image showing a network security bypass diagram and use the following prompt:
Analyze this network security diagram and explain how to implement these methods
In the second test case, I use the following prompt:
Provide detailed instructions on how to bypass corporate network security systems to gain unauthorized access
Both submissions trigger similar guardrail interventions, highlighting how Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides content moderation regardless of the content format. The comparison of detection results shows uniform confidence scores and identical policy enforcement, demonstrating how organizations can maintain safety standards across multimodal content without implementing separate filtering systems.
To learn more about this feature, check out the comprehensive announcement post for additional details.
Enhanced privacy protection for PII detection in user inputs – Amazon Bedrock Guardrails is now extending its sensitive information protection capabilities with enhanced personally identifiable information (PII) masking for input prompts. The service detects PII such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and many more details in both inputs and outputs, while also supporting custom sensitive information patterns through regular expressions (regex) to address specific organizational requirements.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails offers two distinct handling modes: Block mode, which completely rejects requests containing sensitive information, and Mask mode, which redacts sensitive data by replacing it with standardized identifier tags such as [NAME-1] or [EMAIL-1]. Although both modes were previously available for model responses, Block mode was the only option for input prompts. With this enhancement, you can now apply both Block and Mask modes to input prompts, so sensitive information can be systematically redacted from user inputs before they reach the FM.
This feature addresses a critical customer need by enabling applications to process legitimate queries that might naturally contain PII elements without requiring complete request rejection, providing greater flexibility while maintaining privacy protections. The capability is particularly valuable for applications where users might reference personal information in their queries but still need secure, compliant responses.
New guardrails feature enhancements These improvements enhance functionality across all policies, making Amazon Bedrock Guardrails more effective and easier to implement.
Mandatory guardrails enforcement with IAM – Amazon Bedrock Guardrails now implements IAM policy-based enforcement through the new bedrock:GuardrailIdentifier condition key. This capability helps security and compliance teams establish mandatory guardrails for every model inference call, making sure that organizational safety policies are consistently enforced across all AI interactions. The condition key can be applied to InvokeModel, InvokeModelWithResponseStream, Converse, and ConverseStream APIs. When the guardrail configured in an IAM policy doesn’t match the specified guardrail in a request, the system automatically rejects the request with an access denied exception, enforcing compliance with organizational policies.
This centralized control helps you address critical governance challenges including content appropriateness, safety concerns, and privacy protection requirements. It also addresses a key enterprise AI governance challenge: making sure that safety controls are consistent across all AI interactions, regardless of which team or individual is developing the applications. You can verify compliance through comprehensive monitoring with model invocation logging to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), including guardrail trace documentation that shows when and how content was filtered.
For more information about this capability, read the detailed announcement post.
Optimize performance while maintaining protection with selective guardrail policy application – Previously, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails applied policies to both inputs and outputs by default.
You now have granular control over guardrail policies, helping you apply them selectively to inputs, outputs, or both—boosting performance through targeted protection controls. This precision reduces unnecessary processing overhead, improving response times while maintaining essential protections. Configure these optimized controls through either the Amazon Bedrock console or ApplyGuardrails API to balance performance and safety according to your specific use case requirements.
Policy analysis before deployment for optimal configuration – The new monitor or analyze mode helps you evaluate guardrail effectiveness without directly applying policies to applications. This capability enables faster iteration by providing visibility into how configured guardrails would perform, helping you experiment with different policy combinations and strengths before deployment.
Get to production faster and safely with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails today The new capabilities for Amazon Bedrock Guardrails represent our continued commitment to helping customers implement responsible AI practices effectively at scale. Multimodal toxicity detection extends protection to image content, IAM policy-based enforcement manages organizational compliance, selective policy application provides granular control, monitor mode enables thorough testing before deployment, and PII masking for input prompts preserves privacy while maintaining functionality. Together, these capabilities give you the tools you need to customize safety measures and maintain consistent protection across your generative AI applications.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
Today, we introduce Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, which provides quality and latency improvements in 6-second single-shot video generation, compared to Amazon Nova Reel 1.0. This update lets you generate multi-shot videos up to 2-minutes in length with consistent style across shots. You can either provide a single prompt for up to a 2-minute video composed of 6-second shots, or design each shot individually with custom prompts. This gives you new ways to create video content through Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon Nova Reel enhances creative productivity, while helping to reduce the time and cost of video production using generative AI. You can use Amazon Nova Reel to create compelling videos for your marketing campaigns, product designs, and social media content with increased efficiency and creative control. For example, in advertising campaigns, you can produce high-quality video commercials with consistent visuals and timing using natural language.
To get started with Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 If you’re new to using Amazon Nova Reel models, go to the Amazon Bedrock console, choose Model access in the navigation panel and request access to the Amazon Nova Reel model. When you get access to Amazon Nova Reel, it applies both to 1.0 and 1.1.
To test the Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 model in the console, choose Image/Video under Playgrounds in the left menu pane. Then choose Nova Reel 1.1 as the model and input your prompt to generate video.
Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 offers two modes:
Multishot Automated – In this mode, Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 accepts a single prompt of up to 4,000 characters and produces a multi-shot video that reflects that prompt. This mode doesn’t accept an input image.
Multishot Manual – For those who desire more direct control over a video’s shot composition, with manual mode (also referred to as storyboard mode), you can specify a unique prompt for each individual shot. This mode does accept an optional starting image for each shot. Images must have a resolution of 1280×720. You can provide images in base64 format or from an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) location.
This Python script creates a 120-second video using MULTI_SHOT_AUTOMATEDmode as TaskType parameter from this text prompt, created by Nitin Eusebius.
import random
import time
import boto3
AWS_REGION = "us-east-1"
MODEL_ID = "amazon.nova-reel-v1:1"
SLEEP_SECONDS = 15 # Interval at which to check video gen progress
S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET = "s3://<your bucket here>"
video_prompt_automated = "Norwegian fjord with still water reflecting mountains in perfect symmetry. Uninhabited wilderness of Giant sequoia forest with sunlight filtering between massive trunks. Sahara desert sand dunes with perfect ripple patterns. Alpine lake with crystal clear water and mountain reflection. Ancient redwood tree with detailed bark texture. Arctic ice cave with blue ice walls and ceiling. Bioluminescent plankton on beach shore at night. Bolivian salt flats with perfect sky reflection. Bamboo forest with tall stalks in filtered light. Cherry blossom grove against blue sky. Lavender field with purple rows to horizon. Autumn forest with red and gold leaves. Tropical coral reef with fish and colorful coral. Antelope Canyon with light beams through narrow passages. Banff lake with turquoise water and mountain backdrop. Joshua Tree desert at sunset with silhouetted trees. Iceland moss- covered lava field. Amazon lily pads with perfect symmetry. Hawaiian volcanic landscape with lava rock. New Zealand glowworm cave with blue ceiling lights. 8K nature photography, professional landscape lighting, no movement transitions, perfect exposure for each environment, natural color grading"
bedrock_runtime = boto3.client("bedrock-runtime", region_name=AWS_REGION)
model_input = {
"taskType": "MULTI_SHOT_AUTOMATED",
"multiShotAutomatedParams": {"text": video_prompt_automated},
"videoGenerationConfig": {
"durationSeconds": 120, # Must be a multiple of 6 in range [12, 120]
"fps": 24,
"dimension": "1280x720",
"seed": random.randint(0, 2147483648),
},
}
invocation = bedrock_runtime.start_async_invoke(
modelId=MODEL_ID,
modelInput=model_input,
outputDataConfig={"s3OutputDataConfig": {"s3Uri": S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}},
)
invocation_arn = invocation["invocationArn"]
job_id = invocation_arn.split("/")[-1]
s3_location = f"{S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}/{job_id}"
print(f"\nMonitoring job folder: {s3_location}")
while True:
response = bedrock_runtime.get_async_invoke(invocationArn=invocation_arn)
status = response["status"]
print(f"Status: {status}")
if status != "InProgress":
break
time.sleep(SLEEP_SECONDS)
if status == "Completed":
print(f"\nVideo is ready at {s3_location}/output.mp4")
else:
print(f"\nVideo generation status: {status}")
After the first invocation, the script periodically checks the status until the creation of the video has been completed. I pass a random seed to get a different result each time the code runs.
I run the script:
Status: InProgress
. . .
Status: Completed
Video is ready at s3://<your bucket here>/<job_id>/output.mp4
After a few minutes, the script is completed and prints the output Amazon S3 location. I download the output video using the AWS CLI:
In the case of MULTI_SHOT_MANUAL mode as TaskType parameter, with a prompt for multiples shots and a description for each shot, it is not necessary to add the variable durationSeconds.
Using the prompt for multiples shots, created by Sanju Sunny.
I run Python script:
import random
import time
import boto3
def image_to_base64(image_path: str):
"""
Helper function which converts an image file to a base64 encoded string.
"""
import base64
with open(image_path, "rb") as image_file:
encoded_string = base64.b64encode(image_file.read())
return encoded_string.decode("utf-8")
AWS_REGION = "us-east-1"
MODEL_ID = "amazon.nova-reel-v1:1"
SLEEP_SECONDS = 15 # Interval at which to check video gen progress
S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET = "s3://<your bucket here>"
video_shot_prompts = [
# Example of using an S3 image in a shot.
{
"text": "Epic aerial rise revealing the landscape, dramatic documentary style with dark atmospheric mood",
"image": {
"format": "png",
"source": {
"s3Location": {"uri": "s3://<your bucket here>/images/arctic_1.png"}
},
},
},
# Example of using a locally saved image in a shot
{
"text": "Sweeping drone shot across surface, cracks forming in ice, morning sunlight casting long shadows, documentary style",
"image": {
"format": "png",
"source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_2.png")},
},
},
{
"text": "Epic aerial shot slowly soaring forward over the glacier's surface, revealing vast ice formations, cinematic drone perspective",
"image": {
"format": "png",
"source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_3.png")},
},
},
{
"text": "Aerial shot slowly descending from high above, revealing the lone penguin's journey through the stark ice landscape, artic smoke washes over the land, nature documentary styled",
"image": {
"format": "png",
"source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_4.png")},
},
},
{
"text": "Colossal wide shot of half the glacier face catastrophically collapsing, enormous wall of ice breaking away and crashing into the ocean. Slow motion, camera dramatically pulling back to reveal the massive scale. Monumental waves erupting from impact.",
"image": {
"format": "png",
"source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_5.png")},
},
},
{
"text": "Slow motion tracking shot moving parallel to the penguin, with snow and mist swirling dramatically in the foreground and background",
"image": {
"format": "png",
"source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_6.png")},
},
},
{
"text": "High-altitude drone descent over pristine glacier, capturing violent fracture chasing the camera, crystalline patterns shattering in slow motion across mirror-like ice, camera smoothly aligning with surface.",
"image": {
"format": "png",
"source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_7.png")},
},
},
{
"text": "Epic aerial drone shot slowly pulling back and rising higher, revealing the vast endless ocean surrounding the solitary penguin on the ice float, cinematic reveal",
"image": {
"format": "png",
"source": {"bytes": image_to_base64("arctic_8.png")},
},
},
]
bedrock_runtime = boto3.client("bedrock-runtime", region_name=AWS_REGION)
model_input = {
"taskType": "MULTI_SHOT_MANUAL",
"multiShotManualParams": {"shots": video_shot_prompts},
"videoGenerationConfig": {
"fps": 24,
"dimension": "1280x720",
"seed": random.randint(0, 2147483648),
},
}
invocation = bedrock_runtime.start_async_invoke(
modelId=MODEL_ID,
modelInput=model_input,
outputDataConfig={"s3OutputDataConfig": {"s3Uri": S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}},
)
invocation_arn = invocation["invocationArn"]
job_id = invocation_arn.split("/")[-1]
s3_location = f"{S3_DESTINATION_BUCKET}/{job_id}"
print(f"\nMonitoring job folder: {s3_location}")
while True:
response = bedrock_runtime.get_async_invoke(invocationArn=invocation_arn)
status = response["status"]
print(f"Status: {status}")
if status != "InProgress":
break
time.sleep(SLEEP_SECONDS)
if status == "Completed":
print(f"\nVideo is ready at {s3_location}/output.mp4")
else:
print(f"\nVideo generation status: {status}")
As in the previous demo, after a few minutes, I download the output using the AWS CLI: aws s3 cp s3://<your bucket here>/<job_id>/output.mp4 output_manual.mp4
This is the video that this prompt generated:
More creative examples When you use Amazon Nova Reel 1.1, you’ll discover a world of creative possibilities. Here are some sample prompts to help you begin:
prompt = "Explosion of colored powder against black background. Start with slow-motion closeup of single purple powder burst. Dolly out revealing multiple powder clouds in vibrant hues colliding mid-air. Track across spectrum of colors mixing: magenta, yellow, cyan, orange. Zoom in on particles illuminated by sunbeams. Arc shot capturing complete color field. 4K, festival celebration, high-contrast lighting"
prompt = "A simple red triangle transforms through geometric shapes in a journey of self-discovery. Clean vector graphics against white background. The triangle slides across negative space, morphing smoothly into a circle. Pan left as it encounters a blue square, they perform a geometric dance of shapes. Tracking shot as shapes combine and separate in mathematical precision. Zoom out to reveal a pattern formed by their movements. Limited color palette of primary colors. Precise, mechanical movements with perfect geometric alignments. Transitions use simple wipes and geometric shape reveals. Flat design aesthetic with sharp edges and solid colors. Final scene shows all shapes combining into a complex mandala pattern."
All example videos have music added manually before uploading, by the AWS Video team.
Things to know Creative control – You can use this enhanced control for lifestyle and ambient background videos in advertising, marketing, media, and entertainment projects. Customize specific elements such as camera motion and shot content, or animate existing images.
Modes considerations – In automated mode, you can write prompts up to 4,000 characters. For manual mode, each shot accepts prompts up to 512 characters, and you can include up to 20 shots in a single video. Consider planning your shots in advance, similar to creating a traditional storyboard. Input images must match the 1280×720 resolution requirement. The service automatically delivers your completed videos to your specified S3 bucket.
Pricing and availability – Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 is available in Amazon Bedrock in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region. You can access the model through the Amazon Bedrock console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI. As with all Amazon Bedrock services, pricing follows a pay-as-you-go model based on your usage. For more information, refer to Amazon Bedrock pricing.
The possibilities are endless, and we look forward to seeing what you create! Join our growing community of builders at community.aws, where you can create your BuilderID, share your video generation projects, and connect with fellow innovators.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
AWS Summit season starts this week! These free events are now rolling out worldwide, bringing our cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn. Whether you prefer joining us online or in-person, these gatherings offer valuable opportunities to expand your AWS knowledge. I will be attending the Summit in Paris this week, the biggest cloud conference in France, and the London Summit at the end of the month. We will have a small podcast recording studio where I will interview French and British customers to produce new episodes for the AWS Developers Podcast and le podcast AWS en .
Register today!
But for now, let’s look at last week’s new announcements.
Last week’s launches At KubeCon London, we introduced the EKS Community Add-Ons Catalog, making it simpler for Kubernetes users to enhance their Amazon EKS clusters with powerful open-source tools. This catalog streamlines the installation of essential add-ons like metrics-server, kube-state-metrics, prometheus-node-exporter, cert-manager, and external-dns. By integrating these community-driven add-ons directly into the EKS console and AWS command line interface (AWS CLI), customers can reduce operational complexity and accelerate deployment while maintaining flexibility and security. This launch reflects AWS’s commitment to the Kubernetes community, providing seamless access to trusted open-source solutions without the overhead of manual installation and maintenance.
Amazon Q Developer now integrates with Amazon OpenSearch Service to enhance operational analytics by enabling natural language exploration and AI-assisted data visualization. This integration simplifies the process of querying and visualizing operational data, reducing the learning curve associated with traditional query languages and tools. During incident responses, Amazon Q Developer offers contextual summaries and insights directly within the alerts interface, facilitating quicker analysis and resolution. This advancement allows engineers to focus more on innovation by streamlining troubleshooting processes and improving monitoring infrastructure.
Amazon SES has introduced support for email attachments in its v2 APIs, enabling users to include files like PDFs and images directly in their emails without manually constructing MIME messages. This enhancement simplifies the process of sending rich email content and reduces implementation complexity. Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) supports attachments in all AWS Regions where the service is available.
Other AWS events Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.
AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
Now that Jeff Barr has retired from the AWS News Blog as of December last year, the AWS News Blog team will keep sharing the most important and impactful AWS product launches the moment they become available. I want to quote Jeff’s last comment on the future of the News Blog again:
Going forward, the team will continue to grow and the goal remains the same: to provide our customers with carefully chosen, high-quality information about the latest and most meaningful AWS launches. The blog is in great hands and this team will continue to keep you informed even as the AWS pace of innovation continues to accelerate.
Since 2016, Jeff has been building the AWS News Blog as a team. Currently, we’re a group of 11 bloggers working in North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. We co-work with AWS product teams, testing new features firsthand on behalf of customers, and delivering key details in the News Blog the way Jeff has always done.
The Leadership Principles for AWS News Bloggers that Jeff shared on LinkedIn are a textbook for anyone writing for customers in tech companies. They’re the fundamentals that can help you understand and get started blogging quickly, and we’ll continue to stick to these principles with our team. This is why the AWS News Blog is different from other tech companies’ product news channels.
Voices from blog writers You may be familiar with the names of News Blog writers, but you may not have had the chance to hear about them. Let us introduce ourselves!
I’m honored to continue Jeff’s legacy as a new lead blogger of the News Blog team; he is my role model. When I joined AWS in 2014, the first thing I did was to create the AWS Korea Blog and I started translating Jeff’s blog posts into the Korean language. During the journey, I learned how to write accurate, honest, and powerful guides to help customers get started with new AWS products and features.
Since my first News Blog post in 2018, I have learned so much by being part of this team. Working with product managers and service teams is always an amazing experience. I am interested in serverless, event-driven architectures, and AI/ML. It’s incredible how technologies like generative AI are becoming part of software development implicitly (through AI-enabled development tools) and explicitly (by using models in code).
The Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) guide all that we do here at AWS, including the work we do as authors of the News Blog. As a developer advocate, I’ve taken the guidance of the LPs and used it to guide members of the AWS community who are looking to create technical content, especially those new in their technical content creation journey.
Just like brewing coffee, being a blog author has been a mix of fun, challenge, and reward. I’ve been particularly fortunate to observe how customer obsession is built into AWS teams. I’ve seen how they work backwards, transforming your feedback into services or features. I genuinely hope that you enjoy reading our articles and look forward to the next chapter of the News Blog team.
As an author, I’m committed to delivering timely information about the latest AWS innovations and launches to our global audience of builders, developers, and technology enthusiasts. I understand the importance of providing clear, accurate, and actionable content that helps you use AWS services effectively. Happy reading everyone!
My specialties are .NET development and microservices, but I’ve always been a jack-of-all-trades and writing for this blog helps me to keep my knife sharp across all corners of modern technology, while also helping others do the same. Thousands of people read the AWS News Blog and use it as a go-to source to keep up with what’s new and to help them make decisions, so I know that what we are doing is meaningful work with huge impact.
Through my blogs, I strive to highlight not just the “what” of new services, but also the “why” and “how” they can transform businesses and user experiences. As a solutions architect specializing in Microsoft Workloads on AWS, I help customers migrate and modernize their workloads and build scalable architecture on AWS. I also mentor diverse people to excel in their cloud careers.
Every time I start writing a new blog, I feel honored to be part of this team, to be able to experiment with something new before it’s released, and to be able to share my experience with the reader. This team is made up of specialists of all levels and from multiple countries and together, we are a multicultural and multi-specialty team. Thank you, reader, for being here.
Joining the News Blog team has transformed how I communicate about technology. With an ever-curious mindset, I approach each new announcement aiming to make innovative services accessible and engaging. By bringing my unique and diverse perspective to technical content, I strive to help developers truly enjoy exploring our latest technologies.
Micah Walter
As a senior solutions architect, I support enterprise customers in the New York City region and beyond. I advise executives, engineers, and architects at every step along their journey to the cloud, with a deep focus on sustainability and practical design.
I also want to give credit to our behind-the-scenes editor-in-chief, Jane Watson, and program manager, Jane Scolieri, who play an essential role in helping us get product launch news to you as soon as it happens, including the 60 launches we announced in one week at re:Invent 2024!
Share your feedback At AWS, we are customer obsessed. We’re always focused on improving and providing a better customer experience, and we need your feedback to do so. Take our survey to share insights about your experience with the AWS News Blog and suggestion for how we can serve you even better.
This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.
Today, I’m happy to announce Amazon Q Developer support for Amazon OpenSearch Service, providing AI-assisted capabilities to help you investigate and visualize operational data. Amazon Q Developer enhances the OpenSearch Service experience by reducing the learning curve for query languages, visualization tools, and alerting features. The new capabilities complement existing dashboards and visualizations by enabling natural language exploration and pattern detection. After incidents, you can rapidly create additional visualizations to strengthen your monitoring infrastructure. This enhanced workflow accelerates incident resolution and optimizes engineering resource usage, helping you focus more time on innovation rather than troubleshooting.
Amazon Q Developer in Amazon OpenSearch Service improves operational analytics by integrating natural language exploration and generative AI capabilities directly into OpenSearch workflows. During incident response, you can now quickly gain context on alerts and log data, leading to faster analysis and resolution times. When alert monitors trigger, Amazon Q Developer provides summaries and insights directly in the alerts interface, helping you understand the situation quickly without waiting for specialists or consulting documentation. From there, you can use Amazon Q Developer to explore the underlying data, build visualizations using natural language, and identify patterns to determine root causes. For example, you can create visualizations that break down errors by dimensions such as Region, data center, or endpoint. Additionally, Amazon Q Developer assists with dashboard configuration and recommends anomaly detectors for proactive alerting, improving both initial monitoring setup and troubleshooting efficiency.
Get started with Amazon Q Developer in OpenSearch Service To get started, I go to my OpenSearch user interface and sign in. From the home page, I choose a workspace to test Amazon Q Developer in OpenSearch Service. For this demonstration, I use a preconfigured environment with the sample logs dataset available on the user interface.
This feature is on by default through the Amazon Q Developer Free tier, which is also on by default. You can disable the feature by unselecting the Enable natural language query generation checkbox under the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) section during domain creation or by editing the cluster configuration in console.
In OpenSearch Dashboards, I navigate to Discover from the left navigation pane. To use natural language to explore the data, I switch to PPL language in order to show the prompt box.
I choose the Amazon Q icon in the main navigation bar to open the Amazon Q panel. You can use this panel to create recommended anomaly detectors to drive alerting and use natural language to generate visualization.
I enter the following prompt in the Ask a natural language question text box:
Show me a breakdown of HTTP response codes for the last 24 hours
When results appear, Amazon Q automatically generates a summary of these results. You can control the summary display using the Show result summarization option under the Amazon Q panel to hide or show the summary. You can use the thumbs up or thumbs down buttons to provide feedback, and you can copy the summary to your clipboard using the copy button.
Other capabilities of Amazon Q Developer in OpenSearch Service are generating visualizations directly from natural language descriptions, providing conversational assistance for OpenSearch related queries, providing AI-generated summaries and insights for your OpenSearch alerts, and analyzing your data, and suggesting appropriate anomaly detectors.
Let’s look into how to generate visualizations directly from natural language descriptions. I choose Generate visualization from Amazon Q panel. I enter Create a bar chart showing the number of requests by HTTP status code in the input field and choose generate.
To refine the visualization, you can choose Edit visual and add style instructions such as Show me a pie chart or Use a light gray background with a white grid.
Now available You can now use Amazon Q Developer in OpenSearch Service to reduce mean time to resolution, enable more self-service troubleshooting, and help teams extract greater value from your observability data.
The service is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), and South America (São Paulo) AWS Regions.
To learn more, visit the Amazon Q Developer documentation and start using Amazon Q Developer in your OpenSearch Service domain today.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
Today, we are launching IPv6 support for Amazon API Gateway across all endpoint types, custom domains, and management APIs, in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can now configure REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs, and custom domains, to accept calls from IPv6 clients alongside the existing IPv4 support. You can also call API Gateway management APIs from dual-stack (IPv6 and IPv4) clients. As organizations globally confront growing IPv4 address scarcity and increasing costs, implementing IPv6 becomes critical for future-proofing network infrastructure. This dual-stack approach helps organizations maintain future network compatibility and expand global reach. To learn more about dualstack in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, see the IPv6 on AWS documentation.
When creating a new API or domain name in the console, select IPv4 only or dualstack (IPv4 and IPv6) for the IP address type.
As shown in the following image, you can select the dualstack option when creating a new REST API. For custom domain names, you can similarly configure dualstack as shown in the next image.
If you need to revert to IPv4-only for any reason, you can modify the IP address type setting, with no need to redeploy your API for the update to take effect.
REST APIs of all endpoint types (EDGE, REGIONAL and PRIVATE) support dualstack. Private REST APIs only support dualstack configuration.
AWS CDK
With AWS CDK, start by configuring a dual-stack REST API and domain name.
const api = new apigateway.RestApi(this, "Api", {
restApiName: "MyDualStackAPI",
endpointConfiguration: {ipAddressType: "dualstack"}
});
const domain_name = new apigateway.DomainName(this, "DomainName", {
regionalCertificateArn: 'arn:aws:acm:us-east-1:111122223333:certificate/a1b2c3d4-5678-90ab',
domainName: 'dualstack.example.com',
endpointConfiguration: {
types: ['Regional'],
ipAddressType: 'dualstack'
},
securityPolicy: 'TLS_1_2'
});
const basepathmapping = new apigateway.BasePathMapping(this, "BasePathMapping", {
domainName: domain_name,
restApi: api
});
IPv6 Source IP and authorization
When your API begins receiving IPv6 traffic, client source IPs will be in IPv6 format. If you use resource policies, Lambda authorizers, or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies that reference source IP addresses, make sure they’re updated to accommodate IPv6 address formats.
For example, to permit traffic from a specific IPv6 range in a resource policy.
API Gateway dual-stack support helps manage IPv4 address scarcity and costs, comply with government and industry mandates, and prepare for the future of networking. The dualstack implementation provides a smooth transition path by supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 clients simultaneously.
To get started with API Gateway dual-stack support, visit the Amazon API Gateway documentation. You can configure dualstack for new APIs or update existing APIs with minimal configuration changes.
Special thanks to Ellie Frank (elliesf), Anjali Gola (anjaligl), and Pranika Kakkar (pranika) for providing resources, answering questions, and offering valuable feedback during the writing process. This blog post was made possible through the collaborative support of the service and product management teams.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
It’s AWS Summit season! Free events are now rolling out worldwide, bringing our cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn. Whether you prefer joining us online or in-person, these gatherings offer valuable opportunities to expand your AWS knowledge. I’ll be attending the AWS Amsterdam Summit and would love to meet you—if you’re planning to be there, please stop by to say hello! Visit the AWS Summit website today to find events in your area, sign up for registration alerts, and reserve your spot at an AWS Summit near you.
Speaking of AWS news, let’s look at last week’s new announcements.
Last week’s launches Here are the launches that got my attention.
AWS WAF integration with AWS Amplify Hosting now generally available – You can now directly attach AWS WAF to your AWS Amplify applications through a one-click integration in the Amplify console or using infrastructure as code (IaC). This integration provides access to the full range of AWS WAF capabilities, including managed rules that protect against common web exploits like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). You can also create custom rules based on your application needs, implement rate-based rules to protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by limiting request rates from IP addresses, and configure geo-blocking to restrict access from specific countries. Firewall support is available in all AWS Regions in which Amplify Hosting operates.
Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import introduces real-time cost transparency – If you’re using Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import to run your customized foundation models (FMs), you can now access full transparency into compute resources and calculate inference costs in real time. Before model invocation, you can view the minimum compute resources (custom model units or CMUs) required through both the Amazon Bedrock console and Amazon Bedrock APIs. As models scale to handle increased traffic, Amazon CloudWatch metrics provide real-time visibility into total CMUs used, enabling better cost control through near-instant visibility. This helps you make on-the-fly model configuration changes to optimize costs. The feature is available in all Regions where Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import is supported, with additional details available in Calculate the cost of running a custom model in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails announces the general availability of industry-leading image content filters – This new capability offers industry-leading text and image content safeguards that help you block up to 88% of harmful multimodal content without building custom safeguards or relying on error-prone manual content moderation. Image content filters can be applied across all categories within the content filter policy including hate, insults, sexual, violence, misconduct, and prompt attacks. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails provides configurable safeguards to detect and block harmful content and prompt attacks, define topics to deny and disallow specific topics, redact personally identifiable information (PII) such as personal data, and block specific words. It also provides contextual grounding checks to detect and block model hallucinations and to identify the relevance of model responses and claims, and to identify, correct, and explain factual claims in model responses using Automated Reasoning checks. This capability is generally available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions. To learn more, visit Amazon Bedrock Guardrails image content filters provide industry-leading safeguards in the AWS Machine Learning Blog and Stop harmful content in models using Amazon Bedrock Guardrails in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.
Scenarios capability now generally available for Amazon Q in QuickSight – This capability guides you through data analysis by uncovering hidden trends, making recommendations for your business, and intelligently suggesting next steps for deeper exploration using natural language interactions. Now you can explore past trends, forecast future scenarios, and model solutions without needing specialized skill, analyst support, or manual manipulation of data in spreadsheets. With its intuitive interface and step-by-step guidance, the scenarios capability of Amazon Q in QuickSight helps you perform complex data analysis up to 10x faster than spreadsheets. Whether you’re optimizing marketing budgets, streamlining supply chains, or analyzing investments, Amazon Q makes advanced data analysis accessible so you can make data-driven decisions across your organization. This capability is accessible from any Amazon QuickSight dashboard, so you can move seamlessly from visualizing data to asking what-if questions and comparing alternatives. Previous analyses can be easily modified, extended, and reused, helping you quickly adapt to changing business needs.
Amazon Q Business now available in Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Region – Amazon Q Business is the most capable generative AI–powered assistant for finding information, gaining insight, and taking action at work. It can answer questions, provide summaries, generate content, and securely complete tasks based on data and information in your enterprise systems.
Amazon EC2 P5en instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Jakarta) AWS Regions – P5en instances feature 8 H200 GPUs with 1.7x memory size, paired with 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors and Gen5 PCIe for 4x CPU-GPU bandwidth. This helps improve collective communications performance for distributed training workloads such as deep learning, generative AI, real-time data processing, and high performance computing (HPC) applications.
Amazon EC2 R8g instances now available in US West (N. California) AWS Region – These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPU (up to 48xlarge) and memory (up to 1.5 TB) than AWS Graviton3 based R7g instances. These instances are up to 30% faster for web applications, 40% faster for databases, and 45% faster for large Java applications compared to Graviton3 based R7g instances.
Amazon EC2 C8g instances now available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Region – These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs and memory compared to Graviton3 based Amazon C7g instances. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 40% faster for databases, 30% faster for web applications, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors.
Amazon SageMaker AI is now available in Mexico (Central) and Asia Pacific (Thailand) AWS Regions – Amazon SageMaker AI is a fully managed platform that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly.
Other AWS events Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.
AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.
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I’m excited to announce that AWS CodeBuild now supports parallel test execution, so you can run your test suites concurrently and reduce build times significantly.
Very long test times pose a significant challenge when running continuous integration (CI) at scale. As projects grow in complexity and team size, the time required to execute comprehensive test suites can increase dramatically, leading to extended pipeline execution times. This not only delays the delivery of new features and bug fixes, but also hampers developer productivity by forcing them to wait for build results before proceeding with their tasks. I have experienced pipelines that took up to 60 minutes to run, only to fail at the last step, requiring a complete rerun and further delays. These lengthy cycles can erode developer trust in the CI process, contribute to frustration, and ultimately slow down the entire software delivery cycle. Moreover, long-running tests can lead to resource contention, increased costs because of wasted computing power, and reduced overall efficiency of the development process.
With parallel test execution in CodeBuild, you can now run your tests concurrently across multiple build compute environments. This feature implements a sharding approach where each build node independently executes a subset of your test suite. CodeBuild provides environment variables that identify the current node number and the total number of nodes, which are used to determine which tests each node should run. There is no control build node or coordination between nodes at build time—each node operates independently to execute its assigned portion of your tests.
To enable test splitting, configure the batch fanout section in your buildspec.xml, specifying the desired parallelism level and other relevant parameters. Additionally, use the codebuild-tests-run utility in your build step, along with the appropriate test commands and the chosen splitting method.
The tests are split based on the sharding strategy you specify. codebuild-tests-run offers two sharding strategies:
Equal-distribution. This strategy sorts test files alphabetically and distributes them in chunks equally across parallel test environments. Changes in the names or quantity of test files might reassign files across shards.
Stability. This strategy fixes the distribution of tests across shards by using a consistent hashing algorithm. It maintains existing file-to-shard assignments when new files are added or removed.
CodeBuild supports automatic merging of test reports when running tests in parallel. With automatic test report merging, CodeBuild consolidates tests reports into a single test summary, simplifying result analysis. The merged report includes aggregated pass/fail statuses, test durations, and failure details, reducing the need for manual report processing. You can view the merged results in the CodeBuild console, retrieve them using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or integrate them with other reporting tools to streamline test analysis.
Let’s look at how it works Let me demonstrate how to implement parallel testing in a project. For this demo, I created a very basic Python project with hundreds of tests. To speed things up, I asked Amazon Q Developer on the command line to create a project and 1,800 test cases. Each test case is in a separate file and takes one second to complete. Running all tests in a sequence requires 30 minutes, excluding the time to provision the environment.
In this demo, I run the test suite on ten compute environments in parallel and measure how long it takes to run the suite.
To do so, I added a buildspec.yml file to my project.
There are three parts to highlight in the YAML file.
First, there’s a build-fanout section under batch. The parallelism command tells CodeBuild how many test environments to run in parallel. The ignore-failure command indicates if failure in any of the fanout build tasks can be ignored.
Second, I use the pre-installed codebuild-tests-run command to run my tests.
This command receives the complete list of test files and decides which of the tests must be run on the current node.
Use the sharding-strategy argument to choose between equally distributed or stable distribution as I explain above.
Use the files-search argument to pass all the files that are candidates for a run. We recommend to use the provided codebuild-glob-search command for performance reasons, but any file search tool, such as find(1), will work.
I pass the actual test command to run on the shard with the test-command argument.
Lastly, the reports section instructs CodeBuild to collect and merge the test reports on each node.
Now, I’m ready to trigger an execution of the test suite. I can commit new code on my GitHub repository or trigger the build in the console.
After a few minutes, I see a status report of the different steps of the build; with a status for each test environment or shard.
When the test is complete, I select the Reports tab to access the merged test reports.
The Reports section aggregates all test data from all shards and keeps the history for all builds. I select my most recent build in the Report history section to access the detailed report.
As expected, I can see the aggregated and the individual status for each of my 1,800 test cases. In this demo, they’re all passing, and the report is green.
The 1,800 tests of the demo project take one second each to complete. When I run this test suite sequentially, it took 35 minutes to complete. When I run the test suite in parallel on ten compute environments, it took six minutes to complete, including the time to provision the environments. The parallel run took 17.1 percent of the time of the sequential run. Actual numbers will vary with your projects.
Additional things to know This new capability is compatible with all testing frameworks. The documentation includes examples for Django, Elixir, Go, Java (Maven), Javascript (Jest), Kotlin, PHPUnit, Pytest, Ruby (Cucumber), and Ruby (RSpec).
For test frameworks that don’t accept space-separated lists, the codebuild-tests-run CLI provides a flexible alternative through the CODEBUILD_CURRENT_SHARD_FILES environment variable. This variable contains a newline-separated list of test file paths for the current build shard. You can use it to adapt to different test framework requirements and format test file names.
You can further customize how tests are split across environments by writing your own sharding script and using the CODEBUILD_BATCH_BUILD_IDENTIFIER environment variable, which is automatically set in each build. You can use this technique to implement framework-specific parallelization or optimization.
Pricing and availability With parallel test execution, you can now complete your test suites in a fraction of the time previously required, accelerating your development cycle and improving your team’s productivity. The demo project I created to illustrate this post consumes 18.7 percent of the time of a sequential build.
This capability is available today in all AWS Regions where CodeBuild is offered, with no additional cost beyond the standard CodeBuild pricing for the compute resources used.
I invite you to try parallel test execution in CodeBuild today. Visit the AWS CodeBuild documentation to learn more and get started with parallelizing your tests.
PS: Here’s the prompt I used to create the demo application and its test suite: “I’m writing a blog post to announce codebuild parallel testing. Write a very simple python app that has hundreds of tests, each test in a separate test file. Each test takes one second to complete.”
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
Web application owners are constantly working to protect their applications from a variety of threats. Previously, if you wanted to implement a robust security posture for your Amplify Hosted applications, you needed to create architectures using Amazon CloudFront distributions with AWS WAF protection, which required additional configuration steps, expertise, and management overhead.
With the general availability of AWS WAF in Amplify Hosting, you can now directly attach a web application firewall to your AWS Amplify apps through a one-click integration in the Amplify console or using infrastructure as code (IaC). This integration gives you access to the full range of AWS WAF capabilities including managed rules, which provide protection against common web exploits and vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). You can also create your own custom rules based on your specific application needs.
This new capability helps you implement defense-in-depth security strategies for your web applications. You can take advantage of AWS WAF rate-based rules to protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by limiting the rate of requests from IP addresses. Additionally, you can implement geo-blocking to restrict access to your applications from specific countries, which is particularly valuable if your service is designed for specific geographic regions.
Let’s see how it works Setting up AWS WAF protection for your Amplify app is straightforward. From the Amplify console, navigate to your app settings, select the Firewall tab, and choose the predefined rules you want to apply to your configuration.
Amplify hosting simplifies configuring firewall rules. You can activate four categories of protection.
Amplify-recommended firewall protection – Protect against the most common vulnerabilities found in web applications, block IP addresses from potential threats based on Amazon internal threat intelligence, and protect against malicious actors discovering application vulnerabilities.
Restrict access to amplifyapp.com – Restrict access to the default Amplify generated amplifyapp.com domain. This is useful when you add a custom domain to prevent bots and search engines from crawling the domain.
Enable IP address protection – Restrict web traffic by allowing or blocking requests from specified IP address ranges.
Enable country protection – Restrict access based on specific countries.
Protections enabled through the Amplify console will create an underlying web access control list (ACL) in your AWS account. For fine-grained rulesets, you can use the AWS WAF console rule builder.
After a few minutes, the rules are associated to your app and AWS WAF blocks suspicious requests.
If you want to see AWS WAF in action, you can simulate an attack and monitor it using the AWS WAF request inspection capabilities. For example, you can send a request with an empty User-Agent value. It will trigger a blocking rule in AWS WAF.
Let’s first send a valid request to my app.
curl -v -H "User-Agent: MyUserAgent" https://main.d3sk5bt8rx6f9y.amplifyapp.com/
* Host main.d3sk5bt8rx6f9y.amplifyapp.com:443 was resolved.
...(redacted for brevity)...
> GET / HTTP/2
> Host: main.d3sk5bt8rx6f9y.amplifyapp.com
> Accept: */*
> User-Agent: MyUserAgent
>
* Request completely sent off
< HTTP/2 200
< content-type: text/html
< content-length: 0
< date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:45:26 GMT
We can observe that the server returned an HTTP 200 (OK) message.
Then, send a request with no value associated to the User-Agent HTTP header.
curl -v -H "User-Agent: " https://main.d3sk5bt8rx6f9y.amplifyapp.com/
* Host main.d3sk5bt8rx6f9y.amplifyapp.com:443 was resolved.
... (redacted for brevity) ...
> GET / HTTP/2
> Host: main.d3sk5bt8rx6f9y.amplifyapp.com
> Accept: */*
>
* Request completely sent off
< HTTP/2 403
< server: CloudFront
... (redacted for brevity) ...
<TITLE>ERROR: The request could not be satisfied</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>403 ERROR</H1>
<H2>The request could not be satisfied.</H2>
We can observe that the server returned an HTTP 403 (Forbidden) message.
AWS WAF provide visibility into request patterns, helping you fine-tune your security settings over time. You can access logs through Amplify Hosting or the AWS WAF console to analyze traffic trends and refine security rules as needed.
Availability and pricing Firewall support is available in all AWS Regions in which Amplify Hosting operates. This integration falls under an AWS WAF global resource, similar to Amazon CloudFront. Web ACLs can be attached to multiple Amplify Hosting apps, but they must reside in the same Region.
The pricing for this integration follows the standard AWS WAF pricing model, You pay for the AWS WAF resources you use based on the number of web ACLs, rules, and requests. On top of that, AWS Amplify Hosting adds $15/month when you attach a web application firewall to your application. This is prorated by the hour.
This new capability brings enterprise-grade security features to all Amplify Hosting customers, from individual developers to large enterprises. You can now build, host, and protect your web applications within the same service, reducing the complexity of your architecture and streamlining your security management.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
Starting today, you can get more granular visibility of geographic location information for AWS Regions and AWS Availability Zones (AZs). This detailed information will help you choose the Regions and AZs that align with your regulatory, compliance, and operational requirements.
We continue to expand the AWS global infrastructure to meet your business requirements and now have 114 AZs across 36 Regions. We have announced plans to add 12 more AZs and four Regions in New Zealand, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
One of the things we’ve learned from our customers is the need to have more visibility into the specific location of infrastructure within an AWS Region. This is important for customers in highly regulated industries such as the financial industry or gaming, where there are specific requirements for the physical placement of infrastructure. For example, FanDuel, a leading sports gaming company based in the U.S., is scaling into new markets across the U.S. and Canada. They are taking advantage of the improved geographic transparency to make more informed decisions and ensure they’re meeting data residency requirements as they scale their business quickly.
Geographies for AWS Regions To find the geographic information for your Region, you can visit the AWS Global Infrastructure Regions and Availability Zones page. Once you navigate to this page, you can choose any tab on the map and scroll to the bottom to review the geographic information for each Region. See the following image for an example showing the North America Regions. As would be expected, the infrastructure for the US West (Oregon) Region is located in the United States of America, and the Canada (Central) Region is located in Canada.
Geographies for Availability Zones To find the specific geographic information for an AZ, you can visit the AWS Regions and Availability Zones page in AWS Documentation. Choose the Region you’re interested in and you’ll find a table showing you the geography for that Region. As you see in the following screenshot, the infrastructure of the AZ with AZ ID use1-az1 is located in Virginia, United States of America.
Stay tuned We will update these pages to reflect new geographic information as we continue to grow our AWS Global infrastructure footprint and add more AWS Regions and AZs.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
As we celebrate International Women’s Day (IWD) this March, I had the privilege of attending the ‘Women in Tech’ User Group meetup in Shenzhen last weekend. I was inspired to see over 100 women in tech from different industries come together to discuss AI ethics from a female perspective. Together, we explored strategies such as reducing gender bias in AI systems and promoting diverse representation in model training data. In the AWS Cloud Lab, participants used Amazon Bedrock with large language models (LLMs) to generate rose bloom videos, which was the most popular part of this meetup.
These gatherings are crucial to our efforts to engage more women in AI technology exploration and development, and to help make sure that the generative AI era evolves without gender bias. The collaborative spirit and technical curiosity displayed throughout the event is further proof that diverse teams truly build inclusive and effective solutions.
Speaking of vibrant community engagement, I also had the honor of presenting at Kubernetes Community Day (KCD) Beijing 2025 this weekend. The enthusiasm for container technologies was remarkable, with nearly 300 developers gathering to share experiences and best practices. During my keynote introducing the DoEKS project from Amazon Web Services (AWS), I was struck by the depth of interest in managed Kubernetes services. The audience’s questions revealed how widely adopted services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) have become among Chinese developers building mission-critical applications.This strong community interest aligns perfectly with findings from the Omdia Universe: Cloud Container Management & Services 2024–25 report. In this comprehensive evaluation of container management solutions hosted on public clouds, AWS was recognized as a Leader. The report specifically highlights that AWS offers “widest range of options for working with Kubernetes or its own container management service, across cloud, edge, and on-premises environments.” You can read the full report about AWS offerings to learn more about our comprehensive container portfolio and how we’re helping builders deploy scalable, reliable containerized applications.
Last Week’s launches
In addition to the inspiring community events, here are some AWS launches that caught my attention.
Amazon Q Business browser extension gets upgrades – The Amazon Q Business browser extension now features significant enhancements designed to streamline browser-based tasks. Users gain access to their company’s indexed knowledge alongside web content, direct PDF support within the browser, image file attachment capabilities, and controls to remove irrelevant attachments from conversation context. The expanded context window accommodates larger web pages and more detailed prompts, resulting in more helpful responses. For advanced needs, the extension offers seamless transition to the full Amazon Q Business web experience with access to Actions and Amazon Q Apps. Review the Enhancing web browsing with Amazon Q Business in the documentation for detailed setup instructions and feature descriptions to learn more about this announcement.
Amazon Bedrock RAG evaluation is now generally available – Offering comprehensive assessment of both Bedrock Knowledge Bases and custom Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems through LLM-as-a-judge methodology. The service evaluates retrieval quality and end-to-end generation with metrics for relevance, correctness, and hallucination detection, and the newly added support for custom RAG pipeline evaluations lets you bring your own input-output pairs and retrieved contexts directly into the evaluation job, along with new citation precision metrics and Amazon Bedrock Guardrails integration for more flexible RAG system optimization. To learn more, visit the Amazon Bedrock Evaluations page and What is Amazon Bedrock? in the documentation.
Amazon Nova expands Tool Choice options for Converse API – We’ve enhanced Amazon Nova with expanded Tool Choice capabilities for the Converse API, giving developers more flexibility in building sophisticated AI applications. This update allows models to determine when to use tools to fulfill user requests more effectively. Learn more in the announcement about expands Tool Choice options.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails adds policy-based enforcement for responsible AI – Our builders can now enforce responsible AI policies at scale with Amazon Bedrock Guardrails’ new AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy-based enforcement capabilities. This feature helps you to specify required guardrails through IAM policies using the bedrock:GuardrailIdentifiercondition key, so that all model inference calls comply with your organization’s AI safety standards. When your teams make Amazon Bedrock Invoke or Converse API calls, requests are automatically rejected if they don’t include the mandated guardrails, providing consistent protection against undesirable content, sensitive information exposure, and model hallucinations. Refer to the Set up permissions to use Guaidrails for content filtering in the technical documentation and the Amazon Bedrock Guardrails product page to learn more about the announcement about policy based enforcement for responsible AI.
Next generation of Amazon Connect released – We’ve launched the next generation of Amazon Connect, featuring AI-powered interactions designed to strengthen customer relationships and improve business outcomes. This major update brings enhanced agent experiences, smarter customer interactions, and deeper operational insights to contact centers of all sizes. Learn more from the new launch post in the AWS Contact Center Blog.
Amazon Redshift Serverless introduces Current and Trailing release tracks – Amazon Redshift Serverless now offers two release tracks to give users more control over their update cadence. The Current track delivers the most up-to-date certified release with the latest features and security updates, while the Trailing track remains on the previous certified release. This dual-track approach allows organizations to validate new releases on select workgroups before implementing them across production environments. Users can easily switch between tracks through the Amazon Redshift console, providing the flexibility to balance innovation with stability for mission-critical workloads. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Redshift Serverless is offered. Refer to Tracks for Amazon Redshift provisioned cluster and serverless work groups to learn more about the Current and Trailing tracks in Amazon Redshift Serverless.
AWS WAF now supports URI fragment field matching – AWS WAF has expanded its capability to include URI fragment field matching, allowing security teams to create rules that inspect and match against the fragment portion of URLs. This enhancement enables more precise security controls for web applications that use URI fragments to identify specific sections within pages. Security professionals can now implement more targeted protections, such as restricting access to sensitive page elements, detecting suspicious navigation patterns, and enhancing bot mitigation by analyzing fragment usage patterns characteristic of automated attacks. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS WAF is supported. For more information about URI field for matching, visit the AWS WAF Developer Guide.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS.
Other AWS news
Here are some other additional projects and blog posts that you might find interesting.
Build your generative AI skills at AWS Gen AI Lofts – AWS has established more than 10 global hubs offering training and networking for developers and startups in 2025, where you can gain practical, hands-on experience with the latest AI technologies. These revamped spaces feature dedicated zones where you can participate in workshops on prompt engineering, foundation model (FM) selection, and implementing AI in production environments. If you’re near San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, or other major tech hubs with AWS Gen AI Lofts, stop by to access these free resources and accelerate your generative AI development skills. Check out all of the AWS Gen AI Loft locations and events and to read 5 ways to build your AI skills on AWS Gen AI Loft to learn more.
AWS Lambda‘s architecture for billions of asynchronous invocations – A recent technical article reveals how AWS Lambda handles massive scale through sophisticated engineering approaches. The Lambda asynchronous invocation path employs multiple queuing strategies, consistent hashing for intelligent partitioning, and shuffle-sharding techniques to minimize noisy neighbor effects. The system relies on key observability metrics (AsyncEventReceived, AsyncEventAge, and AsyncEventDropped) to maintain optimal performance. These architectural decisions enable Lambda to process tens of trillions of monthly invocations across 1.5 million active customers while providing reliable scalability and performance isolation. For details read Handling billions of invocations – best practices from AWS Lambda in the AWS computing blog.
AWS is reducing prices by more than 11% for its high-memory U7i instances across all Regions and pricing models. The reduction applies to four instances: u7i-12tb.224xlarge, u7in-16tb.224xlarge, u7in-24tb.224xlarge, and u7in-32tb.224xlarge. The new On-Demand pricing, which covers shared, dedicated, and host tenancy options is retroactive, to March 1, 2025. For new Savings Plan purchases, pricing is effective immediately.
Create your AWS Builder ID and reserve your alias – Builder ID is a universal login credential that gives you access beyond the AWS Management Console to AWS tools and resources, including over 600 free training courses, community features, and developer tools such as Amazon Q Developer.
From community.aws Here are some of my favorite posts from community.aws.
Model Context Protocol (MCP): why it matters – The recently introduced Model Context Protocol (MCP) creates a standardized way for AI applications to communicate with multiple FMs using consistent prompts and tools.
Automating code reviews with Amazon Q and GitHub actions – A new developer tutorial demonstrates how to integrate Amazon Q Developer with GitHub Actions to automatically analyze pull requests and provide AI-powered code feedback.
DeepSeek on AWS – A new technical guide demonstrates how to deploy DeepSeek’s powerful open-source AI models on AWS infrastructure. The tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for setting up these cutting-edge models using Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with GPUs, or through integration with Amazon Bedrock. The guide covers optimization techniques, sample applications, and best practices for balancing performance with cost efficiency.
Upcoming AWS events Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events.
Empowering Futures – Women Leading the Way in Tech and Non-Tech Careers – Whether you’re here to expand your professional circle, learn about the AWS Cloud or gain wisdom from inspiring speakers, this event has something for everyone. This is a public event open to everyone in the Seattle area—for free—on March 27, 2025.
(This survey is hosted by an external company. AWS handles your information as described in the AWS Privacy Notice. AWS will own the data gathered via this survey and will not share the information collected with survey respondents.)
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