Last week I had the joy of participating in Amazon’s “Bring Your Kids to Work Day” with my 7 year old son. We commuted together into the New York City office, his first real rush hour train ride, and spent the day exploring how Amazon uses AI, machine learning, and robotics to deliver packages to customers all over the world. Watching his eyes light up as he saw robots navigating a fulfillment center reminded me why so many of us got into technology in the first place. There’s nothing quite like seeing that sense of wonder when something complex clicks.

That same energy carried into the week’s launches. We’ve got updates across AI pricing, observability, multicloud networking, and data management. Let’s dive in.

Headlines
Amazon Bedrock announces up to 80% lower prices for OpenAI GPT‑5.6 models – If you’re using OpenAI’s GPT‑5.6 family through Amazon Bedrock, your costs just dropped significantly. Effective July 30, on-demand inference prices for GPT‑5.6 Luna are reduced by 80%, while GPT‑5.6 Terra prices are reduced by 20%. Luna now costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, making it one of the most affordable frontier-class models available. These price reductions apply automatically — no action required on your part. Read more

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Amazon CloudWatch announces managed Prometheus collectors – Amazon CloudWatch now supports collecting Prometheus metrics from your AWS infrastructure using fully managed collectors, enabling you to monitor Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon MSK, and Amazon OpenSearch Service workloads without deploying or managing any agents. If you’ve been maintaining your own Prometheus scraping infrastructure, this removes a significant operational burden. Read more
• AWS Interconnect — multicloud connectivity with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is now generally available – AWS Interconnect is the first purpose-built multicloud connectivity product of its kind, allowing you to quickly provision resilient, scalable private connections between AWS and other cloud providers. With this GA launch for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), you can establish private cross-cloud networking without traversing the public internet, making it easier to run multicloud architectures with the security and performance your workloads demand. Read more
• AWS IAM Identity Center extends multi-Region support to Identity Center directory – You can now replicate IAM Identity Center from your primary AWS Region to additional Regions when using the Identity Center directory as your identity source. If IAM Identity Center is affected by a disruption in the primary Region, your users continue to have access to their AWS accounts using provisioned entitlements in additional Regions. This feature was previously available only for instances connected to external identity providers. Read more
• Amazon S3 Tables now supports the Variant data type for Apache Iceberg V3 – Amazon S3 Tables adds support for the Variant data type, introduced in the Apache Iceberg V3 table format specification. Variant provides a high-performance, native solution for managing semi-structured data within your data lake — think IoT sensor data, application logs, and other schema-flexible payloads — without resorting to JSON blobs. Read more

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Installing and updating the AWS CLI with single-line commands – A new blog post from the Developer Tools team that simplifies AWS CLI installation and updates across platforms with single-line commands. If you manage CLI versions across teams or in CI pipelines, this is a nice quality-of-life improvement.
• Deploying Kimi K3 on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod and Amazon EKS – A step-by-step guide for deploying Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model on AWS infrastructure using SageMaker HyperPod and Amazon EKS. If you’re evaluating large-scale model deployment options, this walks through the full workflow.
• Deliver Apache Kafka data to streaming tables for Apache Iceberg with Amazon MSK Express brokers – Learn how to stream data from Apache Kafka into Apache Iceberg tables using Amazon MSK Express brokers, with throughput support of up to 10 GB/s for delivery to Apache Iceberg on Amazon S3 Tables.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free events that bring the cloud and AI community together to connect, learn, and explore the latest technologies. Browse the full calendar to find a Summit near you in the second half of 2026.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders.

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

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

In my last Week in Review post, I shared what I’d been hearing from customers in the AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) workshops I’ve been delivering. Last week I was back at it, this time in Denver for a two-day AI-DLC workshop, where I helped facilitate 17 teams to deliver nearly 20 separate use cases in just two days. The pace of acceleration that AI-DLC unlocks—especially when paired with tools like Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock—is fundamentally changing how businesses operate. Traditional roles within software development teams are collapsing into smaller, AI-augmented squads, and the paradigm shift is beginning to take place right in front of us. To learn more about how to utilize various AI tools, visit the GitHub repository of AI-DLC workflow.

This shift is also reshaping how AWS account teams (solutions architects, customer solutions managers, and technical account managers) collaborate with customers. It’s becoming less about handing off advisory design documents and more about building alongside them in real time. It’s a genuinely exciting moment to be in the middle of the change, and this week’s headline launch — Anthropic’s most capable model yet, now on AWS, is going to push that pace even further.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines
Claude Opus 4.8 on AWS – Anthropic’s most capable generally available model is now accessible through both Amazon Bedrock and the Claude Platform on AWS. Opus 4.8 is built for agentic coding, knowledge work, and extended autonomous task execution — it sustains longer autonomous sessions with deeper reasoning, recovers from errors, and synthesizes information across lengthy documents. For coding workloads, it reads codebases like an engineer, plans before it edits, and holds context across long sessions. On Amazon Bedrock, you get AWS-managed features like Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, and data residency; on the Claude Platform on AWS, you get Anthropic’s native APIs unified with AWS billing. To learn more, visit the deep-dive blog post.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Introducing the next generation of AWS Resilience Hub – A reimagined Resilience Hub gives SREs and developers a unified framework to define resilience standards, evaluate applications against them, and demonstrate compliance across an entire portfolio. It introduces modular resilience policies (covering service-level objectives (SLOs), multi-AZ/Region DR, and data recovery), business-oriented application modeling, generative AI-powered assessments aligned with the Well-Architected and Resilience Analysis Frameworks, and automatic dependency discovery via DNS query log analysis. Integration with AWS Organizations enables organization-wide resilience management from a single delegated administrator account.
• Introducing the next generation of Amazon OpenSearch Serverless for building agentic AI applications – Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now a fully managed search and vector engine purpose-built for agentic AI applications. It scales from zero to thousands of requests per second—roughly 20x faster than the prior generation—delivers up to 60% cost savings versus peak-provisioned clusters, and adds GPU acceleration plus new SEARCH and VECTORSEARCH collection types. Native integrations with Vercel, Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor through OpenSearch Agent Skills make it straightforward to plug into your agent stack.
• New assessment capabilities in AWS Transform – AWS Transform expands with new tools to help you build migration business cases and evaluate TCO before moving workloads to AWS. You can ingest data from RVTools exports, CMDB data, the AWS Transform discovery tool, and third-party discovery tools, then run what-if scenarios across region, utilization, and service mapping for EC2, FSx, S3, SQL Server on EC2, and virtual desktops. The release also adds Agentic Readiness Analysis (ARA) and Modernization Analysis (MODA), which scan code repositories in 5 to 30 minutes per repo to surface severity-tagged findings with file-level evidence and AWS-mapped remediation guidance.
• Amazon Aurora MySQL with Kiro Powers — Aurora MySQL now integrates with Kiro Powers, drawing from a curated repository of pre-packaged MCP servers, steering files, and hooks validated by Kiro partners. Developers can execute both data plane tasks (queries, schema management) and control plane tasks (cluster management) in natural language, with dynamic guidance for Aurora MySQL Serverless scaling, RDS-to-Aurora migration, and replication setup. The companion Database Blog post explains how the agent produces the API calls, SQL, and configuration for you to review and run — available via one-click install from the Kiro IDE or webpage.
• Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports Windows Desktop OS – You can now bring your own Windows Desktop licenses to Amazon WorkSpaces Applications and stream full Windows desktops and applications from AWS-hosted dedicated hardware. BYOL eliminates OS fees (you pay only for compute and streaming infrastructure), supports eligible Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, and gives users a matching experience between local and remote environments — same workflows, shortcuts, and navigation in both.

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 posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Meet our newest AWS Heroes — May 2026 – An AWS Builder Center post introducing the latest cohort of AWS Heroes recognized for their contributions to the global AWS community.
• AI-native, full-stack web apps with Vercel and AWS databases – Database blog post on the new Vercel and AWS Databases integration, which lets you provision Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, or Aurora DSQL directly from the Vercel dashboard or via v0. The post also highlights the H0 hackathon with $160,000 in prizes for building full-stack apps on this stack.
• Introducing US-based, US citizen 24/7 technical support for AWS GovCloud (US) customers: Your mission never sleeps. Neither do we – Public Sector blog post announcing that all AWS GovCloud (US) technical support cases are now automatically routed to US-based, US citizen engineers around the clock, no opt-in required, for government agencies, contractors, nonprofits, and academic institutions running mission-critical workloads.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events as well as AWS Summits and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

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

-Micah

Enterprises face a significant challenge when deploying AI agents: the desktop and legacy applications that power most business workflows are simply inaccessible to modern AI systems. According to a 2024 Gartner report, 75% of organizations run legacy applications that lack modern APIs, and 71% of Fortune 500 companies operate critical processes on mainframe systems without adequate programmatic access. For many organizations, this has meant choosing between delaying AI adoption or undertaking expensive and risky modernization projects.

Today, we are announcing that Amazon WorkSpaces now enables AI agents to securely operate desktop applications without requiring application modernization. The same managed virtual desktops that millions of employees use and trust can now also serve AI agents, turning WorkSpaces into infrastructure for scaling enterprise productivity, not just delivering it. Because agents operate within your existing WorkSpaces environment, there are no APIs to build, no application migrations to plan, and no new infrastructure to manage.

Some of our customers had an early opportunity to give their agents a WorkSpace. Chris Noon, Director, Nuvens Consulting shared with us, “WorkSpaces lets our clients give AI agents the same secure, governed desktop environment their employees already use — no custom API integrations, full audit trails, and enterprise-grade isolation out of the box. For regulated industries, that’s not a nice-to-have — it’s the baseline.”

Secure cloud desktop access for AI agents
With WorkSpaces, AI agents can securely access and operate desktop applications running inside managed WorkSpaces environments to complete complex business workflows. Agents authenticate through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and connect via Workspaces with complete audit trails available through AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch. Because agents operate within secure WorkSpaces environments rather than on local machines, your existing security controls and compliance policies remain fully intact.

Amazon Workspaces supports the industry-standard Model Context Protocol (MCP), which means WorkSpaces works with any agent framework, such as LangChain, CrewAI and Strands Agents.

Let’s try it out
To set up a WorkSpaces environment for AI agents, I started in the AWS Management Console by creating a new WorkSpaces Applications stack—the environment definition that controls how agents connect and what they’re allowed to do.

From the Amazon WorkSpaces console, I chose Create stack and configured the basics: name, fleet association, and VPC endpoints. In Step 3 of the stack creation workflow, I noticed the new AI agents section with two options. The first, No AI agent access, is the default configuration for standard WorkSpaces designed for people. The second, Add AI Agents, allows AI agents to securely access and operate applications using their own identity and permissions. I selected Add AI Agents to enable agent connections on this stack.

Next, I will enable storage before configuring the agent access settings to define how agents interact with the desktop.

Under Agent features, I enabled three capabilities. Computer input allows the agent to click, type, and scroll within the desktop. Computer vision allows the agent to capture screenshots of the desktop, which is how it “sees” the application. Finally, screenshot storage configures where session screenshots are stored for audit and debugging.

Under Desktop screen layout, I set the screen resolution to 1280×720 and image format to PNG. The resolution determines the fidelity of what the agent sees during a session—a complex application with dense UI elements might benefit from higher resolution, while a terminal-style interface works well at 720p.

With my stack configured, WorkSpaces exposes a managed MCP endpoint. I pointed my agent framework to this endpoint, provided IAM credentials for authentication, and my agent began interacting with the desktop applications installed on the fleet’s image.

To see this in action, here’s an agent built with the Strands Agent SDK and Amazon Bedrock handling a prescription refill, looking up the patient record, searching for the medication, placing the order, and confirming a successful refill, all inside a sample pharmacy system with no API.

The application doesn’t know an agent is driving it. Nothing about the software was modified, rebuilt, or integrated. The agent worked with it exactly as it exists today.

Now available
This feature is available today at no additional cost in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, London), and Asia (Tokyo, Mumbai, Sydney, Seoul, Singapore) Regions.

Get started building today using our GitHub repo, or visit the WorkSpaces page for more details.

Updated July 1, 2026– Feature has moved from public preview to GA.

In my last Week in Review post, I mentioned how much time I’ve been spending on AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) workshops with customers this year. A common theme in those sessions is the need for better cost visibility. Teams are moving fast with AI, but as they go from experimenting to full production, finance and leadership really need to know who is using which resources and at what cost. That’s why I was so excited to see the launch of Amazon Bedrock new support for cost allocation by IAM user and role this week. This lets you tag IAM principals with attributes like team or cost center and then activate those tags in your Billing and Cost Management console. The resulting cost data flows into AWS Cost Explorer and the detailed Cost and Usage Report, giving you a clear line of sight into model inference spending. Whether you’re scaling agents across teams, tracking foundation model use by department, or running tools like Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock, this new feature is a game changer for tracking and managing your AI investments. You can get all the details on setting this up in the IAM principal cost allocation documentation.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines
Amazon Bedrock now offers Claude Mythos Preview – Anthropic’s most sophisticated AI model to date is now available on Amazon Bedrock as a gated research preview through Project Glasswing. Claude Mythos introduces a new model class focused on cybersecurity, capable of identifying sophisticated security vulnerabilities in software, analyzing large codebases, and delivering state of the art performance across cybersecurity, coding, and complex reasoning tasks. Security teams can use it to discover and address vulnerabilities in critical software before threats emerge. Access is currently limited to allowlisted organizations, with Anthropic and AWS prioritizing internet critical companies and open source maintainers.

AWS Agent Registry for centralized agent discovery and governance now in preview – AWS launched Agent Registry through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, providing organizations with a private catalog for discovering and managing AI agents, tools, skills, MCP servers, and custom resources. The registry helps teams locate existing capabilities rather than duplicating them, with semantic and keyword search, approval workflows, and CloudTrail audit trails. It is accessible via the AgentCore Console, AWS CLI, SDK, and as an MCP server queryable from IDEs.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Announcing Amazon S3 Files, making S3 buckets accessible as file systems – Amazon S3 Files transforms S3 buckets into shared file systems that connect any AWS compute resource directly with your S3 data. Built on Amazon EFS technology, it delivers full file system semantics with low latency performance, caching actively used data and providing multiple terabytes per second of aggregate read throughput. Applications can access S3 data through both file system and S3 APIs simultaneously without code modifications or data migration.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service supports Managed Prometheus and agent tracing – Amazon OpenSearch Service now provides a unified observability platform that consolidates metrics, logs, traces, and AI agent tracing into a single interface. The update includes native Prometheus integration with direct PromQL query support, RED metrics monitoring, and OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic convention support for LLM execution visibility. Operations teams can correlate slow traces to logs and overlay Prometheus metrics on dashboards without switching between tools.
• Amazon WorkSpaces Advisor now available for AI powered troubleshooting – AWS launched Amazon WorkSpaces Advisor, an AI powered administrative tool that uses generative AI to help IT administrators troubleshoot Amazon WorkSpaces Personal deployments. It analyzes WorkSpace configurations, detects problems automatically, and provides actionable recommendations to restore service and optimize performance.
• Amazon Braket adds support for Rigetti’s 108 qubit Cepheus QPU – Amazon Braket now offers access to Rigetti’s Cepheus-1-108Q device, the first 100+ qubit superconducting quantum processor on the platform. The modular design features twelve 9 qubit chiplets with CZ gates that offer enhanced resilience to phase errors. It supports multiple frameworks including Braket SDK, Qiskit, CUDA-Q, and Pennylane, with pulse level control for researchers.

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 posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Building automated AWS Regional availability checks with Amazon S3– Storage blog post on implementing automated systems for monitoring service availability across AWS regions using Amazon S3 as core infrastructure.
• Understanding Amazon Bedrock model lifecycle – Machine learning blog post that walks through the stages foundation models go through in Bedrock from availability through deprecation, helping teams plan for model updates and manage version dependencies in production.
• Building memory intensive apps with AWS Lambda managed instances – Compute blog post exploring how Lambda managed instances extend the platform beyond lightweight workloads to support memory intensive applications while maintaining serverless benefits.
• Deploy OpenClaw on AWS: Choose the right options for your AI workload – Builder Center guide comparing four AWS deployment options for OpenClaw: Amazon Lightsail for individual developers, Amazon EC2 for startups needing deeper AWS integration, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for serverless multiuser scenarios, and Amazon EKS for enterprises requiring VM level isolation and advanced orchestration.
• We’re bringing back the Kiro startup credits program – Kiro is relaunching its startup credits initiative, offering eligible early stage companies complimentary access to Kiro Pro+ for up to one year. The three tier program (Starter, Growth, Scale) provides 2 to 30 users based on team size, with rolling applications accepted globally.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• What’s Next with AWS (April 28, Virtual) Join this livestream at 9am PT for a candid discussion about how agentic AI is transforming how businesses operate. Featuring AWS CEO Matt Garman, SVP Colleen Aubrey, and OpenAI leaders discussing emerging agent capabilities, Amazon’s internal experiences, and new agentic solutions and platform capabilities.

Browse here for upcoming AWS led in person and virtual events, startup events, and developer focused events.

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

~ micah