Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Monitor network performance and traffic across your EKS clusters with Container Network Observability

Organizations are increasingly expanding their Kubernetes footprint by deploying microservices to incrementally innovate and deliver business value faster. This growth places increased reliance on the network, giving platform teams exponentially complex challenges in monitoring network performance and traffic patterns in EKS. As a result, organizations struggle to maintain operational efficiency as their container environments scale, often delaying application delivery and increasing operational costs.

Today, I’m excited to announce Container Network Observability in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a comprehensive set of network observability features in Amazon EKS that you can use to better measure your network performance in your system and dynamically visualize the landscape and behavior of network traffic in EKS.

Here’s a quick look at Container Network Observability in Amazon EKS:

Container Network Observability in EKS addresses observability challenges by providing enhanced visibility of workload traffic. It offers performance insights into network flows within the cluster and those with cluster-external destinations. This makes your EKS cluster network environment more observable while providing built-in capabilities for more precise troubleshooting and investigative efforts.

Getting started with Container Network Observability in EKS

I can enable this new feature for a new or existing EKS cluster. For a new EKS cluster, during the Configure observability setup, I navigate to the Configure network observability section. Here, I select Edit container network observability. I can see there are three included features: Service map, Flow table, and Performance metric endpoint, which are enabled by Amazon CloudWatch Network Flow Monitor.

On the next page, I need to install the AWS Network Flow Monitor Agent.

After it’s enabled, I can navigate to my EKS cluster and select Monitor cluster.

This will bring me to my cluster observability dashboard. Then, I select the Network tab.


Comprehensive observability features
Container Network Observability in EKS provides several key features, including performance metrics, service map, and flow table with three views: AWS service view, cluster view, and external view.

With Performance metrics, you can now scrape network-related system metrics for pods and worker nodes directly from the Network Flow Monitor agent and send them to your preferred monitoring destination. Available metrics include ingress/egress flow counts, packet counts, bytes transferred, and various allowance exceeded counters for bandwidth, packets per second, and connection tracking limits. The following screenshot shows an example of how you can use Amazon Managed Grafana to visualize the performance metrics scraped using Prometheus.


With the Service map feature, you can dynamically visualize intercommunication between workloads in your cluster, making it straightforward to understand your application topology with a quick look. The service map helps you quickly identify performance issues by highlighting key metrics such as retransmissions, retransmission timeouts, and data transferred for network flows between communicating pods.

Let me show you how this works with a sample e-commerce application. The service map provides both high-level and detailed views of your microservices architecture. In this e-commerce example, we can see three core microservices working together: the GraphQL service acts as an API gateway, orchestrating requests between the frontend and backend services.

When a customer browses products or places an order, the GraphQL service coordinates communication with both the products service (for catalog data, pricing, and inventory) and the orders service (for order processing and management). This architecture allows each service to scale independently while maintaining clear separation of concerns.

For deeper troubleshooting, you can expand the view to see individual pod instances and their communication patterns. The detailed view reveals the complexity of microservices communication. Here, you can see multiple pod instances for each service and the network of connections between them.

This granular visibility is crucial for identifying issues like uneven load distribution, pod-to-pod communication bottlenecks, or when specific pod instances are experiencing higher latency. For example, if one GraphQL pod is making disproportionately more calls to a particular products pod, you can quickly spot this pattern and investigate potential causes.

Use the Flow table to monitor the top talkers across Kubernetes workloads in your cluster from three different perspectives, each providing unique insights into your network traffic patterns.

Flow table – Monitor the top talkers across Kubernetes workloads in your cluster from three different perspectives, each providing unique insights into your network traffic patterns:

  • AWS service view shows which workloads generate the most traffic to Amazon Web Services (AWS) services such as Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), so you can optimize data access patterns and identify potential cost optimization opportunities.
  • The Cluster view reveals the heaviest communicators within your cluster (east-west traffic), which means you can spot chatty microservices that might benefit from optimization or colocation strategies
  • External viewidentifies workloads with the highest traffic to destinations outside AWS (internet or on premises), which is useful for security monitoring and bandwidth management.

The flow table provides detailed metrics and filtering capabilities to analyze network traffic patterns. In this example, we can see the flow table displaying cluster view traffic between our e-commerce services. The table shows that the orders pod is communicating with multiple products pods, transferring amounts of data. This pattern suggests the orders service is making frequent product lookups during order processing.

The filtering capabilities are useful for troubleshooting, for example, to focus on traffic from a specific orders pod. This granular filtering helps you quickly isolate communication patterns when investigating performance issues. For instance, if customers are experiencing slow checkout times, you can filter to see if the orders service is making too many calls to the products service, or if there are network bottlenecks between specific pod instances.

Additional things to know
Here are key points to note about Container Network Observability in EKS:

  • Pricing – For network monitoring, you pay standard Amazon CloudWatch Network Flow Monitor pricing.
  • Availability – Container Network Observability in EKS is available in all commercial AWS regions where Amazon CloudWatch Network Flow Monitor is available.
  • Export metrics to your preferred monitoring solution – Metrics are available in OpenMetrics format, compatible with Prometheus and Grafana. For configuration details, refer to Network Flow Monitor documentation.

Get started with Container Network Observability in Amazon EKS today to improve network observability in your cluster.

Happy building!
Donnie



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Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Accelerate large-scale AI applications with the new Amazon EC2 P6-B300 instances

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P6-B300 instances, our next-generation GPU platform accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs. These instances deliver 2 times more networking bandwidth, and 1.5 times more GPU memory compared to previous generation instances, creating a balanced platform for large-scale AI applications.

With these improvements, P6-B300 instances are ideal for training and serving large-scale AI models, particularly those employing sophisticated techniques such as Mixture of Experts (MoE) and multimodal processing. For organizations working with trillion-parameter models and requiring distributed training across thousands of GPUs, these instances provide the perfect balance of compute, memory, and networking capabilities.

Improvements made compared to predecessors
The P6-B300 instances deliver 6.4Tbps Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking bandwidth, supporting efficient communication across large GPU clusters. These instances feature 2.1TB of GPU memory, allowing large models to reside within a single NVLink domain, which significantly reduces model sharding and communication overhead. When combined with EFA networking and the advanced virtualization and security capabilities of AWS Nitro System, these instances provide unprecedented speed, scale, and security for AI workloads.

The specs for the EC2 P6-B300 instances are as follows.

Instance size VCPUs System memory GPUs GPU memory GPU-GPU interconnect EFA network bandwidth ENA bandwidth EBS bandwidth Local storage
P6-B300.48xlarge 192 4TB 8x B300 GPU 2144GB HBM3e 1800 GB/s 6.4 Tbps 300 Gbps 100 Gbps 8x 3.84TB

Good to know
In terms of persistent storage, AI workloads primarily use a combination of high performance persistent storage options such as Amazon FSx for Lustre, Amazon S3 Express One Zone, and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), depending on price performance considerations. For illustration, the dedicated 300Gbps Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) networking on P6-B300 enables high-throughput hot storage access with S3 Express One Zone, supporting large-scale training workloads. If you’re using FSx for Lustre, you can now use EFA with GPUDirect Storage (GDS) to achieve up to 1.2Tbps of throughput to the Lustre file system on the P6-B300 instances to quickly load your models.

Available now
The P6-B300 instances are now available through Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML and Savings Planin the US West (Oregon) AWS Region.
For on-demand reservation of P6-B300 instances, please reach out to your account manager. As usual with Amazon EC2, you pay only for what you use. For more information, refer to Amazon EC2 Pricing. Check out the full collection of accelerated computing instances to help you start migrating your applications.

To learn more, visit our Amazon EC2 P6-B300 instances page. Send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

– Veliswa



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Monday, November 17, 2025

AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Lambda, load balancers, Amazon DCV, Amazon Linux 2023, and more (November 17, 2025)

The weeks before AWS re:Invent, my team is full steam ahead preparing content for the conference. I can’t wait to meet you at one of my three talks: CMP346 : Supercharge AI/ML on Apple Silicon with EC2 Mac, CMP344: Speed up Apple application builds with CI/CD on EC2 Mac, and DEV416: Develop your AI Agents and MCP Tools in Swift.

Last week, AWS announced three new AWS Heroes. The AWS Heroes program recognizes a vibrant, worldwide group of AWS experts whose enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing has a real impact within the community. Welcome to the community, Dimple, Rola, and Vivek.

We also opened the GenAI Loft in Tel Aviv, Israel. AWS Gen AI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences for startups and developers. The Loft content is tailored to address local customer needs – from startups and enterprises to public sector organizations, bringing together developers, investors, and industry experts under one roof.

GenAI Loft - TLV

The loft is open in Tel Aviv until Wednesday, November 19. If you’re in the area, check the list of sessions, workshops, and hackathons today.

If you are a serverless developer, last week was really rich with news. Let’s start with these.

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

Additional updates
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that I found interesting:

  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service gets independent affirmation of its zero operator access design – Amazon EKS offers a zero operator access posture. AWS personnel cannot access your content. This is achieved through a combination of AWS Nitro System-based instances, restricted administrative APIs, and end-to-end encryption. An independent review by NCC Group confirmed the effectiveness of these security measures.
  • Make your web apps hands-free with Amazon Nova Sonic – Amazon Nova Sonic, a foundation model from AAmazon Bedrock, provides you with the ability to create natural, low-latency, bidirectional speech conversations for applications. This provides users with the ability to collaborate with applications through voice and embedded intelligence, unlocking new interaction patterns and enhancing usability. This blog post demonstrates a reference app, Smart Todo App. It shows how voice can be integrated to provide a hands-free experience for task management.
  • AWS X-Ray SDKs & Daemon migration to OpenTelemetry – AWS X-Ray is transitioning to OpenTelemetry as its primary instrumentation standard for application tracing. OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation solutions are recommended for producing traces from applications and sending them to AWS X-Ray. X-Ray’s existing console experience and functionality continue to be fully supported and remains unchanged by this transition.
  • Powering the world’s largest events: How Amazon CloudFront delivers at scale – Amazon CloudFront achieved a record-breaking peak of 268 terabits per second on November 1, 2025, during major game delivery workloads—enough bandwidth to simultaneously stream live sports in HD to approximately 45 million concurrent viewers. This milestone demonstrates the CloudFront massive scale, powered by 750+ edge locations across 440+ cities globally and 1,140+ embedded PoPs within 100+ ISPs, with the latest generation delivering 3x the performance of previous versions.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars so that you can sign up for these upcoming events:

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse here for upcoming in-person events, developer-focused events, and events for startups.

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

— seb

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!



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Friday, November 14, 2025

AWS Lambda enhances event processing with provisioned mode for SQS event-source mapping

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of provisioned mode for AWS Lambda with Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) Event Source Mapping (ESM), a new feature that customers can use to optimize the throughput of their event-driven applications by configuring dedicated polling resources. Using this new capability, which provides 3x faster scaling, and 16x higher concurrency, you can process events with lower latency, handle sudden traffic spikes more effectively, and maintain precise control over your event processing resources.

Modern applications increasingly rely on event-driven architectures where services communicate through events and messages. Amazon SQS is commonly used as an event source for Lambda functions, so developers can build loosely coupled, scalable applications. Although the SQS ESM automatically handles queue polling and function invocation, customers with stringent performance requirements have asked for more control over the polling behavior to handle spiky traffic patterns and maintain low processing latency.

Provisioned mode for SQS ESM addresses these needs by introducing event pollers, which are dedicated resources that remain ready to handle expected traffic patterns. These event pollers can auto scale up to 1000 per concurrent executions per minute, more than three times faster than before to handle sudden spikes in event traffic and provide up to 20,000 concurrency–16 times higher capacity to process millions of events with Lambda functions. This enhanced scaling behavior helps customers maintain predictable low latency even during traffic surges.

Enterprises across various industries, from financial services to gaming companies, are using AWS Lambda with Amazon SQS to process real-time events for their mission-critical applications. These organizations, which include some of the largest online gaming platforms and financial institutions, require consistent subsecond processing times for their event-driven workloads, particularly during periods of peak usage. Provisioned mode for SQS ESM is a capability you can use to meet your stringent performance requirements while maintaining cost controls.

Enhanced control and performance

With provisioned mode, you can configure both minimum and maximum numbers of event pollers for your SQS ESM. Each event poller represents a unit of compute that handles queue polling, event batching, and filtering before invoking Lambda functions. Each event poller can handle up to 1 MB/sec of throughput, up to 10 concurrent invokes, or up to 10 SQS polling API calls per second. By setting a minimum number of event pollers, you enable your application to maintain a baseline processing capacity that can immediately handle sudden traffic increases. We recommend that you set the minimum event pollers required to handle your known peak workload requirements. The optional maximum setting helps prevent overloading downstream systems by limiting the total processing throughput.

The new mode delivers significant improvements in how your event-driven applications handle varying workloads. When traffic increases, your ESM detects the growing backlog within seconds and dynamically scales event pollers between your configured minimum and maximum values three times faster than before. This enhanced scaling capability is complemented by a substantial increase in processing capacity, with support for up to 2 GBps of aggregate traffic, and up to 20K concurrent requests—16x higher than previously possible. By maintaining a minimum number of ready-to-use event pollers, your application achieves predictable performance, handling sudden traffic spikes without the delay typically associated with scaling up resources. During low traffic periods, your ESM automatically scales down to your configured minimum number of event pollers, which means you can optimize costs while maintaining responsiveness.

Let’s try it out

Enabling provisioned mode is straightforward in the AWS Management Console. You need to already have an SQS queue configured and a Lambda function. To get started, in the Configuration tab for your Lambda function, choose Triggers, then Add trigger. This will bring up a user interface where you can configure your trigger. Choose SQS from the dropdown menu for source and then select the SQS queue you want to use.

Under Event poller configuration, you will now see a new option called Provisioned mode. Select Configure to reveal settings for Minimum event pollers and Maximum event pollers, each with defaults and minimum and maximum values displayed.

Configuration panel for SQS provisioned Mode

After you have configured Provisioned mode, you can save your trigger. If you need to make changes later, you can find the current configuration under the Triggers tab in the AWS Lambda configuration section, and you can modify your current settings there.

SQS Provisioned Poller confiig

Monitoring and observability

You can monitor your provisioned mode usage through Amazon CloudWatch metrics. The ProvisionedPollers metric shows the number of active event pollers processing events in one-minute windows.

Now available

Provisioned mode for Lambda SQS ESM is available today in all commercial AWS Regions. You can start using this feature through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs. Pricing is based on the number of event pollers provisioned and the duration they’re provisioned for, measured in Event Poller Units (EPUs). Each EPU supports up to 1 MB per second throughput capacity per event poller, with minimum 2 event pollers per ESM. See the AWS pricing page for more information on EPU charges.

To learn more about provisioned mode for SQS ESM, visit the AWS Lambda documentation. Start building more responsive event-driven applications today with enhanced control over your event processing resources.



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Thursday, November 13, 2025

Introducing AWS IoT Core Device Location integration with Amazon Sidewalk

Today, I’m happy to announce a new capability to resolve location data for Amazon Sidewalk enabled devices with the AWS IoT Core Device Location service. This feature removes the requirement to install GPS modules in a Sidewalk device and also simplifies the developer experience of resolving location data. Devices powered by small coin cell batteries, such as smart home sensor trackers, use Sidewalk to connect. Supporting built-in GPS modules for products that move around is not only expensive, it can creates challenge in ensuring optimal battery life performance and longevity.

With this launch, Internet of Things (IoT) device manufacturers and solution developers can build asset tracking and location monitoring solutions using Sidewalk-enabled devices by sending Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, or Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) information to AWS IoT for location resolution. They can then send the resolved location data to an MQTT topic or AWS IoT rule and route the data to other Amazon Web Services (AWS) services, thus using different capabilities of AWS Cloud through AWS IoT Core. This would simplify their software development and give them more options to choose the optimal location source, thereby improving their product performance.

This launch addresses previous challenges and architecture complexity. You don’t need location sensing on network-based devices when you use the Sidewalk network infrastructure itself to determine device location, which eliminates the need for power-hungry and costly GPS hardware on the device. And, this feature also allows devices to efficiently measure and report location data from GNSS and Wi-Fi, thus extending the product battery life. Therefore, you can build a more compelling solution for asset tracking and location-aware IoT applications with these enhancements.

For those unfamiliar with Amazon Sidewalk and the AWS IoT Core Device Location service, I’ll briefly explain their history and context. If you’re already familiar with them, you can skip to the section on how to get started.

AWS IoT Core integrations with Amazon Sidewalk
Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better through improved connectivity options. It’s designed to support a wide range of customer devices with capabilities ranging from locating pets or valuables, to smart home security and lighting control and remote diagnostics for appliances and tools.

Amazon Sidewalk is a secure community network that uses Amazon Sidewalk Gateways (also called Sidewalk Bridges), such as compatible Amazon Echo and Ring devices, to provide cloud connectivity for IoT endpoint devices. Amazon Sidewalk enables low-bandwidth and long-range connectivity at home and beyond using BLE for short-distance communication and LoRa and frequency-shift keying (FSK) radio protocols at 900MHz frequencies to cover longer distances.

Sidewalk now provides coverage to more than 90% of the US population and supports long-range connected solutions for communities and enterprises. Users with Ring cameras or Alexa devices that act as a Sidewalk Bridge can choose to contribute a small portion of their internet bandwidth, which is pooled to create a shared network that benefits all Sidewalk-enabled devices in a community.

In March 2023, AWS IoT Core deepened its integration with Amazon Sidewalk to seamlessly provision, onboard, and monitor Sidewalk devices with qualified hardware development kits (HDKs), SDKs, and sample applications. As of this writing, AWS IoT Core is the only way for customers to connect the Sidewalk network.

In the AWS IoT Core console, you can add your Sidewalk device, provision and register your devices, and connect your Sidewalk endpoint to the cloud. To learn more about onboarding your Sidewalk devices, visit the Getting started with AWS IoT Core for Amazon Sidewalk in the AWS IoT Wireless Developer Guide.

In November 2022, we announced AWS IoT Core Device Location service, a new feature that you can use to get the geo-coordinates of their IoT devices even when the device doesn’t have a GPS module. You can use the Device Location service as a simple request and response HTTP API, or you can use it with IoT connectivity pathways like MQTT, LoRaWAN, and now with Amazon Sidewalk.

In the AWS IoT Core console, you can test the Device Location service to resolve the location of your device by importing device payload data. Resource location is reported as a GeoJSON payload. To learn more, visit the AWS IoT Core Device Location in the AWS IoT Core Developer Guide.

Customers across multiple industries like automotive, supply chain, and industrial tools have requested a simplified solution such as the Device Location service to extract location-data from Sidewalk products. This would streamline customer software development and give them more options to choose the optimal location source, thereby improving their product.

Get started with a Device Location integration with Amazon Sidewalk
To enable Device Location for Sidewalk devices, go to the AWS IoT Core for Amazon Sidewalk section under LPWAN devices in the AWS IoT Core console. Choose Provision device or your existing device to edit the setting and select Activate positioning in the Geolocation option when creating and updating your Sidewalk devices.

While activating position, you need to specify a destination where you want to send your location data. The destination can either be an AWS IoT rule or an MQTT topic.

Here is a sample AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) command to enable position while provisioning a new Sidewalk device:

$ aws iotwireless createwireless device --type Sidewalk \
  --name "demo-1" --destination-name "New-1" \
  --positioning Enabled

After your Sidewalk device establishes a connection to the Amazon Sidewalk network, the device SDK will send the GNSS-, Wi-Fi- or BLE-based information to AWS IoT Core for Amazon Sidewalk. If the customer has enabled Positioning, then AWS IoT Core Device Location will resolve the location data and send the location data to the specified Destination. After your Sidewalk device transmits location measurement data, the resolved geographic coordinates and a map pin will also be displayed in the Position section for the selected device.

You will also get location information delivered to your destination in GeoJSON format, as shown in the following example:

{
    "coordinates": [
        13.376076698303223,
        52.51823043823242
    ],
    "type": "Point",
    "properties": {
        "verticalAccuracy": 45,
        "verticalConfidenceLevel": 0.68,
        "horizontalAccuracy": 303,
        "horizontalConfidenceLevel": 0.68,
        "country": "USA",
        "state": "CA",
        "city": "Sunnyvale",
        "postalCode": "91234",
        "timestamp": "2025-11-18T12:23:58.189Z"
    }
}

You can monitor the Device Location data between your Sidewalk devices and AWS Cloud by enabling Amazon CloudWatch Logs for AWS IoT Core. To learn more, visit the AWS IoT Core for Amazon Sidewalk in the AWS IoT Wireless Developer Guide.

Now available
AWS IoT Core Device Location integration with Amazon Sidewalk is now generally available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region. To learn more about use cases, documentation, sample codes, and partner devices, visit the AWS IoT Core for Amazon Sidewalk product page.

Give it a try in the AWS IoT Core console and send feedback to AWS re:Post for AWS IoT Core or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

Channy



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Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Introducing Our Final AWS Heroes of 2025

With AWS re:Invent approaching, we’re celebrating three exceptional AWS Heroes whose diverse journeys and commitment to knowledge sharing are empowering builders worldwide. From advancing women in tech and rural communities to bridging academic and industry expertise and pioneering enterprise AI solutions, these leaders exemplify the innovative spirit that drives our community forward. Their stories showcase how technical excellence, combined with passionate advocacy and mentorship, strengthens the global AWS community.

Dimple Vaghela – Ahmedabad, India

Community Hero Dimple Vaghela leads both the AWS User Group Ahmedabad and AWS User Group Vadodara, where she drives cloud education and technical growth across the region. Her impact spans organizing numerous AWS meetups, workshops, and AWS Community Days that have helped thousands of learners advance their cloud careers. Dimple launched the “Cloud for Her” project to empower girls from rural areas in technology careers and serves as co-organizer of the Women in Tech India User Group. Her exceptional leadership and community contributions were recognized at AWS re:Invent 2024 with the AWS User Group Leader Award in the Ownership category, while she continues building a more inclusive cloud community through speaking, mentoring, and organizing impactful tech events.

Rola Dali – Montreal, Canada

Community Hero Rola Dali is a senior Data, ML, and AI expert specializing in AWS cloud, bringing unique perspective from her PhD in neuroscience and bioinformatics with expertise in human genomics. As co-organizer of the AWS Montreal User Group and a former AWS Community Builder, her commitment to the cloud community earned her the prestigious Golden Jacket recognition in 2024. She actively shapes the tech community by architecting AWS solutions, sharing knowledge through blogs and lectures, and mentoring women entering tech, academics transitioning to industry, and students starting their careers.

Vivek Velso – Toronto, Canada

Machine Learning Hero Vivek Velso is a seasoned technology leader with over 27 years of IT industry experience, specializing in helping organizations modernize their cloud infrastructure for generative AI workloads. His deep AWS expertise earned him the prestigious Golden Jacket award for completing all AWS certifications, and he actively contributes to the AWS Subject Matter Expert (SME) program for multiple certification exams. A former AWS Community Builder and AWS Ambassador, he continues to share his knowledge through more than 100 technical blogs, articles, conference engagements, and AWS livestreams, helping the community confidently embrace cloud innovation.

Learn More

Visit the AWS Heroes webpage if you’d like to learn more about the AWS Heroes program, or to connect with a Hero near you.

Taylor



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Monday, November 10, 2025

Secure EKS clusters with the new support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup

Today, we’re announcing support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup to provide the capability to secure Kubernetes applications using the same centralized platform you trust for your other Amazon Web Services (AWS) services. This integration eliminates the complexity of protecting containerized applications while providing enterprise-grade backup capabilities for both cluster configurations and application data. AWS Backup is a fully managed service to centralize and automate data protection across AWS and on-premises workloads. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a fully managed Kubernetes service to manage availability and scalability of the Kubernetes clusters. With this new capability, you can centrally manage and automate data protection across your Amazon EKS environments alongside other AWS services.

Until now, for backups, customers relied on custom solutions or third-party tools to back up their EKS clusters, requiring complex scripting and maintenance for each cluster. The support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup eliminates this overhead by providing a single, centralized, and policy-driven solution that protects both EKS clusters (Kubernetes deployments and resources) and stateful data (stored in Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) only) without the need to manage custom scripts across clusters. For restores, customers were previously required to restore their EKS backups to a target EKS cluster which was either the source EKS cluster, or a new EKS cluster, requiring that an EKS cluster infrastructure is provisioned ahead of time prior to the restore. With this new capability, during a restore of EKS cluster backups, customers also have the option to create a new EKS cluster based on previous EKS cluster configuration settings and restore to this new EKS cluster, with AWS Backup managing the provisioning of the EKS cluster on the customer’s behalf.

This support includes policy-based automation for protecting single or multiple EKS clusters. This single data protection policy provides a consistent experience across all services AWS Backup supports. It allows creation of immutable backups to prevent malicious or inadvertent changes, helping customers meet their regulatory compliance needs. In case there is a customer data loss or cluster downtime event, customers can easily recover their EKS cluster data from encrypted, immutable backups using an easy-to-use interface and maintain business continuity of running their EKS clusters at scale.

How it works
Here’s how I set up support for on-demand backup of my EKS cluster in AWS Backup. First, I’ll show a walkthrough of the backup process, then demonstrate a restore of the EKS cluster.

Backup
In the AWS Backup console, in the left navigation pane, I choose Settings and then Configure resources to opt in to enable protection of EKS clusters in AWS Backup.

Now that I’ve enabled Amazon EKS, in Protected resources I choose Create on-demand backup to create a backup for my already existing EKS cluster floral-electro-unicorn.

Enabling EKS in Settings ensures that it shows up as a Resource type when I create on-demand backup for the EKS cluster. I proceed to select the EKS resource type and the cluster.

I leave the rest of the information as default, then select Choose an IAM role to select a role (test-eks-backup) that I’ve created and customized with the necessary permissions for AWS Backup to assume when creating and managing backups on my behalf. I choose Create on-demand backup to finalize the process.


The job is initiated, and it will start running to back up both the EKS cluster state and the persistent volumes. If Amazon S3 buckets are attached to the backup, you’ll need to add the additional Amazon S3 backup permissions AWSBackupServiceRolePolicyForS3Backup to your role. This policy contains the permissions necessary for AWS Backup to back up any Amazon S3 bucket, including access to all objects in a bucket and any associated AWS KMS key.


The job is completed successfully and now EKS clusterfloral-electro-unicorn is backed up by AWS Backup.


Restore
Using the AWS Backup Console, I choose the EKS backup composite recovery point to start the process of restoring the EKS cluster backups, then choose Restore.


I choose Restore full EKS cluster to restore the full EKS backup. To restore to an existing cluster, I Choose an existing cluster then select the cluster from the drop-down list. I choose the Default order as the order in which individual Kubernetes resources will be restored.

I then configure the restore for the persistent storage resources, that will be restored alongside my EKS clusters.


Next, I Choose an IAM role to execute the restore action. The Protected resource tags checkbox is selected by default and I’ll leave it as is, then choose Next.

I review all the information before I finalize the process by choosing Restore, to start the job.


Selecting the drop-down arrow gives details of the restore status for both the EKS cluster state and persistent volumes attached. In this walkthrough, all the individual recovery points are restored successfully. If portions of the backup fail, it’s possible to restore the successfully backed up persistent stores (for example, Amazon EBS volumes) and cluster configuration settings individually. However, it’s not possible to restore full EKS backup. The successfully backed up resources will be available for restore, listed as nested recovery points under the EKS cluster recovery point. If there’s a partial failure, there will be a notification of the portion(s) that failed.


Benefits
Here are some of the benefits provided by the support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup:

  • A fully managed multi-cluster backup experience, removing the overhead associated with managing custom scripts and third-party solutions.
  • Centralized, policy-based backup management that simplifies backup lifecycle management and makes it seamless to back up and recover your application data across AWS services, including EKS.
  • The ability to store and organize your backups with backup vaults. You assign policies to the backup vaults to grant access to users to create backup plans and on-demand backups but limit their ability to delete recovery points after they’re created.

Good to know
The following are some helpful facts to know:

  • Use either the AWS Backup Console, API, or AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to protect EKS clusters using AWS Backup. Alternatively, you can create an on-demand backup of the cluster after it has been created.
  • You can create secondary copies of your EKS backups across different accounts and AWS Regions to minimize risk of accidental deletion.
  • Restoration of EKS backups is available using the AWS Backup Console, API, or AWS CLI.
  • Restoring to an existing cluster will not override the Kubernetes versions, or any data as restores are non-destructive. Instead, there will be a restore of the delta between the backup and source resource.
  • Namespaces can only be restored to an existing cluster to ensure a successful restore as Kubernetes resources may be scoped at the cluster level.

Voice of the customer

Srikanth Rajan, Sr. Director of Engineering at Salesforce said “Losing a Kubernetes control plane because of software bugs or unintended cluster deletion can be catastrophic without a solid backup and restore plan. That’s why it’s exciting to see AWS rolling out the new EKS Backup and Restore feature, it’s a big step forward in closing a critical resiliency gap for Kubernetes platforms.”

Now available
Support for Amazon EKS in AWS Backup is available today in all AWS commercial Regions (except China) and in the AWS GovCloud (US) where AWS Backup and Amazon EKS are available. Check the full Region list for future updates.

To learn more, check out the AWS Backup product page and the AWS Backup pricing page.

Try out this capability for protecting your EKS clusters in AWS Backup and let us know what you think by sending feedback to AWS re:Post for AWS Backup or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

Veliswa.



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AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, and more (November 10, 2025)

AWS re:Invent 2025 is only 3 weeks away and I’m already looking forward to the new launches and announcements at the conference. Last year brought 60,000 attendees from across the globe to Las Vegas, Nevada, and the atmosphere was amazing. Registration is still open for AWS re:Invent 2025. We hope you’ll join us in Las Vegas December 1–5 for keynotes, breakout sessions, chalk talks, interactive learning opportunities, and networking with cloud practitioners from around the world.

AWS and OpenAI announced a multi-year strategic partnership that provides OpenAI with immediate access to AWS infrastructure for running advanced AI workloads. The $38 billion agreement spans 7 years and includes access to AWS compute resources comprising hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, with the ability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs for agentic workloads. The infrastructure deployment that AWS is building for OpenAI features a sophisticated architectural design optimized for maximum AI processing efficiency and performance. Clustering the NVIDIA GPUs—both GB200s and GB300s—using Amazon EC2 UltraServers on the same network enables low-latency performance across interconnected systems, allowing OpenAI to efficiently run workloads with optimal performance. The clusters are designed to support various workloads, from serving inference for ChatGPT to training next generation models, with the flexibility to adapt to OpenAI’s evolving needs.

AWS committed $1 million through its Generative AI Innovation Fund to digitize the Jane Goodall Institute’s 65 years of primate research archives. The project will transform handwritten field notes, film footage, and observational data on chimpanzees and baboons from analog to digital formats using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker. The digital transformation will employ multimodal large language models (LLMs) and embedding models to make the research archives searchable and accessible to scientists worldwide for the first time. AWS is collaborating with Ode to build the user experience, helping the Jane Goodall Institute adopt AI technologies to advance research and conservation efforts. I was deeply saddened when I heard that world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall had passed away. Learning that this project will preserve her life’s work and make it accessible to researchers around the world brought me comfort. It’s a fitting tribute to her remarkable legacy.

Transforming decades of research through cloud and AI. Dr. Jane Goodall and field staff observe Goblin at Gombe National Park, Tanzania. CREDIT: the Jane Goodall Institute

Last week’s launches
Let’s look at last week’s new announcements:

  • Amazon S3 now supports tags on S3 Tables – Amazon S3 now supports tags on S3 Tables for attribute-based access control (ABAC) and cost allocation. You can use tags for ABAC to automatically manage permissions for users and roles accessing table buckets and tables, eliminating frequent AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or S3 Tables resource-based policy updates and simplifying access governance at scale. Additionally, tags can be added to individual tables to track and organize AWS costs using AWS Billing and Cost Management.
  • Amazon EC2 R8a Memory-Optimized Instances now generally available – R8a instances feature 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (formerly code named Turin) with a maximum frequency of 4.5 GHz, and they deliver up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price-performance compared to R7a instances, with 45% more memory bandwidth. Built on the AWS Nitro System using sixth-generation Nitro Cards, these instances are designed for high-performance, memory-intensive workloads, including SQL and NoSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches, in-memory databases, real-time big data analytics, and electronic design automation (EDA) applications. R8a instances are SAP certified and offer 12 sizes, including two bare metal sizes.
  • EC2 Auto Scaling announces warm pool support for mixed instances policies – EC2 Auto Scaling groups now support warm pools for Auto Scaling groups configured with mixed instances policies. Warm pools create a pool of pre-initialized EC2 instances ready to quickly serve application traffic, improving application elasticity. The feature benefits applications with lengthy initialization processes, such as writing large amounts of data to disk or running complex custom scripts. By combining warm pools with instance type flexibility, Auto Scaling groups can rapidly scale out to maximum size while deploying applications across multiple instance types to enhance availability. The feature works with Auto Scaling groups configured for multiple On-Demand Instance types through manual instance type lists or attribute-based instance type selection.
  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime now supports direct code deployment – Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime now offers two deployment methods for AI agents: container-based deployment and direct code upload. You can choose between direct code–zip file upload for rapid prototyping and iteration or container-based options for complex use cases requiring custom configurations. AgentCore Runtime provides a serverless framework and model agnostic runtime for running agents and tools at scale. The direct code–zip upload feature includes drag-and-drop functionality, enabling faster iteration cycles for prototyping while maintaining enterprise security and scaling capabilities for production deployments.
  • AWS Capabilities by Region now available for Regional planning – AWS Capabilities by Region helps discover and compare AWS services, features, APIs, and AWS CloudFormation resources across Regions. This planning tool provides an interactive interface to explore service availability, compare multiple Regions side by side, and view forward-looking roadmap information. You can search for specific services or features, view API operations availability, verify CloudFormation resource type support, and check EC2 instance type availability including specialized instances. The tool displays availability states including Available, Planning, Not Expanding, and directional launch planning by quarter. The AWS Capabilities by Region data is also accessible through the AWS Knowledge MCP server, enabling automation of Region expansion planning and integration into development workflows and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

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

  • AWS re:Invent 2025 – Join us in Las Vegas December 1–5 as cloud pioneers gather from across the globe for the latest AWS innovations, peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities. Don’t forget to explore the event catalog.
  • AWS Builder Loft – A tech hub in San Francisco where builders share ideas, learn, and collaborate. The space offers industry expert sessions, hands-on workshops, and community events covering topics from AI to emerging technologies. Browse the upcoming sessions and join the events that interest you.
  • AWS Skills Center Seattle 4th Anniversary Celebration – A free, public event on November 20 with a keynote, learning panels, recruiter insights, raffles, and virtual participation options.

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, developer-focused events, and events for startups.

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

— Esra

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!



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Thursday, November 6, 2025

Introducing AWS Capabilities by Region for easier Regional planning and faster global deployments

At AWS, a common question we hear is: “Which AWS capabilities are available in different Regions?” It’s a critical question whether you’re planning Regional expansion, ensuring compliance with data residency requirements, or architecting for disaster recovery.

Today, I’m excited to introduce AWS Capabilities by Region, a new planning tool that helps you discover and compare AWS services, features, APIs, and AWS CloudFormation resources across Regions. You can explore service availability through an interactive interface, compare multiple Regions side-by-side, and view forward-looking roadmap information. This detailed visibility helps you make informed decisions about global deployments and avoid project delays and costly rework.

Getting started with Regional comparison
To get started, go to AWS Builder Center and choose AWS Capabilities and Start Exploring. When you select Services and features, you can choose the AWS Regions you’re most interested in from the dropdown list. You can use the search box to quickly find specific services or features. For example, I chose US (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Taipei) Regions to compare Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) features.

Now I can view the availability of services and features in my chosen Regions and also see when they’re expected to be released. Select Show only common features to identify capabilities consistently available across all selected Regions, ensuring you design with services you can use everywhere.

The result will indicate availability using the following states: Available (live in the region); Planning (evaluating launch strategy); Not Expanding (will not launch in region); and 2026 Q1 (directional launch planning for the specified quarter).

In addition to exploring services and features, AWS Capabilities by Region also helps you explore available APIs and CloudFormation resources. As an example, to explore API operations, I added Europe (Stockholm) and Middle East (UAE) Regions to compare Amazon DynamoDB features across different geographies. The tool lets you view and search the availability of API operations in each Region.

The CloudFormation resources tab helps you verify Regional support for specific resource types before writing your templates. You can search by Service, Type, Property, and Config.For instance, when planning an Amazon API Gateway deployment, you can check the availability of resource types like AWS::ApiGateway::Account.

You can also search detailed resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance type availability, including specialized instances such as Graviton-based, GPU-enabled, and memory-optimized variants. For example, I searched 7th generation compute-optimized metal instances and could find c7i.metal-24xl and c7i.metal-48xl instances are available across all targeted Regions.

Beyond the interactive interface, the AWS Capabilities by Region data is also accessible through the AWS Knowledge MCP Server. This allows you to automate Region expansion planning, generate AI-powered recommendations for Region and service selection, and integrate Regional capability checks directly into your development workflows and CI/CD pipelines.

Now available
You can begin exploring AWS Capabilities by Region in AWS Builder Center immediately. The Knowledge MCP server is also publicly accessible at no cost and does not require an AWS account. Usage is subject to rate limits. Follow the getting started guide for setup instructions.

We would love to hear your feedback, so please send us any suggestions through the Builder Support page.

Channy



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Monday, November 3, 2025

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Build more accurate AI applications with Amazon Nova Web Grounding

Imagine building AI applications that deliver accurate, current information without the complexity of developing intricate data retrieval systems. Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Web Grounding, a new built-in tool for Nova models on Amazon Bedrock.

Web Grounding provides developers with a turnkey Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) option that allows the Amazon Nova foundation models to intelligently decide when to retrieve and incorporate relevant up-to-date information based on the context of the prompt. This helps to ground the model output by incorporating cited public sources as context, aiming to reduce hallucinations and improve accuracy.

When should developers use Web Grounding?

Developers should consider using Web Grounding when building applications that require access to current, factual information or need to provide well-cited responses. The capability is particularly valuable across a range of applications, from knowledge-based chat assistants providing up-to-date information about products and services, to content generation tools requiring fact-checking and source verification. It’s also ideal for research assistants that need to synthesize information from multiple current sources, as well as customer support applications where accuracy and verifiability are crucial.

Web Grounding is especially useful when you need to reduce hallucinations in your AI applications or when your use case requires transparent source attribution. Because it automatically handles the retrieval and integration of information, it’s an efficient solution for developers who want to focus on building their applications rather than managing complex RAG implementations.

Getting started
Web Grounding seamlessly integrates with supported Amazon Nova models to handle information retrieval and processing during inference. This eliminates the need to build and maintain complex RAG pipelines, while also providing source attributions that verify the origin of information.

Let’s see an example of asking a question to Nova Premier using Python to call the Amazon Bedrock Converse API with Web Grounding enabled.

First, I created an Amazon Bedrock client using AWS SDK for Python (Boto3) in the usual way. For good practice, I’m using a session, which helps to group configurations and make them reusable. I then create a BedrockRuntimeClient.

try:
    session = boto3.Session(region_name='us-east-1')
    client = session.client(
        'bedrock-runtime')

I then prepare the Amazon Bedrock Converse API payload. It includes a “role” parameter set to “user”, indicating that the message comes from our application’s user (compared to “assistant” for AI-generated responses).

For this demo, I chose the question “What are the current AWS Regions and their locations?” This was selected intentionally because it requires current information, making it useful to demonstrate how Amazon Nova can automatically invoke searches using Web Grounding when it determines that up-to-date knowledge is needed.

# Prepare the conversation in the format expected by Bedrock
question = "What are the current AWS regions and their locations?"
conversation = [
   {
     "role": "user",  # Indicates this message is from the user
     "content": [{"text": question}],  # The actual question text
      }
    ]

First, let’s see what the output is without Web Grounding. I make a call to Amazon Bedrock Converse API.

# Make the API call to Bedrock 
model_id = "us.amazon.nova-premier-v1:0" 
response = client.converse( 
    modelId=model_id, # Which AI model to use 
    messages=conversation, # The conversation history (just our question in this case) 
    )
print(response['output']['message']['content'][0]['text'])

I get a list of all the current AWS Regions and their locations.

Now let’s use Web Grounding. I make a similar call to the Amazon Bedrock Converse API, but declare nova_grounding as one of the tools available to the model.

model_id = "us.amazon.nova-premier-v1:0" 
response = client.converse( 
    modelId=model_id, 
    messages=conversation, 
    toolConfig= {
          "tools":[ 
              {
                "systemTool": {
                   "name": "nova_grounding" # Enables the model to search real-time information
                 }
              }
          ]
     }
)

After processing the response, I can see that the model used Web Grounding to access up-to-date information. The output includes reasoning traces that I can use to follow its thought process and see where it automatically queried external sources. The content of the responses from these external calls appear as [HIDDEN] – a standard practice in AI systems that both protects sensitive information and helps manage output size.

Additionally, the output also includes citationsContent objects containing information about the sources queried by Web Grounding.

Finally, I can see the list of AWS Regions. It finishes with a message right at the end stating that “These are the most current and active AWS regions globally.”

Web Grounding represents a significant step forward in making AI applications more reliable and current with minimum effort. Whether you’re building customer service chat assistants that need to provide up-to-date accurate information, developing research applications that analyze and synthesize information from multiple sources, or creating travel applications that deliver the latest details about destinations and accommodations, Web Grounding can help you deliver more accurate and relevant responses to your users with a convenient turnkey solution that is straightforward to configure and use.

Things to know
Amazon Nova Web Grounding is available today in US East (N. Virginia). Web Grounding will also soon launch on US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon).

Web Grounding incurs additional cost. Refer to the Amazon Bedrock pricing page for more details.

Currently, you can only use Web Grounding with Nova Premier but support for other Nova models will be added soon.

If you haven’t used Amazon Nova before or are looking to go deeper, try this self-paced online workshop where you can learn how to effectively use Amazon Nova foundation models and related features for text, image, and video processing through hands-on exercises.

Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus

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