Last week, my team made a trip to Seoul to connect with the leaders of the AWS Korea User Group (AWSKRUG). As the largest cloud developer community in Korea, AWSKRUG runs 20 meetup groups organized by both topic and region, putting on over 100 events a year, mostly in the Seoul area. My team regularly visits countries across the Asia-Pacific region to gather feedback from user group leaders and find ways to support their communities. During this meeting, the leaders openly discussed what went well in the first half of the year, areas that need improvement, and what they’d like to see from the AWS Developer Experience team. We also shared a great conversation over some Chimaek (Korean fried chicken and beer) together.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the key launches from last week.
The launch that really grabbed my attention last week was the one-click Lambda setup prompt for coding agents. With a single click, it equips your agent with AWS Serverless skills and the Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, baking in serverless best practices right from the start. The prompt pulls from the Lambda agent setup guide, which contains installation commands for popular tools like Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Devin Desktop, and OpenCode. To try it out, just hit the Copy agent prompt button on the Lambda console or grab the URL directly with fetch https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/samples/aws-lambda-agent-setup.md, then paste it into your preferred AI agent.
You can also leverage the Agent Toolkit for AWS to provide your coding agent with up-to-date AWS know-how and secure resource access. Simply use fetch https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws/refs/heads/main/setup-instructions/setup.md to install the AWS MCP Server.
Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that caught my attention:
- OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna on Amazon Bedrock: You can now use OpenAI’s smartest model family yet on Bedrock’s next-generation inference engine, built for high performance, security, and reliability. The three models span capability tiers from flagship reasoning (Sol) to balanced performance (Terra) to fast, cost-efficient inference (Luna), all accessible through the Responses API on Amazon Bedrock.
- Same-day transitions to Amazon S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA: You can now transition objects to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA) and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (S3 One Zone-IA) as soon as the day they are created, without the previous 30-day minimum retention period in S3 Standard. These storage classes offer up to 40% lower storage costs than S3 Standard while still providing millisecond access when needed, making them ideal for backups, log analytics, and compliance workloads where data becomes cold within hours or days.
- Self-managed code storage on AWS Lambda: With self-managed Amazon S3 buckets for code storage, you can reference source code directly from your own S3 buckets without Lambda creating intermediate copies. This eliminates code storage limits and reduces function activation time after function creates and updates by removing the copy step.
- Importing users with password hashes on Amazon Cognito: You can now import users with password hashes in CSV user imports. Previously, imported users had to reset their passwords on first sign-in. Now, you can include password hashes in the CSV import, enabling users to sign in immediately with their existing credentials. When creating a CSV import, you specify the password hashing algorithm used by your source system.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.
Additional updates
Here are some additional news items that you might find interesting:
- Amazon SQS turns 20: Two decades of reliable messaging at scale — When Amazon SQS launched publicly in July 2006, it made the decoupling pattern available to every AWS customer. Twenty years later, that core function, separating producers from consumers, remains the reason customers use SQS. Check out the milestone highlights since Jeff’s 15th anniversary post.
- Open Protocols with the Strands Agents SDK: Learn how open AI protocols such as MCP, A2A, UTCP, AG-UI, and x402 work together using the Strands Agents SDK as an example implementation, though the patterns apply to any agent framework.
- Open source Bulk Executor for Amazon DynamoDB: Performing bulk operations against all items in a DynamoDB table has historically required custom coding. The Bulk Executor for DynamoDB simplifies bulk tasks like these. You can use this feature to invoke commands like count, find, delete, or update. No coding is required, even when running at large scale.
- Transform AWS Support Case Workflows with Kiro CLI: Explore how Kiro CLI’s MCP integration accelerates support case workflows by combining investigation, documentation lookup, and case creation into a single conversational interface across three real-world scenarios: AWS Glue job failures, AWS Lambda cold start investigation, and AWS WAF false positive analysis.
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 including AWS Summits. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.
Finally, some customers experienced an issue with Cost Explorer displaying inaccurate estimated billing data over the past weekend. They may have received erroneous budget and cost anomaly detection alerts, and observed inflated estimated cost and usage data. The issue has been resolved, and all AWS services are operating normally. We apologize for the concern this incident caused our customers and are conducting a thorough retrospective to prevent events like this from reoccurring, as well as improving our response when billing incidents occur. For more information, visit the AWS Health Dashboard.
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
— Channy
