Last week, I had the privilege of spending three days in São Paulo with technical builders from across Latin America at a regional tech event brimming with deep-dive sessions, hands-on workshops, and conversations with customers and partners. What stood out wasn’t any single session—it was the palpable energy of a tech community that rarely gets to gather in person. Over coffee, people swapped architecture ideas and sketched solutions on whiteboards, leaving with a longer list of experiments to try than when they arrived. It’s a powerful reminder: as important as the tools we build are, it’s the community around them that truly makes technology stick.
That same community spirit ties directly into this week’s biggest infrastructure story, which revolves around bringing AWS closer to where builders actually live and work.
Now, let’s dive into this week’s AWS news.
Headlines
AWS Local Zone in Athens, Greece: AWS has launched a new Local Zone in Athens, Greece—the second Local Zone in EMEA to support Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots. This allows you to store and process data within Greece, helping you meet local data residency requirements. The Athens Local Zone supports Amazon EC2 (C7i, M7i, and R7i instances), Amazon S3 with the One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class, Amazon EBS, Amazon ECS, and more.
With this launch, you can process and store data in-country while delivering single-digit millisecond latency to your end users. AWS Local Zones place infrastructure closer to major population and industry centers, supporting workloads like financial services, healthcare, media production, and real-time gaming. For builders in Greece, this means you can run latency-sensitive workloads locally and comply with in-country data residency rules—without managing your own data center. For more details, check out the AWS Global Infrastructure and Sustainability Blog post.
Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:
Claude Opus 5 on AWS: Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5, their most advanced Opus model to date, is now available. It matches the top-tier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 in many domains, at Opus-tier pricing. When you use Claude Opus 5 through Amazon Bedrock, zero data retention (ZDR) is enabled by default, giving you that high-level intelligence while meeting data governance requirements—something Claude Fable 5 doesn’t offer. You can access Claude Opus 5 via Amazon Bedrock or the Claude Platform on AWS. Learn more in the deep-dive blog post.
AWS Lambda durable execution SDK for .NET is now generally available: Build resilient, long-running workflows in C# using Lambda durable functions, without writing custom progress tracking or integrating an external orchestration service. This SDK automatically checkpoints progress and can pause execution for up to a year—a natural fit for multi-step applications like payment processing pipelines, AI agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop approvals. If you’re a .NET developer crafting serverless workflows, this eliminates a great deal of the plumbing you used to code manually.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now delivers unified observability with traces and logs in a single log group: Agent traces and prompts now land in the same Amazon CloudWatch log group as your agent’s logs. Previously, telemetry was scattered across different destinations—trace spans went to a shared log group, while prompts, inputs, and outputs were stored separately, forcing you to search multiple places when debugging a single invocation. Now you can debug an invocation in one place, and apply fine-grained access control and customer-managed key (CMK) encryption at the individual agent level.
Amazon Connect delivers more natural agentic voice experiences: Amazon Connect now supports more natural, human-like agentic voice experiences across over 50 languages—including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Thai—with more than 100 new voice options and conversational enhancements that make AI interactions sound more fluid. Its agentic self-service enables AI agents to understand, reason, and act across voice and digital channels, adapting to a customer’s tone and sentiment. Now you can build contact center experiences that feel natural to callers in many more of the languages your customers actually speak.
Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports Amazon OpenSearch: You can now query and analyze search and log analytics data from Amazon OpenSearch directly alongside other data assets within Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio. This connection lets you combine operational search data in OpenSearch with information from Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and relational databases—all within a single, governed environment. It’s especially useful when you need to correlate analytical and operational workloads, for example joining application logs with transactional data to uncover insights.
Amazon CloudWatch announces coding agent insights: Engineering leaders now have visibility into how AI coding tools deliver value across their organization. This feature integrates with the Claude apps gateway for AWS to collect telemetry from Claude Code with no extra instrumentation, and it also supports other coding agents like Codex and GitHub Copilot. As you scale AI coding adoption, you can measure your return on investment using metrics built on OpenTelemetry—no custom instrumentation required.
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:
Evaluating AI Agents: A production blueprint with Strands and AgentCore: This practical guide walks you through evaluating AI agents both before and after they go into production, using Strands Agents and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. If you’re moving agents from prototype to production, this post pairs well with the AgentCore observability update above—it shows you how to measure agent quality systematically, rather than relying on gut instinct.
Building multi-region resiliency for AWS CloudFormation custom resource deployment: Discover how to design CloudFormation custom resources for multi-region resiliency, ensuring your infrastructure-as-code deployments remain reliable even when an individual Region experiences problems.
Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) pricing plans: Amazon SES now offers pricing plans that make your costs more predictable as your email volume increases. If you send emails at scale, this could significantly simplify your billing.
Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:
AWS Summits: AWS Summits are free events that unite the cloud and AI community 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: These community-led conferences feature content planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. If you’re in Latin America, don’t miss AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte on August 22—registration is open at awscommunityday.com.br.
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.
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!
Daniel Abib is a senior specialist solutions architect at AWS, focused on generative AI and Amazon Bedrock—and passionate about serverless. He helps startups and enterprises build AI-powered applications and modernize with cloud-native architectures. A three-time Ironman finisher and four-time re:Invent speaker, he brings the same endurance mindset to building cloud solutions.
