The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit 2025 season has officially kicked off this week, beginning with the Paris Summit. These events are designed to bring together the global cloud computing community for a series of free gatherings focused on education and collaboration. One notable highlight was the AWS Community Day in Romania, which took place on April 11th. This event underscored the importance of local community engagement in fostering opportunities for collective growth and inclusion.
Last Week’s Launches
Announcing Up to 85% Price Reductions for Amazon S3 Express One Zone
Amazon Web Services has announced significant price reductions for its S3 Express One Zone, a high-performance storage class. These adjustments include a 31% reduction in storage prices, a 55% decrease in PUT request prices, and an impressive 85% reduction in GET request prices. Furthermore, the per-gigabyte charges for data uploads and retrievals have been slashed by 60%. This new pricing structure applies to all bytes transferred, not just those exceeding 512 kilobytes. Below is a summary of the price changes for the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region:
– Storage (per GB-Month): Previous – $0.16, New – $0.11, Reduction – 31%
– Writes (PUT requests): Previous – $0.0025 per 1,000 requests, New – $0.00113 per 1,000 requests, Reduction – 55%
– Reads (GET requests): Previous – $0.0002 per 1,000 requests, New – $0.00003 per 1,000 requests, Reduction – 85%
– Data Upload (per GB): Previous – $0.008, New – $0.0032, Reduction – 60%
– Data Retrievals (per GB): Previous – $0.0015, New – $0.0006, Reduction – 60%
AWS Announces Pixtral Large 25.02 Model in Amazon Bedrock Serverless
The Pixtral Large 25.02 model, developed by Mistral AI, is now available on the Amazon Bedrock serverless platform. This model integrates advanced vision and language comprehension, featuring a 128K context window and multilingual capabilities. Designed with an agent-centric approach, it simplifies integration with existing systems. By adhering to prompts, the model enhances reliability in applications involving retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and large context scenarios.
Introducing Amazon Nova Sonic: Human-like Voice Conversations for Generative AI Applications
Amazon Nova Sonic, the latest member of the Amazon Nova family of foundation models, is now accessible through Amazon Bedrock. This model facilitates the creation of human-like voice interactions for applications by unifying speech and text processing into a single model. This innovation reduces complexity and enhances natural interactions. Developers can get started with the Amazon Nova model cookbook repository.
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails Enhances Generative AI Application Safety with New Capabilities
Amazon Bedrock Guardrails now offers new features aimed at improving the safety of generative AI applications. These enhancements include multimodal toxicity detection, improved protection for personally identifiable information (PII), enforcement of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, selective application of guardrails, and a monitor mode for pre-deployment analysis.
AWS App Studio Introduces a Prebuilt Solutions Catalog and Cross-Instance Import and Export
AWS App Studio now offers a prebuilt solutions catalog with ready-to-use applications and patterns, alongside cross-instance import and export functionality. These features streamline the development process, reducing setup time to less than 15 minutes.
Amazon Nova Reel 1.1: Featuring Up to 2-Minutes Multi-Shot Videos
Amazon Nova Reel 1.1 enhances video generation through Amazon Bedrock by supporting two-minute multi-shot videos. Users can create content using single prompts for automatic generation or custom prompts for individual shots, providing flexible options for marketing and social media content creation.
AWS IAM Identity Center Now Offers Improved Error Messages and AWS CloudTrail Logging for Provisioning Issues
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Identity Center has been upgraded with enhanced error messages and AWS CloudTrail logging capabilities. These improvements aid users in troubleshooting synchronization issues when managing workforce identities across AWS accounts and applications, while also enabling automated monitoring and auditing of provisioning problems.
AWS WAF Console Adds New Top Insights Visualizations in Additional Regions
The AWS WAF Console now includes enhanced traffic visualization features in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The all-traffic dashboard provides new top insights based on Amazon CloudWatch logs, assisting customers in analyzing traffic patterns, identifying security threats, and optimizing WAF configurations through detailed metrics.
AWS Step Functions Expands Data Source and Output Options for Distributed Map
AWS Step Functions has expanded the functionality of Distributed Map by adding support for additional data sources, including JSONL and various delimited file formats from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The update also introduces new output transformation options, enabling more flexible parallel processing workflows and improved integration with downstream systems.
Amazon CloudWatch Now Provides Lock Contention Diagnostics for Aurora PostgreSQL
Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now offers lock contention diagnostics for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in Advanced mode. This feature visualizes blocking and waiting sessions, helping users identify the root causes of lock contention issues. It includes 15-month historical data retention for comprehensive troubleshooting.
For further updates on AWS announcements, visit the What’s New with AWS? page.
Other AWS Blog Posts
Reduce ML Training Costs with Amazon SageMaker HyperPod
Amazon SageMaker HyperPod addresses hardware failures during large-scale Machine Learning (ML) model training by automatically detecting and replacing faulty instances. This solution has the potential to reduce downtime from 280 to 40 minutes per failure, resulting in a 32% reduction in training time for large clusters. For a 10-million GPU-hour training job, this translates to $25.6 million in cost savings.
Model Customization, RAG, or Both: A Case Study with Amazon Nova
A study comparing model customization with fine-tuning and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches using Amazon Nova models revealed key insights. Combining both methods yields the best results: RAG is effective for dynamic data and domain insights, while fine-tuning excels in specialized tasks and latency reduction.
Generate User-Personalized Communication with Amazon Personalize and Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Personalize and Amazon Bedrock collaborate to create personalized marketing emails. Learn how to combine Amazon Personalize for movie recommendations with Amazon Bedrock to generate tailored email content based on user preferences and demographics.
Implement Human-in-the-Loop Confirmation with Amazon Bedrock Agents
When implementing human validation in Amazon Bedrock Agents, developers have two primary frameworks to choose from: user confirmation and return of control (ROC). Using an HR application example, user confirmation allows for simple yes/no validation before executing actions, while ROC enables users to modify parameters before execution.
Multi-LLM Routing Strategies for Generative AI Applications on AWS
Learn how to implement multi-Large Language Model (LLM) routing strategies for AWS generative AI applications using static routing, dynamic routing with Amazon Bedrock, or custom solutions for optimal model selection and cost efficiency.
Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these upcoming AWS events:
AWS GenAI Lofts
GenAI Lofts, available globally, offer collaborative spaces and immersive experiences for startups and developers. You can join in-person GenAI Loft San Francisco events such as GenAI in EdTech: A Hands-On Workshop (April 15) and the Unstructured Data Meetup SF (April 16). Find your nearest event at GenAI Lofts.
AWS Summits
Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together for connection, collaboration, and learning about AWS. Register for events in your nearest city: Amsterdam (April 16), London (April 30), and Poland (May 5).
AWS re:Inforce
AWS re:Inforce, scheduled for June 16–18 in Philadelphia, PA, is an annual learning event focused on AWS cloud security. Registration is open, and more than 5,000 security builders and leaders are expected to attend.
AWS Community Days
Join community-led conferences featuring technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs driven by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are scheduled for April 19 in Turkey and April 29 in Prague, with Jeff Barr as the opening keynote speaker.
Browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.
Create your AWS Builder ID and reserve your alias. The Builder ID is a universal login credential that provides access, beyond the AWS Management Console, to AWS tools and resources, including over 600 free training courses, community features, and developer tools such as Amazon Q Developer.
That concludes this week’s updates. Stay tuned for the next Weekly Roundup!
For more information, visit the AWS website.
Thank you to Andra Somesan for the AWS Community Romania photo and Thembile Martis for the AWS Paris Summit photo.
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a summary of interesting news and announcements from AWS!
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