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At the end of 2025, I was happy to take a long break to enjoy the incredible summers that the southern hemisphere has to offer. I’m back writing my first post in 2026, which is also my last post for the AWS News blog (more on that later).
The AWS community is starting the year strong with various AWS re:invent re:Caps held around the world, with some communities already holding their AWS Community Day events, AWS Community Day Tel Aviv 2026 was held last week.
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Last week’s launch
Here’s the news from last week that caught my eye:
- Latest Kiro CLI Features – Kiro CLI now has detailed controls for web loading URLs, keyboard shortcuts for your own agents, improved diff views and much more. With these improvements, you can now use whitelists or blacklists to restrict which URLs an agent can access, ensuring a seamless experience when working with multiple specialized agents in a single session, to name a few.
- AWS European Sovereign Cloud – After announcing plans to build a new independent cloud infrastructure in 2023, last week we announced the general availability of AWS European Sovereign Cloud to all customers. The cloud is ready to meet the most stringent sovereignty requirements of European customers with a comprehensive set of AWS services.
- Amazon EC2 X8i Instances – Last week we announced the general availability of new memory-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) X8i instances. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors with a sustained 3.9GHz all-core turbo frequency only available on AWS. These certified SAP instances provide the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.
Another update
These projects, blog posts and news articles also caught my attention:
- 5 Essential Features in Amazon Quick Suite – AWS VP Agentic AI Swami Sivasubramanian talks about how he uses Amazon Quick Suite for almost everything. In October 2025, we announced Amazon Quick Suite, a new agent on the team that quickly answers your questions at work and turns insights into action for you. Amazon Quick Suite has become one of my favorite productivity tools, it helps me with my research on different topics and also gives me different perspectives on the topic.
- Deploy AI agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore with GitHub Actions – Last year we announced Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a flexible service that helps you seamlessly build and manage AI agents across different frameworks and models, whether hosted on Amazon Bedrock or in other environments. Learn how to use the GitHub Actions workflow to automate the deployment of AI agents on the AgentCore Runtime. This approach delivers a scalable solution with enterprise-grade security controls that provides full continuous integration and automation of delivery (CI/CD).
Upcoming AWS events
Join us on January 28th or 29th (depending on your time zone) for Best of AWS re:Invent, a free virtual event where we bring you the most impactful announcements and best sessions from AWS re:Invent. Jeff Barr, AWS Vice President and Chief Evangelist, will share his highlights during the opening session.
There’s still time until January 21 to compete for $250,000 in prizes and AWS credits in the Global 10,000 AIdeas Competition (yes, the second letter is I as in Idea, not L as in similar). No code needed yet: simply submit your idea, and if you’re selected as a semi-finalist, you’ll build your app with Kiro within the AWS Free Tier limits. In addition to cash prizes and a potential starring role at AWS re:Invent 2026, you’ll gain hands-on experience with next-generation AI tools and connect with innovators around the world.
Earlier this month, the 2026 application for the Community Builders program launched. The application is open until January 21st, midnight PST, so this is your last chance not to miss out.
If these opportunities interest you, join the AWS Builder Center and learn with builders in the AWS community.
This concludes one of my most meaningful chapters here at AWS. It was an absolute pleasure to write for you and thank you for taking the time to read the work that my team and I put our absolute hearts into. I have grown from working closely with the launch teams and the feedback from all of you. The Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) community has grown significantly and I want to devote more time to this community, I am still at AWS and look forward to meeting you at an event!
Check back next Monday for another weekly recap!
– Veliswa Boya