Good Morning!
I’m keynoting AWS Community Day Midwest this Wednesday. If you’re near Indianapolis come by. If you’d like to attend but the $25 ticket is too steep, I got you; hit reply and there’ll be one waiting for you at pickup.
And next week, I’ll be back in San Francisco (yes, I live here, not sure why that always catches people by surprise) for the AI Engineer World’s Fair; that link gets you 30% off. Come heckle me!
Things I Found on the Internet
An AI agent spun up redundant AWS instances to scan a hobbyist network, racked up a $6,531 AWS bill, and left its operator soliciting donations. The play-by-play of the DN42 community gaslighting the agent and deploying LLM tarpits is great. Cautionary tale, comedy, and egress math all at once.
Charity Majors makes the point that everyone hand-waving about “AI writes the code now” keeps missing: the validation, review, and harness work gets harder, not easier. Her case for more discipline draws the parallel to the pets-to-cattle immutable infrastructure shift, which lands if you lived through that one. A moment of silence for those who did not.
Watching the two-pizza team get reorganized around agents is the sort of internal upheaval Amazon rarely lets outsiders see. GeekWire got detail on how AI is reshaping Amazon’s traditions, and the bit about which sacred cows are quietly being slaughtered makes it worth the read.
Microsoft owns Azure, owns GitHub, and is quietly renting AWS to keep GitHub upright after agentic coding pushed commits from 1 billion to a projected 14 billion this year. The capacity crunch is so real that Redmond is paying its archrival for breathing room. Compute scarcity makes strange bedfellows.
I wrote about Quick Desktop, Amazon’s desktop AI assistant, which survived seven identity providers and a half-gigabyte install to become something I grudgingly stopped hating. The auth flow is a flaming hedge maze and the connectors can’t see half my professional life. And yet… it actually works.
Tobias Mann said it, and even quoted me doing the same: slapping “agentic” on a Neoverse V3 doesn’t make it an AI chip. The case against agentic CPUs walks through why Vera, Graviton 5, and Arm’s “AGI CPU” all look different. Because there’s no single right answer.
What AWS Has For Us This Time
AWS Marketplace announces AI-assisted product listing
An AI now writes your Marketplace listing by scraping your own website, which raises the question of why you needed humans for it before. The “quality score” judges how well your robot-generated copy pleases AWS’s discovery algorithm. Machines marketing to buyers who’ll send other machines to read it; what a slopportunity!
Amazon CloudWatch introduces Log Analytics for unified log analysis
Logs Insights, Live Tail, and Contributor Insights should have been one thing, and this is finally getting there. Someday they’ll discover the miracle of unifying the pricing as well—then we’ll be cooking with gas.
Amazon EKS now supports customer-routed control plane egress
Compliance teams have spent years begging EKS to route control plane traffic through their own VPC, and now they can, at no additional cost. The catch arrives later, when that traffic crosses a NAT Gateway and you discover what “no additional cost” actually means for your bill and the NAT Gateway product owner’s growing yacht fleet.
Free Network Bandwidth Amazon GameLift Servers is Here!
I did not editorialize this title’s enthusiasm in any way. Free egress bandwidth, the thing AWS guards like the last lifeboat on the Titanic, has been handed over for game servers without enrollment or commitment. Either someone in pricing got fired, or competitors offering bare-metal multiplayer hosting got AWS’s attention. My money’s on the latter. Enjoy it before someone notices.
“Removing the need to learn infrastructure tools,” says the company whose business model is selling infrastructure tools and has actively resisted building precisely this flavor of tool for two decades. The pitch is solid until you hit the part where it deploys to “production AWS services” and then, SURPRISE! Your bill discovers a new hobby. Free framework, leading to an expensive habit. Drop into CDK when the abstraction inevitably betrays you.
AWS Compute Optimizer enhances EBS volume recommendations with additional performance metrics
A tool that recommends rightsizing EBS now notices when your volume is choking on IOPS spikes. I can’t wait for the AWS Solutions Team to write a blog post about how to do this with 14 steps, 7 services, 6 python scripts, and a state machine.
Introducing AWS Continuum for security at machine speed
That’s a lot of vowels a frugal company bought for the name, but nevertheless! The temptation for Anthropic to be petty and call the White House about this must be overwhelming.
AWS Management Console Private Access now works without internet connectivity
“Private Access” that required internet connectivity was always my favorite oxymoron, right up there with jumbo shrimp and Microsoft Works. Now it actually works air-gapped, which the defense folks have wanted since roughly the Reagan administration. You pay only for PrivateLink endpoints and data processing, so “private” still has a per-gigabyte price tag attached.
AWS Security Agent announces support for Threat Modeling
An AI now tells you all the ways your architecture might get owned, which is handy since the same vendor designed half of it. Free during preview, naturally, so enjoy the anxiety while it lasts. Threat number seven: the pricing page.
Grok 4.3 from xAI now available in Amazon Bedrock
This is terrific news, as long as your company’s business challenges are best solved via revenge porn. For the rest of us, it’s pretty clear this is AWS cozying up to SpaceX for future corpdev purposes.
Amazon Aurora and RDS for MySQL expand Extended Support for MySQL 5.7 through June 2029
MySQL 5.7 hit end-of-life back in 2023, yet here we are, paying Year 3 ransom pricing for “critical bug fixes” through 2029. No price hike this time, which means they’re confident you’ll never actually upgrade. They’re right. You won’t. See you in 2029 for the next extension.
AWS Marketplace reduces listing fee for professional services to 0.5%
Drops from 2.5%. Note the fine print: existing offers stay at the old rate. So partners get the discount only on new deals, because nostalgia apparently costs five times more.
S3 Vectors: More Results, Cheaper Queries, Fresh Fees
S3 Vectors now also supports larger queries against larger indexes, with pricing adjustments to match. You’re probably thinking I’m about to say the thing I was in fact originally going to to say—but! The S3 Vectors team reached out to me proactively as this issue was going to press to talk me through this. This is not a price hike for existing usage patterns. It’s a capability expansion, plus S3 Vectors is computationally intensive; combine the two and there was a missing pricing dimension. I appreciate their dedication to not surprising customers with fees, caring about the perception of the cost of their services, and ability to predict exactly what I was going to make fun of before I did it. Gold star for them!
Amazon S3 annotations: attach rich, queryable context directly to your objects
S3 gets an object store in the object store, and now you can bolt a full gigabyte of “context” onto each object, because the four existing metadata mechanisms weren’t confusing enough. Every announcement these days whispers from behind you “agentic workflows,” which is Seattle for “your AI will generate the data, then pay Athena to read it back.” Vertical integration is great, but now it’s on your own bill.
Announcing Amazon EC2 G7 instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs
A new instance type with seven sizes, four operating systems, and exactly two regions to run it in. Ohio and Oregon get the Blackwell GPUs; is that a “big O notation?” Everyone else gets a CloudFormation tab and the promise of “future regional expansion.”
So we’ve reached the part of the AI boom where AWS sells you a robot to review the code your other robots wrote, because the humans drowned in pull requests around March. An agent babysitting agents. Bill the machines, I guess. The pricing’s in preview, which means “we’ll surprise you later.”
A toll booth for robots, settled in stablecoins to your crypto wallet, because nothing screams “trusted publisher revenue stream” like Coinbase facilitating your microtransactions. Configuring it only requires Bot Control, a protection pack, and surrendering to the phrase “Machine Payments Protocol.” Welcome to 2026.
Simulating Amazon EC2 EBS burst credits before downsizing an instance
No. NO. How the hell did this get all the way through the AWS publication process without someone with half a clue mentioning that the free AWS Compute Optimizer has a burst credit simulation engine embedded in it?! Sure, go ahead and connect this monstrosity together out of lego parts and bricks over the course of an afternoon, or you could just CLICK THE GODDAMNED BUTTON that AWS already provides, to you, for free.
AWS Security Bulletin Quartet: AI Tools Forget Unix 101 – Four bulletins in one omnibus, and the headliner is a heap double-free born from AI tools fumbling memory management that humans learned in their first Unix class. The recommended workaround? Force HTTP/1.1, the protocol we spent a decade being told to abandon. Progress marches backward, billed by the gigabyte.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
