Amazon Web Services (AWS) started with a handful of foundational infrastructure services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), so that anyone with an idea could start building. As the world’s largest companies and governments adopted AWS, they asked for features to optimize their configuration for a range of global business contexts, security requirements, and operational needs. To meet these needs, AWS expanded globally through new Regions and added breadth and depth of services in security, networking, governance, and cost controls, so those customers could operate wherever they needed and at the scale they require. That combination of global reach, breadth, and depth remains essential for those customers, but if you are at the start of a new idea, every configuration option is effort standing in the way of shipping your dream product fast.

Today, we’re announcing a new simplified experience on AWS for builders who are working at the pace of AI. Instead of having to complete configuration tasks before you can work on your project, you start with sensible defaults and simple administration. You sign up using an existing identity from providers including Google, GitHub, and Apple. For most new customers, no credit card is required to start and you receive $100 in free credits as part of the AWS Free Tier. You can build immediately in your first project. As you continue to work, you can invite collaborators with just an email address, without learning about AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or AWS IAM Identity Center. When your project grows beyond the free credits, you can set a spend limit so you stay within your budget on the paid plan. If you grow to need additional customization, you can activate advanced AWS features to access the full breadth and depth of AWS without migrating.

How it works
When you sign up, AWS organizes your work in a project. A project contains an AWS account, where you create resources, and settings for sharing with team members. AWS creates that structure for you and applies additional security controls so you can start building your idea. After signing in, you get a prompt to paste into your coding agent that configures it to work with your new AWS environment. From there, your agent can deploy resources, run workloads, and iterate on your application following best practices for working with AWS.

You can create another project with a click. When you want to work with an additional team member, you send an invitation to their email address. Identity permissions are handled for you, so there are no IAM users to create; each person you invite only gets access to the projects you specify. Console workflows and coding agents also configure permissions between supported services and resources automatically, so you do not have to set up or troubleshoot resource permissions by hand.

When you’re ready to move beyond free credits, you can upgrade to a paid plan by entering your payment method. You can set a monthly spend limit on a project based on your usage trends, starting at $20 per month. The spend limit is the ceiling for that project’s costs, and you pay for what you actually use up to that amount. For example, if you set a $50 spend limit and your project incurs $32 in charges that month, you pay $32 (plus taxes). AWS will suggest a spend limit based on your usage, and you can accept that recommendation or set a custom amount if you are planning to further scale your usage. If your project approaches the limit, you first receive notifications. If spend reaches the limit, AWS pauses your project rather than accumulating charges, and you can resume working on it when you raise the limit. Each project has its own spend limit so you can give a larger budget to a workload that is gaining traction while keeping a smaller budget on an experimental idea.

Let’s try it out
To get started, I went to aws.amazon.com and chose Create account. I signed in with my Google account and within seconds had a new project ready to go, as shown in the following screenshot.

The Sign up for AWS page, with options to continue with email or sign in using Google, GitHub, Apple, or Amazon.

The first thing I saw was a prompt to configure my coding agent. I copied the prompt and pasted it into my agent. The agent set up the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and the Agent Toolkit for AWS, logged me into AWS, and created a CLAUDE.md file in my project with guidance for the new experience.

The Setup Agent Toolkit for AWS dialog, with a prompt to copy and paste into your coding agent.

With the agent connected, I gave it a short prompt: build an API that returns a new unique sequential ID on every request. The agent created an AWS Lambda function, an Amazon DynamoDB table, and an Amazon API Gateway API, then deployed them for me. I did not have to configure resource permissions by hand. Within a few minutes I had a public endpoint that returned a newly minted ID on each request. My project started with $100 in free credits, and I received an additional $20 when the Lambda function was deployed.

A coding agent prompt to build an API that returns a unique sequential ID on every request.

The coding agent presents architecture options for the sequential ID API, with AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB selected.

The coding agent confirms the API is live and lists the Amazon DynamoDB table, AWS Lambda function, and Amazon API Gateway API it deployed.

From the project, I could manage settings, invite team members by email, and monitor billing, as shown in the following screenshots.

The Projects page, showing remaining free-plan days, credits, and a project.

The project Members page, with the option to invite a new team member by email.

The Billing page, showing a $0.00 balance on the free plan, remaining credits, and cost by project.

Activating advanced features
If you reach the point where you need multiple Regions, or governance features like custom policies in AWS Organizations, you can activate advanced features at no additional cost. You’ll find yourself in a fully configured AWS Organization built according to best practices, with no migration and no downtime. Everything you configured previously is preserved and reflected in the underlying AWS services.

Now rolling out
We’ve heard from builders that they do not want to spend their first hours configuring an AWS environment. They want to build what they came to build, and we listened. AWS began as a place where anyone with an idea could start building, and this new simplified experience brings that starting point back, with sensible defaults so you can begin immediately, and with the global reach, breadth, and depth of AWS still there when your idea needs it. We are gradually rolling this experience out to new customers. We cannot wait to see what you build, and we want your feedback on the experience.

To try the new experience, create a new AWS account. To learn more, see the AWS Sign up user documentation.

Last week AWS Summit New York City brought together thousands of customers, partners, and builders for a free, one-day event showcasing the latest in cloud and AI innovation. Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI at AWS unveiled a stack of AI launches in his keynote, all built around one thesis: agents that compound value over time.

• Agents for working – You can launch autonomous agents and access a smarter activity feed with new Amazon Quick features, which now let you create and run multi-step agents directly in the desktop app and consolidates email, Slack, calendar, and tasks into a single prioritized view with personalized rules.
• Agents for securing – You can shift from reactive to proactive security with AWS Continuum, a new AI-native security service that reasons, validates, and acts at machine speed across the full code vulnerability lifecycle. AWS Security Agent (now part of AWS Continuum) adds new features: threat modeling; pull request code scanning with remediation across major Git platforms; and IDE integrations via Kiro power, Claude Code plugin, and MCP.
• Agents for building – You can write, ship, and modernize code in one continuous loop with Kiro, AWS DevOps Agent, and AWS Transform. Kiro introduces a native iOS app; AWS DevOps Agent adds release management capabilities to assess code changes before production; and AWS Transform continuous modernization reduces tech debt autonomously.
• Agents customers create – You can go from agent idea to production in minutes with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, which now includes a GA harness for infrastructure and orchestration, Web Search, Managed Knowledge Base, policy integrations with Guardrails, and the new AWS Context service for mapping organizational data relationships.

To learn more, visit the Summit recap from our top announcements blog post and Amazon News post.

Last week’s launches
Here are last week’s launches that caught my attention:

• AWS Local Zone in Hanoi, Vietnam – This new Local Zone is one of the first AWS Local Zones in the Asia Pacific with support for Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots, enabling customers to meet data residency requirements by storing and backing up data locally. To get started, enable the Hanoi Local Zone (ap-southeast-1-han-1a) from the Regions and Zones tab in the AWS Global View or by using the ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API.
• AWS Blocks, an open-source TypeScript framework for application developers (preview) – AWS Blocks runs a fully functional local environment with Postgres, authentication, and real-time messaging, no AWS account required. When you’re ready to deploy, the same application code runs on production AWS services with zero changes, and you can drop into AWS CDK at any point for direct resource configuration.
• Grok 4.3 from xAI in Amazon Bedrock – You can use the Grok 4.3 model on Amazon Bedrock, giving you even more choice as you build generative AI applications across reasoning, agentic, and enterprise workflows. Grok 4.3 runs on a new inference engine in Bedrock designed for price performance, with support for tool calling, structured output, and response streaming.
• Amazon S3 annotations: attach rich, queryable context directly to your objects – Amazon S3 now lets you attach up to 1 GB of rich, mutable, and queryable context directly to your objects using annotations, purpose-built for AI agents and autonomous workflows that need to discover, understand, and act on data at scale without maintaining separate metadata systems.
• Amazon ECS announces faster service auto scaling – Amazon ECS service auto scaling now detects and responds to load changes faster with support for high resolution (20-second) metrics and metric publishing optimizations. In AWS benchmarking tests, time to trigger scale-out improved from 363 seconds to 86 seconds (76% faster), and total time to scale and provision new tasks improved from 386 seconds to 109 seconds (72% faster).
• Amazon EC2 G7 instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs – AWS is the first major cloud provider to support NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. G7 instances are accelerated by these GPUs with custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, delivering up to 4.6x AI inference performance and up to 2.1x graphics performance compared to G6 instances.
• Strands Agents introduces new capabilities – Strands is an open source toolkit for building production agents. You can now use better context management in Harness SDK, a new isolated execution environment with Strands Shell, and chaos testing and red teaming in Strands Evals.
• AWS Management Console Private Access – You can access the AWS Console from VPCs without internet connectivity, allowing enterprises to manage their AWS infrastructure through the console while maintaining strict network security controls in air-gapped environments.
• AWS Marketplace Storefront is now generally available – AWS Partners can create and deploy their own branded catalog of solutions and services on their website or application in hours. Channel Partners and Independent Software Vendors can now simplify how they manage their cloud marketplace business and make it easier for customers to discover and purchase their solutions from AWS Marketplace.
• Palo Alto Networks (PANW) Advanced DNS Security on Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall (preview) – You can now enforce DNS threat protections from Palo Alto Networks directly on Route 53 DNS Firewall rules, without deploying separate firewalls or modifying VPC configurations — by subscribing to PANW from the DNS Firewall console through the embedded AWS Marketplace widget.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Price reductions 
AWS continues to look for ways to increase performance and lower prices for our customers. I noticed a few such efforts last week, so I’d like to share them:

• Amazon S3 Vectors reduces query charges by up to 80% for large vector indexes – This reduction lowers costs for customers running similarity search across large-scale AI, RAG, and semantic search workloads. The new pricing applies automatically with no application changes required.
• Amazon GameLift Servers introduces free network bandwidth – Amazon GameLift Servers provides network bandwidth in and out of AWS at no additional charge for all instance types from generation 6 and later, including On-Demand and Spot, with no commitment required. You now pay only for your Amazon GameLift Servers instance hours; all network bandwidth is free.
• AWS Marketplace reduces listing fee for professional services to 0.5% from 2.5% – This reduction makes it more cost-effective for consulting partners, systems integrators, managed services providers and independent software vendors to transact their services through AWS Marketplace, while retaining the procurement and billing benefits that come with it.

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events as well as AWS Summits and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Channy