334: AWS Makes Kubernetes Conversational The Cloud Pod podcast

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The Cloud Pod »
334: AWS Makes Kubernetes Conversational

1d ago 1:28:07

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Welcome to episode 334 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! This week, we’re bringing you a jam-packed recap of re:Invent! We’ve got all the news, from keynotes to announcements. Whether you were there live or catching up on all the news, Justin, Matt, and Ryan are here to break it all down. Let’s get started!

Titles we almost went with this week

EKS Gets Chatty: Natural Language Replaces Command Line Nightmares
Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: Why Your RSA Keys Need a Quantum Makeover Before 2026
NAT So Fast: AWS Helps You Find Gateways Doing Absolutely Nothing
AWS Finally Admits You Have Too Many Log Buckets
AWS Finally Lets You Log In Like a Normal Human
Lambda Gets a Memory: Checkpoint Your Way to Multi-Step Workflows
Step Functions at Home: Lambda Durable Functions Let You Write Workflows in Actual Code
No More Bucket List: S3 Public Access Gets Organization-Wide Lockdown
AWS Hits Ctrl-Z on CodeCommit Deprecation
AWS Puts a Cap on CloudFront: Unlimited Traffic, Limited Anxiety
AWS Tells SQL Server to Take a Thread Off: Optimize CPU Cuts Costs by 55%
Amazon Bedrock Gets a Bouncer: AgentCore Identity Checks IDs at the Door
AI Brings on the Developer Renaissance

Follow Up

01:27 re:Invent

Matt Garman- 14th Reinvent, which is weird, since we’ve been doing cloud stuff for 87 years…
Warner – Open Mind for a different View and nothing else matters T-shirt.

02:59 re:Invent predictions

Jonathan

1. Serverless GPU support (extension in Lambda or a different service), it’s about time we have a serverless GPU/Inference capability.
  1. It is talked about in the keynote with DeSantis.

AI Agent with a goal/instructions that can run when they need to, periodically, or always, and perform an action (Agentic Platform that runs agents) –

Garman – Bedrock AgentCore and Kiro Autonomous Agent

Werner will announce this is his last keynote and he will retire

He retired from re:Invent Presentations

Ryan

New Tranium 3 chips, Inferentia, and Graviton chips

Garman – announced Tranium 3 Ultraservers.

They brought the Rack Ryan

Expand the number of models in or via bedrock

Doubled the number of models and announced Gemma, Minimax M2, Nvidia Nemotron, Mistral Large, and Mistral 3
Refresh to AWS Organizations

Justin

New Nova Model & Sonic with Multi-modal

Garman Nova 2 – Lite, Pro, and Sonic (the lack of Sonic the Hedgehog/Sega reference is a shame)

Nova 2 Omni

Announce a partnership with OpenAI (likely on stage)

1. 1. Not announced as new, but said they’re running on AWS and that EC2 Ultraservers are in use.

Advanced Agentic AI Capabilities for Security Hub (Automate the SOC teams)

Garman – Advanced Agentic AI Capabilities for Security Hub – with NEW AWS Security Agent

Matt

A model router to route LLM queries to different AI models
Well-architected framework expansion
End user Authentication that doesn’t suck (not current Cognito)

Tie Breaker – How many times will they say AI or Artificial Intelligence

Matt: 200

Justin: 160

Ryan: 99 Jonathan: 1

Matt Garman’s Keynote: 77

DeSantis’ Keynote: 31

Swami: 44

Werner: 31

Total: 183

This means Justin wins this year!

10:05 Honorable Mentions:

- Mathematical Proof that one of Amazon’s Models has output that can be verifiable with math

Marketplace for AI Work

- New Device to go along with the Nova Models
- Cost Savings for Networking
- FinOps AI recommender for Model Usage
- Savings Plans for AI/Bedrock Models
- S3 Vectors with integration bedrock
- FinOps Kubernetes Service

Q Developer with Autonomous Agents

Next Generation Silicone for a combined TPU competitor, ie GPU/Graviton/Learning
Bedrock Model Marketplace with Revenue Share for fine-tuned models (Ryan)
Sustainability Dashboard
Aurora/DSQL is an AI feature

AWS

11:59 re:Invent keynote Recap

Matt – started the weekend strong, although we struggled with his keynotes. (Sounds like he could use a good copywriter to help with his speeches.)
Swami – Solid B from us, but that’s because we’re not super interested in his topics. Sorry.
Peter – we enjoyed this one more. Cool tech, lots of mentions, and one of the better presenters. A for him.
Werner – Great Intro Video. Welcome to the Renaissance Coder

15:00 A Quick Recap

Look. We know you care about non-AI things (and so do we), so we’re going to do 25 exciting new announcements in 10 minutes. x8, elon instance, c8a, c8ine instances, m8azn, m3 and m4 max macs, lambda durable functions, 50tb s3 object, s3 batch ops 10x faster, intelligent tiering for s3 tables, automatic replication for s3 tables, s3 access points for FSX netapp, S3 Vectors, GPU Index for Amazon Opensearch, Amazon EMR Serverless with no storage provisioning, Guardduty to ECS & Ec2, Security Hub is GA, Unified data store in cloudwatch, Increases STorage for SQL and Oracle RDS, Optimize CPus for RDS for SQL server, SQL Server Development support, Database Savings Plans. 2 hours on AI…when we would have been really happy with all of THIS as the keynote.

26:08 AI/ML & Amazon Bedrock

Bedrock Service Tiers (Priority/Standard/Flex) – Match AI workload performance with cost
Bedrock Reserved Service Tier – Pre-purchase guaranteed tokens-per-minute capacity with 99.5% SLA
Bedrock AgentCore – Policy controls, evaluations, episodic memory for AI agents
Bedrock Reinforcement Fine-tuning – RLVR and RLAIF for model customization
Amazon Nova 2 Lite – Fast, cost-effective reasoning model with configurable thinking
Nova Forge – Build your own foundational models
18 New Open Weight Models – Mistral Large 3, Ministral 3 variants, others
Amazon Q Developer Cost Management – Natural language queries for AWS spending analysis
SageMaker Serverless Customization – Automated infrastructure for fine-tuning
SageMaker HyperPod – Checkpointless and elastic training capabilities
AWS Clean Rooms ML – Privacy-enhancing synthetic dataset generation
AgentCore Evaluations – Continuously inspect agent quality based on real-world behavior

29:09 Ryan – “I do agree with you that no one should be building their own foundational models unless it’s really, truly built on a data set that’s unique, but I do think that everyone should go through the exercise of building a model to understand how AI works.”

30:58 Compute (EC2 & Lambda)

EC2 P6-B300 Instances – NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, 6.4Tbps networking
EC2 X8aedz Instances – AMD EPYC 5GHz, memory-optimized for EDA/databases
- X Æ A-Xii Musk
EC2 C8a Instances – AMD EPYC Turin, 30% higher compute performance
EC2 M9g Instances – Graviton5 powered, 25% better than Graviton4
Graviton5 Processor – 192 cores, 5x larger cache
Lambda Tenant Isolation Mode – Built-in multi-tenant separation
Lambda Managed Instances – Run Lambda on your EC2 with AWS management
Lambda Durable Functions – Multi-step workflows with automatic state management
AWS AI Factories – Cloud-scale AI infrastructure in customer data centers|

33:46 Matt – “I feel like we should have seen this coming, given that they just released the ECS management system a couple of months ago, and it feels like the next step.”

42:24 Containers (EKS & ECS)

EKS Capabilities – Managed Argo CD, ACK, KRO in AWS-owned infrastructure
EKS MCP Server – Natural language Kubernetes management (preview)
EKS Container Network Observability – Service maps, flow tables, performance metrics
EKS/ECS Amazon Q Troubleshooting – AI-powered console diagnostics
ECS Express Mode – Simplified deployment with automatic ALB, domains, HTTPS

43:36 Ryan – “I think this is what I’ve always wanted Beanstalk and Lightsail to be, is this service. This, for me, feels like the best of both worlds.”

45:34 Networking & Content Delivery

CloudFront Flat-Rate Pricing – Bundled delivery, WAF, DDoS protection ($0-$1K/month tiers)
VPN Concentrator – 25-100 low-bandwidth sites via a single Transit Gateway attachment
Route 53 Accelerated Recovery – 60-minute RTO for DNS during regional outages
Route 53 Global Resolver (preview) – Anycast DNS for remote/distributed clients
NAT Gateway Regional Availability – Auto-scale across AZs, simplified management
VPC Encryption Controls – Enforce encryption in transit within/across VPCs
Network Firewall Proxy (preview) – Explicit proxy for outbound traffic filtering

50:29 Ryan – “If you’ve ever had to do any kind of compliance evidence, that’s the reason why this exists and that’s why I love it so much. The song and dance that you have to do to illustrate your use of encryption across your environment is painful.”

53:14 Storage (S3 & FSx)

S3 Vectors GA – Native vector support, 2B vectors/index, 20T vectors/bucket
S3 Tables Replication & Intelligent-Tiering – Cross-region/account Iceberg replication
S3 Storage Lens Enhancements – Performance metrics, billions of prefixes, S3 Tables export
S3 Encryption Controls – Bucket-level encryption type enforcement
S3 Block Public Access – Organization-level enforcement
S3 50TB Object Size – 10x increase from previous 5TB limit
FSx for NetApp ONTAP S3 Access Points – Access file data via S3 API

54:38 Matt – “This is just a nice quality of life improvement.”

58:24 Databases

Aurora DSQL Cost Estimates – Statement-level DPU usage in query plans
Aurora PostgreSQL Dynamic Data Masking – pg_columnmask extension
OpenSearch 3.3 – Agentic search, semantic highlighter improvements
OpenSearch GPU Acceleration – 6-14x faster vector indexing
RDS SQL Server/Oracle Optimizations – Free Developer Edition, 256 TiB storage, CPU optimization
RDS SQL Server Resource Governor – Workload resource control
Database Savings Plans – Up to 35% savings across 9 database services

1:01:01 Justin – “This is quite nice, and quite broad, so they definitely heard all of the community saying please bring us database savings plans.”

1:03:33 Security & Identity

Security Hub GA – Near real-time analytics, risk prioritization, Trends feature
Secrets Manager External Secrets – Managed rotation for Salesforce, Snowflake, BigID
IAM Outbound Identity Federation – Short-lived JWTs for external service authentication
AWS login CLI Command – Eliminate long-term access keys with OAuth 2.0
WAF Web Bot Auth – Cryptographic signature verification for legitimate AI agents
Agentcore Identity
GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection – EC2/ECS multistage attack correlation
AWS Security Agent (preview) – AI-powered security reviews, code scanning, pen testing
IAM Policy Autopilot – Open source MCP server for generating IAM policies from code.

1:08:18 Matt – “…it’s definitely competing with Azure releasing the same thing during their conference. The piece I like about this is the pen test piece because it now lives in your source code, which you probably already have in SCA or a static code analysis tool.”

1:11:46 Cost Management & FinOps

Cost Explorer 18-Month Forecasting – Extended from 12 months to 18 months, explainable with AI (in preview).
Cost Efficiency Metric – Single percentage score combining optimization opportunities.
AWS Data Exports FOCUS 1.2 – Standardized multi-cloud billing format
Billing Transfer – Centralized billing across multiple Organizations
Compute Optimizer NAT Gateway Recommendations – Identify unused NAT Gateways

1:14:09 Developer Tools & Modernization

Step Functions Local Testing – TestState API with mocking support
AWS Transform Custom – AI-powered code modernization (Java, Node.js, Python)
AWS Transform Mainframe – COBOL to microservices with automated testing
API Gateway Developer Portals – Native API discovery and documentation
CodeCommit Restored to GA – Git LFS (Q1 2026), regional expansion (Q3 2026)
AWS Transform Windows – Full-stack .NET/SQL Server modernization
CloudWatch Unified Data Management – Consolidated ops/security/compliance logs
CloudWatch Deletion Protection – Prevent accidental log group removal.
CloudWatch Network Flow Monitor – Container network observability for EKS

1:18:09 Matt – “I mean, I hope all customers have some sort of plan, knowing that I’ve seen many companies say ‘we got this notice six months ago, we’ll deal with it in six months’ and now it’s three weeks and six days, and it expires tomorrow…there’s probably a lot of customers still there.”

1:20:58 Observability & Monitoring

CloudWatch Unified Data Management – Consolidated ops/security/compliance logs
CloudWatch Deletion Protection – Prevent accidental log group removal
CloudWatch Network Flow Monitor – Container network observability for EKS

1:21:39 Governance & Management

Control Tower Controls Dedicated – Use managed controls without a full landing zone.
Service Quotas Automatic Management – Auto-adjust limits based on usage
Supplementary Packages for Amazon Linux – Pre-built EPEL9 packages
AMI Ancestry – Automatic lineage tracking for AMIs

1:23:05 Matt – “I’ve built three different ways to do this in my career. You always want to know where it came from, so if there’s a vulnerability, you know where to start patching and go up from there…but if you have multiple teams, it’s hard to track. So knowing I can track it is a godsend.”

1:25:35 DevOps & Operations

AWS DevOps Agent (preview) – Autonomous incident investigation and root cause analysis
AWS Support Plan Restructure – Business Support+ ($29/mo), Enterprise ($5K/mo), Unified Ops ($50K/mo)

1:26:41 Ryan – “I hope this ends up being decent service, but in my head I’m thinking they’re lowering the cost because they’re getting rid of all their support staff.”

1:29:29 Marketplace & Partner

Partner Central in Console – Unified customer/partner experience
Multi-Product Solutions – Bundled offerings from multiple vendors
CrowdStrike Falcon Integration – Automated SIEM setup wizard

1:30:15 Connectivity & Contact Center

Amazon Connect Predictive Insights (preview) – AI-powered recommendations
Amazon Connect MCP Support – Standardized tools for AI agents

Noteable Announcments We Didn’t Cover in the Show:

Closing

And that is the week in the cloud! Visit our website, the home of the Cloud Pod, where you can join our newsletter, Slack team, send feedback, or ask questions at theCloudPod.net or tweet at us with the hashtag #theCloudPod

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