AWS Summits in the northern hemisphere have mostly concluded but the fun and learning hasn’t yet stopped for those of us in other parts of the globe. The community, customers, partners, and colleagues enjoyed a day of learning and networking last week at the AWS Summit Mexico City and the AWS Summit Jakarta.

Last week’s launches
These are the launches from last week that caught my attention:

• OpenAI open weight models on AWS — OpenAI open weight models (gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b) are now available on AWS. These open weight models excel at coding, scientific analysis, and mathematical reasoning, with performance comparable to leading alternatives.
• Amazon Elastic VMware Service — Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS), a new AWS service that lets you run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environments directly within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), is now generally available.
• Automated Reasoning checks — Automated Reasoning checks, a new Amazon Bedrock Guardrails policy that was previewed during AWS re:Invent, is now generally available. Automated Reasoning checks helps you validate the accuracy of content generated by foundation models (FMs) against a domain knowledge. Read more in Danilo’s post on how this can help prevent factual errors that can be caused by AI hallucinations.
• Multi-Region application recovery service — In this post, Sébastien writes about the announcement of Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) Region switch, a fully managed, highly available capability that enables organizations to plan, practice, and orchestrate Region switches with confidence, eliminating the uncertainty around cross-Region recovery operations.

Additional updates
I thought these projects, blog posts, and news items were also interesting:

• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) — Amazon SQS has increased the maximum message payload size from 256 KiB to 1 MiB, enabling customers to send and receive larger messages through their Amazon SQS standard and FIFO queues.
• AWS Lambda now supports GitHub Actions — AWS Lambda now enables you to use GitHub Actions to automatically deploy Lambda functions when you push code or configuration changes to your GitHub repository, streamlining your continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for serverless applications.
• Console-to-Code on Amazon DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB announced the support of Console-to-Code, powered by Amazon Q Developer. Console-to-Code to make it simple, fast, and cost-effective to create DynamoDB resources at scale by getting you started with your automation code.
• You can dive deep into conversational AI with Amazon Lex by following this course built by AWS Hero Faye Ellis, available free as part of a free trial.
• AWS Community Builder Raphael Manke has published this year’s Unofficial AWS re:Invent Session Planner 2025. This planner is becoming highly awaited every year since it first launched a few years ago.
• AWS Hero Rosius Ndimofor built Educloud Academy and it’s heartwarming to see stories from community members who’re benefiting from this platform, such as this builder who’s participating in the latest Cloud and AI Challenge.

Upcoming AWS events
Keep a look out and be sure to sign up for these upcoming events:

AWS re:Invent 2025 (December 1-5, 2025, Las Vegas) — AWS’s flagship annual conference offering collaborative innovation through peer-to-peer learning, expert-led discussions, and invaluable networking opportunities.

AWS Summits — Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Coming up soon are the summits at São Paulo (August 13) and Johannesburg (August 20).

AWS Community Days — Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Australia (August 15), Adria (September 5), Baltic (September 10), Aotearoa (September 18), and South Africa (September 20).

Join the AWS Builder Center to learn, build, and connect with builders in the AWS community. Browse here for upcoming in-person and virtual developer-focused events.

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

– Veliswa.