Last week’s hallmark event was the security-focused AWS re:Inforce conference.

Now a tradition, the blog team wrote a re:Cap post to summarize the announcements and link to some of the top blog posts.

To further summarize, several new security innovations were announced, including enhanced IAM Access Analyzer capabilities, MFA enforcement for root users, and threat intelligence integration with AWS Network Firewall. Other notable updates include exportable public SSL/TLS certificates from AWS Certificate Manager, a simplified AWS WAF console experience, and a new AWS Shield feature for proactive network security (in preview). Additionally, AWS Security Hub has been enhanced for risk prioritization (Preview), and Amazon GuardDuty now supports Amazon EKS clusters.

But my favorite announcement came from the Amazon Verified Permissions team. They released an open source package for Express.js, enabling developers to implement external fine-grained authorization for web application APIs. This simplifies authorization integration, reducing code complexity and improving application security.

The team also published a blog post that outlines how to create a Verified Permissions policy store, add Cedar and Verified Permissions authorisation middleware to your app, create and deploy a Cedar schema, and create and deploy Cedar policies. The Cedar schema is generated from an OpenAPI specification and formatted for use with the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

Let’s look at last week’s other new announcements.

Last week’s launches
Apart from re:Inforce, here are the launches that got my attention.

• AWS Lambda announces native support for Avro and Protobuf formatted Kafka events — AWS Lambda now provides native support for Avro and Protobuf formatted Kafka events with Apache Kafka’s event-source-mapping (ESM). This integration allows you to validate your schema, filter events, and process them using open source Kafka consumer interfaces. You can also use Powertools for AWS Lambda to process your Kafka events without writing custom deserialization code, making it easier to build your Kafka applications with AWS Lambda.

Kafka customers use Avro and Protobuf formats for efficient data storage, fast serialization and deserialization, schema evolution support, and interoperability between different programming languages. They utilize schema registries to manage, evolve, and validate schemas before data enters processing pipelines. Previously, you were required to write custom code within your Lambda function to validate, deserialize, and filter events when using these data formats. With this launch, Lambda natively supports Avro and Protobuf, as well as integration with GSR, CCSR, and SCSR. This enables you to process your Kafka events using these data formats without writing custom code. Additionally, you can optimize costs through event filtering to prevent unnecessary function invocations.

• Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports atomic renaming of objects with a single API call – The RenameObject API simplifies data management in S3 directory buckets by transforming a multi-step rename operation into a single API call. This means you can now rename objects in S3 Express One Zone by specifying an existing object’s name as the source and the new name as the destination within the same S3 directory bucket. With no data movement involved, this capability accelerates applications like log file management, media processing, and data analytics, while also lowering costs. For instance, renaming a 1-terabyte log file can now complete in milliseconds, instead of hours, significantly accelerating applications and reducing costs.
• Valkey introduces GLIDE 2.0 with support for Go, OpenTelemetry, and pipeline batching – AWS, in partnership with Google and the Valkey community, announces the general availability of General Language Independent Driver for the Enterprise (GLIDE) 2.0. This is the latest release of one of AWS’s official open-source Valkey client libraries. Valkey, the most permissive open-source alternative to Redis, is stewarded by the Linux Foundation and will always remain open-source. Valkey GLIDE is a reliable, high-performance, multi-language client that supports all Valkey commands

GLIDE 2.0 introduces new capabilities that expand developer support, improve observability, and optimise performance for high-throughput workloads. Valkey GLIDE 2.0 extends its multi-language support to Go (contributed by Google), joining Java, Python, and Node.js to provide a consistent, fully compatible API experience across all four languages. More language support is on the way. With this release, Valkey GLIDE now supports OpenTelemetry, an open-source, vendor-neutral framework that enables developers to generate, collect, and export telemetry data and critical client-side performance insights. Additionally, GLIDE 2.0 introduces batching capabilities, reducing network overhead and latency for high-frequency use cases by allowing multiple commands to be grouped and executed as a single operation. You can discover more about Valkey GLIDE in this recent episode of the AWS Developers Podcast: Inside Valkey GLIDE: building a next-gen Valkey client library with Rust.

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

Some other reading
My Belgian compatriot Alexis has written the first article of a two-part series explaining how to develop an MCP Tool server with a streamable HTTP transport and deploy it on Lambda and API Gateway. This is a must-read for anyone implementing MCP servers on AWS. I’m eagerly looking forward to the second part, where Alexis will discuss authentication and authorization for remote MCP servers.

Other AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.

AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.

AWS Summits are free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Japan (this week June 25 – 26), Online in India (June 26), New-York City (July 16).

Save the date for these upcoming Summits in July and August: Taipei (July 29), Jakarta (August 7), Mexico (August 8), São Paulo (August 13), and Johannesburg (August 20) (and more to come in September and October).

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events here.

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

— seb

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!