#742: Amazon Quick Suite, AWS MCP, and lots more!

0:00This is episode 742 of the AWS podcast, released on October 20th, 2025. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Adibus Podcast. I'm Lee Sheer with you. Great to have you back, joined by my co-host, Gillian Ford. G'day, Gillian. How are you going? G'day, Simon. It's always a good day when it's podcast day. This is true. This is true. Lots of new updates, just a touch under 60 today. That's right, six zero. And there's a couple that really bear talking about early on. We'll talk about some during the episode as well. But the first is that we're introducing Amazon QuickSuite, which is your agentic AI powered workspace.

0:37So this is in general availability. It's a new set of agentic teammates that help you get the answers you need using all of your business data to move instantly from insights to action. So QuickSuite retrieves insights across the public internet and your documents, including information in popular third party applications, databases, and other places your company keeps important data. So if you need a single data point or a research project. I did one recently. I'll talk about that shortly. Or anything in between. This helps you get started up and running. It also can do things as well. So it can create or update Jira tickets or service incidents.

1:13It can help you automate a lot of routine tasks. So things like responding to RFPs or preparing for meetings, et cetera. The nice thing is all your data is safe and private. So your queries and data are never used to train models. Really important. And you can tailor the QuickSuite experience to your environment as well. There's also a 30-day free trial for up to 25 users as well. We've been using this ourselves, Gillian, as it's sort of been coming to fruition. I've used the research side of things, and I found it really quite useful because the research process, it's kind of familiar to folks if you use something like perplexity, etc.

1:52It's sort of useful in terms of gathering lots of broad data around the place. What's nice is it produces a report, but then in the side, you can put comments. It's almost like when someone sends you a document and you do your edits or your comments in the document. But you do that in the document and then you say, now go do the research again. And it will action those points, which is really cool. I found it kind of, it felt humanistic in doing it that way. because like I'd done a piece of domain research in a particular area and it took a particular direction and I wanted to take a different direction.

2:27And so like in just a few points, I said, you know, this should be more about, you know, the Australian experience or this should be more about this, et cetera. Funny that. And it responded in that next iteration going, oh yeah, I'll update it doing that way. So that's kind of what I've used. Have you used it for much, Gillian, or still exploring? I'm definitely still exploring it for the research purposes of taking an Excel spreadsheet and being able to just really understand trends, especially across, at least for me, with healthcare and AI and really trying to be able to understand that. So I'm definitely excited for that.

3:01And especially on the automation part of being able to automate routine tasks. Yeah, that's definitely something I need to look more deeply in. Because again, it's interesting as sort of Cambrian explosion of AI stuff is there's lots of different ways to do things. and what's sort of the way this week may not be the way next week. So kind of - True, that's a good point. Now, another new announcement, funnily enough, AI related, is a really handy one because I've got a tip that I hope is going to make people really happy. So it's the AWS API MCP server version one release. So this is our model context protocol, MCP server, enabling foundation models to interact with any AWS API through natural language by creating and executing syntactically correct CLI commands.

3:47That phrase again, syntactically correct CLI commands. The reason why I'm excited about this is, I don't know about you, but a lot of the LLMs that I use are pretty good at using AWS, but more often than not, they issue the CLI command they think they should issue. Yes, that's great. Then they get an error. And it's like, wait, you caught the error. Yeah, it's like, you made the error, and then they fix it. So it's like, oh, you know, often they'll use a flag, like a true or false flag. It drives me insane. And I actually reached out to some colleagues who do a lot of work in this space and said, this is driving me nuts, what do I do?

4:26And they're like, oh, you should just change it to tell it. So instead of, for example, within QCLI, for example, I tell it. So instead of using the use AWS tool, to use the call AWS tool. Now, the call AWS tool is part of this AWS API MCP, and it gets it right every time. It's awesome. And so it really helps a lot in terms of getting things working. It also has access to something called a suggest AWS command tool as well. This allows it to figure out what it should be doing. Also has improved security file system controls, better input validation. You can also use the AWS CloudWatch agent to get logs from it as well for observability.

5:10It also now offers streamable HTTP transport in addition to Stat.io. And it also includes elicitation in supported MCP clients as well to improve that human-in-the-loop workflow. You can also deny certain actions as well. You can also get, there's a new experimental tool called Git Execution Plan that will tell you what it would do for common tasks as well. There's lots. So, but pretty much the main thing that I've found it useful for is it gets rid of those annoying errors that kept happening. So it's a win. This really is. I mean, there's so much really to call out here. First of all, just a quick note for everyone.

5:53you want to go to the AWS Labs GitHub repo. So this is not like on the AWS documentation, but it has its own separate GitHub repository. And there's just like so much that you can be able to do with it. And of course, for all our friends who have different preferences for their infrastructure as code, you'll be able to find a lot of different variations, whether that's Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation. I think that's, I think, part of that people really care about. And then just even be able to access like the latest documentation, AWS pricing, cost explorer. So I think there's just so many different clever things that you can start to be able to do with this.

6:34Yeah, but if you use AWS, run, don't walk, and start using this. But remember to tell the LLM to use the call AWS tool instead of the use AWS tool. That's the little syntactic sugar that makes life easy. I like it. So, Jillian, what are we talking about today? I've got a bunch of things to start with. I think you're going to start with analytics today. That's right. AWS Cleanrooms now supports collaboration with cross-region data sources. This launch enables companies and their partners to easily collaborate with data sources that are stored in different regions without having to move, copy, or share the underlying data.

7:21With CleanRooms support cross-region data collaboration, that is just going to make it a lot simpler, especially if you're thinking about being able to really optimize those costs cross-region. And another one from CleanRooms, it now supports data access budgets. This new privacy control allows you to limit the number of times your data can be analyzed when training or running inference on a custom machine learning model or in a SQL query or a PySpark job. So when you spend a budget, the system prevents additional analyses until the budget refreshes. But you can reset or edit a budget at any time as your needs change.

8:02And so this is not a cost budget, this is a data access budget, which is kind of cool. That's a really good call out, yeah. A data access budget, not a cost budget. All right, next one is AABIS Glue adds write operations for SAP O-Data, Adobe Marketo Engage, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and HubSpot Connectors. So this feature simplifies building end-to-end ETL pipelines that both extract data from and write process results back to target applications. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams now supports IPv6 for streams capability. It is the year of IPv6. The year of IPv6. That's what we need to give out and reinvent to people.

8:51Shirts that say that. Shirts that say that. Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion now supports batch AI inference. inference generates enrichments such as vector embedding predictions translations and with these real-time inference that's ideal for low latency requirements now with open search ingestion you can use these same ar connectors with amazon open search ingestion pipelines as an asynchronous batch inference job to enrich large data sets such as generating and ingesting up to billions of in-vector embeddings. Let's talk application integration and we're happy to announce Apache Airflow 3.0 support in Amazon managed workflows for Apache Airflow.

9:36So this is the latest major release of the workflow orchestration platform and this enhances your ability to author, schedule and monitor complex workflows with greater efficiency and control. So you get all the new cool stuff, there's a new scheduling system, a completely redesigned interface. Security in isolation has also been strengthened through the task execution API. There's also now scheduler managed backfill functionality as well, so for historical stuff. Also now supports Python 3.12 as well, a whole bunch of security enhancements. It's a full release. It's a kind of a big deal. And AWS end user messaging now sends onboarding progress alerts via Slack, email, or any other event bridge destination.

10:23So before this launch, tracking the status of your onboarding process was difficult. You had to check the status of a phone number registration in the console. Now it will tell you at any stage when they're created, submitted, denied, or required an update as well. So if you're not aware, AWS end-user messaging gives developers a scalable and cost-effective messaging infrastructure without compromising the safety, security, or results of their communications. This is also useful for things like one-time passcodes, signups, account updates, appointment reminders, delivery notifications, promotions, and a whole bunch more.

10:57Next topic is artificial intelligence. Amazon Bedrock now offers Cohere Embed version 4, the latest state-of-the-art multimodal embedding model from Cohere that produces high-quality embeddings for text, images, and complex business documents. Traditional embedding models often struggle to understand complex multi-bottle business materials. Now Embed v4 actually addresses this challenge by natively processing documents with tables, graphs, diagrams, code snippets, and handwritten notes. The open source Model Context Protocol server is now available for Amazon Bedrock Agent Core. This new standardized interface allows developers to analyze, transform, and deploy production-ready AI agents directly in their preferred development environment.

11:47You can use natural language to iteratively develop your agent, including transforming your agent logic to work with the agent core SDK and deploy your agent into development accounts. The open source MCP server is available globally via GitHub. So you're going to want to look this up in the agent core MCP server GitHub repository. So that's just something to look out for. Amazon Bedrock data automation now supports enhanced transcription output for audio files by providing the option to distinguish between various speakers and separately process audio from each channel. This is definitely a good call-out because I think a lot of people when they think about Bedrock data automation they usually think about it specifically for extracting data maybe from PDFs but here's a great example of how you can actually use it with audio files and in fact what they've done is they've expanded support for blueprint creation, so these are repeatable templates for certain types of problems, using a guided and natural language-based interface for extracting custom insights to audio modality.

12:54Speaker diarization detects each unique speaker and tracks speaker changes in a multi-party audio conversation. Channel identification enables separate processing of audio from each channel. So one example could be, let's say you've got speakers such as a customer and a sales agent. they can be separated into unique channels and this can just make it easier for additional downstream processes that you might be having depending on how you want to analyze maybe what the speaker is saying versus what the other person on the other side is saying. That's very cool. Yeah, it is. The AWS Knowledge MCP server is now generally available, which you can also find in the AWS API MCP that we were talking about earlier.

13:38With this release, the server also includes knowledge about the regional availability of AWS APIs and CloudFormation resources. All right. That is so handy. Lots of people want that. Yes. Oh my gosh. And most importantly, it is publicly accessible at no cost. Yes. That does not require an AWS account. Fantastic. Amazon Q Developer now helps customers understand service prices and estimate workload costs. Customers can now use QDeveloper to retrieve detailed product attribute and pricing information using natural language, making it easier to understand the cost of new workloads without having to review multiple pricing pages or specify detailed API request parameters.

14:27So you can literally type how much does RES extended support cost, the cost of a planned workload, or another example is like I need to send a million notifications per month to email. How much is that going to cost? So I think this is super exciting for businesses of all different sizes. Yeah. This is right. You're thinking about a new project and you're like, how much is this going to cost? And then before you start actually going, doling it out. So that's really cool. You also have to make choices because you can say, hey, what would it cost if I did it this way? What would it cost if I did it that way?

14:58What are the pros and cons? All that sort of stuff. It's really cool. Totally. Yeah. Really excited about that one. Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio announces corporate identity support for interactive Apache Spark sessions through AWS Identity Center's trusted identity propagation. This new capability enables seamless single sign-on and end-to-end data access traceability for data analytics workflows. Amazon Sage Beaker Notebook Instance now supports Amazon Linux 2023. Let's talk about the AWS Marketplace. If you haven't used the AWS Marketplace, it's actually a great place to get access to all kinds of software and APIs as well that are out there.

15:37I know for a lot of customers, it's just a lot easier to just say, hey, I can just go to the Marketplace, get the thing I want, spin it up, and where we go. So a couple of things that have changed. The AWS Marketplace now supports new currency for usage-based private offers. So it now supports euro, pounds, Australian dollars, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, and Japanese yen as well. So this means you can now reach buyers globally without currency conversion complexity or foreign exchange risk because you can price your offers in those currencies. And the AWS marketplace has also announced enhanced pricing dimension capabilities for sellers.

16:12So this increases the maximum number of pricing dimensions from 24 to 200. So it means you can use new SaaS dimensions and you can also remove the 90-day price update restrictions for dimensions without active subscriptions. So this just means you can make things suit your customers better. Now, speaking of suiting customers, let's talk business applications. The Amazon Connect team. If I had to vote for the team that does the absolute highest rate of changes for their customers, it would have to be this team. I think we always talk about stuff. They have a list of things I'm going to run through now.

16:45They've done a great job. So if you're not familiar with Amazon Connect, it is basically a cloud-based contact center solution. Super popular, really has transformed a lot of organizations we've worked with even locally as well, because it just gives you a modern experience that works well both for your customers or citizens and also for the people taking the calls and processing the calls as well. So here's some of the things that have happened. Firstly, Amazon Connect now provides generative AI powered email conversation overviews and selected responses. So it enables the customer agents to handle emails more efficiently and it means customers get faster, more consistent support.

17:23Amazon Connect now makes it easier to get customer input on outbound calls. So it now allows a prompt to be played to a customer on an outbound call after they answer the call, but before they're with an agent. And Amazon Connect now enables you to customize service level calculations as well. So for example, managers can choose to count callback contacts or exclude contacts transferred out while waiting in a queue, exclude short abandons using a configurable time threshold, like lots of tweaks available there to measure stuff. It also now supports agent screen recording for Chrome OS devices.

17:59So with screen recording, you can identify areas for agent coaching, and it's not just about listening to the customer call or reviewing the chat transcripts, but you can also watch the actions the agent is taking so you can find those efficiencies there as well. Amazon Connect now supports copy and bulk edit of agent scheduling configurations. So you can do lots at one time. It also now supports agent schedule adherence notification as well. So you now can get notifications to supervisors when agents exceed their adherence thresholds. where there's also new case APIs to link related cases, add custom related items and search across them as well.

18:38And Amazon Connect now also provides an agent time off balance data in Analytics Data Lake so you can understand the balance of the latest and historical agent time off balances across different categories. So things like pay time off, sick leave, leave of absence, et cetera. I'm always impressed every single time. They do a lot. They do. Speaking of other things, let's talk about compute. Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now support Kubernetes version 1.34. Amazon ECS now supports one-click event capture and event history querying in the AWS Management Console. And we've got a new compute-optimized instance, the CAI and the C8iFlex instances.

19:24These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among the comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The CAI and C8i Flex instances offer up to 15 % better price performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation Intel-based instances. That's a lot. That's a big jump. It really is. So they deliver up to 20 % better performance than C7i and C7i Flex instances, with even higher gains for some workloads. And they're up to 60 % faster for Nginx web applications, up to 40 % faster for AI deep learning recommendation models, and 35 % faster for memed cache stores compared to C7i and C7i Flex instances.

20:25often used for web and application servers, databases, caches, Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch, and enterprise applications. And they're in a lot of different sizes, whether it's, you need small, going up to 16x large. Super excited for those. Amazon EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint now supports IPv6 connectivity. Because it's the year of IPv6. Now people are going to be sleeping and have that dream. Every time I see IPv6 now, it's like the year IPv6. This is what happens when you give me buttons to press. And we've got another new instance that's generally available, the M8A instances. These are powered by the 5th gen AMD EPYC processors, formerly codenamed TURN, with a maximum frequency of 4.5 GHz, and they deliver up to 30 % higher performance and up to 19 % better price performance compared to the M7A instances.

21:32The M8 instances deliver 45 % more memory bandwidth compared to M7A instances, making these instances ideal for even latency-sensitive workloads. They deliver even higher performance gains for specific benchmarks, 60 % faster for Groovy JVM, up to 39 % faster for Cassandra, and also compared to the M7A instances. That's a big boost there. That's a big, like, again, it reminds you that if you're using certain workloads, you've got to test these new instance types. Just spin it up, run a performance test. Like, wow, if I work up to 60 % faster for my application, I'd be like, this is awesome. It really is.

22:18And it's also just a reminder, I think, for people who are using EC2 instances. You have to keep looking at what's new. And of course, that's what we're here for to see, hey, are there newer instances that I could be taking advantage of? Correct. EC2 Image Builder now automatically disables pipelines after consecutive failures and allows customers to configure custom log groups for image pipelines. AWS Parallel Computing Service now enables you to modify and update key Slurm Workload Manager settings without rebuilding your cluster. AWS Parallel Computing Service now supports Node Reboot via Slurm.

22:55AWS Parallel Computing Service expands Slurm's customization capabilities, enabling you to set over 60 additional parameters for granular control over your high-performance computing cluster operations. That's a whole lot of Slurm going on. It really is. Next topic we've got is databases. Amazon Keyspaces for Apache Cassandra now supports, you guessed it by now, IPv6. The year of IPv6. And just when you thought that was going to be our last time we talk about IPv6, Amazon Dynamo TV now supports, you guessed it, IPv6. Lots of bums. Amazon Neptune now integrates with GraphStorm for scalable graph machine learning.

23:49Amazon Relational Database for DB2 now enables customers to perform native database level backups, offering greater flexibility in database management and migration. Let's talk developer tools. One quick but important update. AWS Builder ID now supports sign-in with Google. So the Adibus Builder ID is a personal profile that provides access to Adibus applications, including Cairo, the Adibus Builder Center, Adibus Training Certification, Adibus Reposts, and Adibus Startups. The Adibus Builder ID represents you as an individual and is independent from any credentials and data you may have in existing Adibus accounts.

24:26That's why it's important. And like other personal profiles, Adibus Builder ID remains with you as you progress to your personal, educational, and career goals. So it's always there for you, no matter who you're working for, what you're doing, et cetera. Now, sign-in with Google offers a convenient way for you to access those capabilities with a single click using your Google account, which means you don't have to have separate credentials. If you'd like to use sign-in with Google, you can. Now let's talk about gaming. Amazon GameLift servers have the capability to view and connect to instances in the console.

24:59So if you'd like to have a look at stuff that way, you can. And guess what? Amazon GameLoop Streams adds IPv6 support for streaming Windows applications. It just keeps on happening. Let's talk about management and governance. Adibus introduces self-service invoice correction feature to update Adibus invoices. This is cool. So this launch enables all Adibus customers to correct key invoice attributes, including purchase order numbers, business legal name and addresses on their adibus invoices and get corrected invoices instantaneously this is massive if you work in enterprise if you do this sort of stuff it just means that the whole cycle time is instant rather than having to wait for stuff going on so i'm pretty excited about that one weird one to be excited about but i i know there's a lot of people for whom the quality of life improves speaking of quality of life automatic quota management is now generally available for adibus service quotas so this is a new capability it's called automated quota management and basically what adibus service quotas does if you've never used it before it helps you view and manage your quotas from a central location now this new feature monitors quota usage and notifies customers before they run out of allocated quotas supported on the adibus service quotas this is awesome because it basically gives you a warning before you're going to hit the limit.

26:23And so you can configure your preferred network, so your preferred notification channels, I should say, things like email, SMS, or Slack through the console or through the API as well. And these notifications are also, of course, available in the Adibus Health page as well. So good way to keep on top of things. And the application map is now generally available for Amazon CloudWatch. So this lets you monitor large-scale distributed applications by automatically discovering and organizing services into groups based on configurations and their relationships. I'm going to use this because I've got an application that fits this right now and I don't know what is going on with it so I'm going to do this.

27:03So with this new application performance monitoring APN capability, customers can quickly visualize which applications and dependencies to focus on while troubleshooting their distributed applications. That sounds handy. Quick update for migration and transfer. So AWS DataSync now supports VPC endpoint policies. So this allows you to control access to DataSync API operations through the DataSync VPC service endpoints and FIPS 140-3 enabled VPC service endpoints. This is really useful depending on the security posture and compliance requirements that you have. Let's talk networking and content delivery.

27:41AWS Client VPN is now supporting the macOS Tahoe release. So if you're on the latest and greatest, you can take advantage of that. And AWS Secrets Manager has expanded private link support to FIPS endpoints as well. So this is useful if you're in the FIPS world. And starting today, Amazon VPC Lattice lets you configure the number of IPv4 addresses assigned to resource gateway elastic network interfaces. So this enhancement builds on VPC Lattice's capability of providing access to resources on layer 4, things like databases, clusters, domain names, etc. across multiple VPCs and accounts. So you can now specify the number of IPv4 addresses per ENI, which becomes immutable after setting.

28:25Now on to security, identity, and compliance. AWS Directory Service now enables customers to upgrade managed Microsoft AD from Standard to Enterprise Edition programmatically through the Update Directory Setup API. Amazon Cognito allows you to configure terms of use and privacy policy documents for managed login pages. That's actually really cool. I use the managed login pages because, quite frankly, I can't be bothered building login pages. And it's always the sort of thing that you're just going to muck up. You're going to get it wrong. Cognito has it built in, and this means you can customize it more.