AWS Cloud Architect & AI Expert
Monday again: where is my order. That pile is about 18% of helpdesk volume. Look up the scan. Do not invent a 2pm window. We are not publishing a tickets-down number.
On August 19, 2026 AWS enabled live-web fetch for Bedrock Web Search in 3 US Regions. Default external_web_access is true; AmazonBedrockFullAccess still does not grant ExternalWebAccess, and the 403 does not fail the request.
Pick the surface instead of AgentCore versus Quick. Agent Skills are official on Harness and Strands, not Chat Agents. August 2026 list price: 500-employee Quick Professional ~$10,250/mo vs ~$791 AgentCore at 50K sessions.
On Aug 7, 2026, AWS shipped aws-auth as a core Cognito skill in the Agent Toolkit, with 603 installs on skills.sh within days, 9 reference packs under skills/core-skills/aws-auth, and a hard warning that update-user-pool-client is a full replace.
Harness GA Jun 17, 2026 plus Strands 1.0 primitives, and why AWS Context is still Coming soon. Reuse the ~180→95 ms Gateway canary; ship Managed KB today.
On Aug 6, 2026 AgentCore Runtime Instances went GA: EC2-backed agents with sessions up to 14 days vs 8-hour microVM Runtime. Field guide: capacity providers, GPU fit, and when idle EC2 burns more than serverless.
On August 4, 2026 Amazon Connect Cases gained workspace CSV export in 10 Regions, with a Cases.Export permission, a field picker, and a Cases-export-YYYY-MM-DD.csv file. Enable for the right roles only.
On August 5, 2026 DynamoDB GA’d native vector search: single-digit ms at 99%+ recall, up to 4096 dims, SearchVectors topK ≤ 100. Decision guide vs S3 Vectors, OpenSearch, and Bedrock Knowledge Bases.
Hand this to your technical lead. The store decision: one lookup this week, a person signs money, skip when a rule already works. Sample uses 9 Gateway tools and is not a client case study.
On June 15, 2026 Grok 4.3 GA on Bedrock Mantle at $1.25/$2.50 per 1M. On August 19, 2026 Grok 4.6 added Converse + US Geo/Global CRIS at $2.00 to $2.20 / $6.00 to $6.60. On September 28, 2026 Grok 4.7 shipped at the same rates. Do not jump on name alone.
On July 30, 2026 AWS cut Bedrock on-demand prices 80% for GPT-5.6 Luna and 20% for Terra. Luna is now $0.22/$1.32 per 1M tokens. This post covers the routing math and what not to re-price overnight.
On July 24, 2026 AWS shipped Claude Opus 5 on Bedrock with 1M-token context, 128K max output, and ZDR by default. This post covers the Bedrock vs Claude Platform routing call and a lane-by-lane rollout plan.
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