Transform live video for mobile audiences with AWS Elemental Inference

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re announcing AWS Elemental Inference, a fully managed AI service that automatically transforms and maximizes live and on-demand video broadcasts to engage audiences at scale. At launch, you’ll be able to use AWS Elemental Inference to adapt video content into vertical formats optimized for mobile and social platforms in real time. With AWS Elemental…

AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Amazon Bedrock, Kiro in GovCloud Regions, new Agent Plugins, and more (February 23, 2026)

By Dustin Ward

Last week, my team met many developers at Developer Week in San Jose. My colleague, Vinicius Senger delivered a great keynote about renascent software—a new way of building and evolving applications where humans and AI collaborate as co-developers using Kiro. Other colleagues spoke about building and deploying production-ready AI agents. Everyone stayed to ask and…

Introducing Budget Bytes: Build powerful AI apps for under $25

By Dustin Ward

When developers hear “cloud” and “AI,” their first thought is often about cost. “How much will this cost me to learn? Can I build something meaningful without racking up a surprise bill?” Budget Bytes is a new series is designed to inspire developers to build affordable, production-quality AI applications on Azure with a budget of…

Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry-Frontier Performance for Scale

By Dustin Ward

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available today in Microsoft Foundry, and it is designed for teams who want frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work at scale.Last week, we took a major step forward with the availability of Claude Opus 4.6 in Microsoft Foundry, bringing frontier AI capable of deep reasoning, agentic workflows, and complex…

Azure reliability, resiliency, and recoverability: Build continuity by design

By Dustin Ward

Modern cloud systems are expected to deliver more than uptime. Customers expect consistent performance, the ability to withstand disruption, and confidence that recovery is predictable and intentional. In Azure, these expectations map the three distinct concepts: reliability, resiliency, and recoverability. Explore technical methodologies with Azure Essentials Reliability describes the degree to which a service or workload…

Amazon EC2 Hpc8a Instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are now available

By Dustin Ward

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc8a instances, a new high performance computing (HPC) optimized instance type powered by latest 5th Generation AMD EPYC processors with a maximum frequency of up to 4.5 GHz. These instances are ideal for compute-intensive tightly coupled HPC workloads, including computational fluid dynamics,…