A GPU burns 700 watts and hundreds of thousands of tries to learn Pong. A human brain does it on 20 watts in a handful of attempts. So what can the oldest architecture in computing teach us about where agents and memory are headed?

In this post, Andy Warfield explains how databases like DuckDB are enabling a new way to build with data, why they matter right now, and how they complement the work we’ve been doing in S3 (e.g., S3 Files, S3 Tables, S3 Vectors). And most importantly, why DuckLabs, the team behind DuckDB, is joining AWS

Zak van der Merwe has spent his entire career at AWS building control planes. First for EC2 and now for DSQL. On the surface, the control plane looks quite boring: it records what should exist and reconciles that with what actually does. Nobody leaves school dreaming of building one, but Zak will be the first to tell you that if you like solving hard problems in distributed systems, there are few better places to be. It’s where many of those hard problems converge, and where the decisions you make determine whether a service survives its own growth.

Today, we're releasing the second season of the Now Go Build documentary series. Five episodes featuring technology leaders from around the world solving the hardest problems in healthcare and education.

What made the Quick desktop team successful is the same thing that has always produced the best work I've seen at Amazon: a small group of people who trusted each other, owned the problem end-to-end, and acted on their conviction.

The subtle inventiveness that reduced cold start setup from seconds to 200μs.

Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files

Over the past decade, Byron's team has proven the correctness of our authorization engine, our cryptographic implementations, and our virtualization layer. Now they're taking those same techniques and applying them to agentic systems.

Today, I’m honored to introduce you to the latest cohort of Now Go Build CTO Fellows. Individuals from around the world with diverse backgrounds (engineering, the humanities, business, healthcare, entrepreneurship, law) that have found their calling at the intersection of technology and education.

Fear is actually a pretty good signal that you are pushing into the unknown, that real growth doesn’t happen without a bit of that associated discomfort, and that it’s worth becoming aware when it happens. Aware enough to consider actually leaning into it.

We’ve caught glimpses of a future that values autonomy, empathy, and individual expertise. Where interdisciplinary cooperation influences discovery and creation at an unrelenting pace. In the coming year, we will begin the transition into a new era of AI in the human loop, not the other way around. This cycle will create massive opportunities to solve problems that truly matter.

While many of us chase the latest tech trends, innovative builders in Sub-Saharan Africa are leveraging a nearly 30-year-old messaging protocol to process hundreds of billions in transactions annually, reminding us that the best technology isn't always the shiniest, it's what actually solves customer problems.