AWS Weekly Roundup: Step Functions as Agent Tools, GPT-6.1 Terra on Bedrock, Lambda SOCI
The November 2 AWS Weekly Roundup leads with OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Terra being generally available on Amazon Bedrock. AWS says input and output token prices are at least 50% lower than GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-5.6 Terra, with up to 1 million input tokens and text plus image input.
The more interesting item architecturally is that AWS Step Functions workflows, both Standard and Express, can now be exposed as AI agent tools through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway over MCP. It is available in every Region where AgentCore Gateway runs, at standard pricing. Instead of letting an agent string together many fine-grained API calls, teams can wrap a vetted, auditable multi-step workflow as a single tool. Retries, error handling and IAM boundaries then stay in the state machine rather than in the model's reasoning.
Other items in the roundup:
- AWS Lambda supports SOCI lazy loading for Lambda Managed Instances, with AWS citing up to 70% faster container startup. SOCI indexes are pushed to Amazon ECR.
- Amazon ECS adds GPU sharing with NVIDIA MPS on ECS Managed Instances and ECS on EC2.
- Amazon EKS Auto Mode supports the Kubernetes Gateway API at no extra charge beyond standard load balancing.
- AWS KMS adds ML-KEM post-quantum key encapsulation.
Read more — AWS News Blog
Amazon S3 Tables Offers Managed Migration from Apache Hive to Apache Iceberg
Amazon S3 Tables can now migrate Parquet tables registered in the AWS Glue Data Catalog from Hive format to Apache Iceberg as a managed operation. There are no pipelines to build or compute to provision, and production workloads keep running during the migration. The process validates the source, produces a compatibility report, then copies data. You can run incremental syncs as often as needed, and the final cutover takes only a few minutes of write downtime.
The destination table is read-only while migration is in progress and becomes read-write on completion. You pay only for the data copied, with no charge for the conversion itself. The CLI calls are aws s3tables start-table-migration and aws s3tables sync-table-migration, and Amazon Athena and SageMaker Unified Studio integrate directly. At launch the feature supports same-account, same-Region migrations in eleven Regions across the US, Asia Pacific and Europe.
For data platform teams with large Hive estates, this removes much of the custom Spark work usually needed to move to Iceberg and its ACID transactions, schema evolution and time travel.
Read more — AWS News Blog
Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash Is Generally Available for Video Generation and Editing
Google made Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash generally available on Google Cloud on November 6, with API access under the model ID gemini-omni-1.2-flash. Pricing is $0.07 per second of 720p video, which Google says is 30% less than Omni 1.1 Flash. Maximum clip length goes from 10 to 15 seconds. Drafts can be generated at 360p or 720p and then upscaled to 1080p or 4K, which keeps iteration cheap.
The model supports Provisioned Throughput for predictable capacity, and all outputs carry a SynthID watermark. Audio references are gated behind allowlisting. In the global region of Gemini Enterprise, Omni 1.2 Flash replaces Veo 3.1 for video generation, so teams calling Veo through Gemini Enterprise should check their outputs and quotas.
Read more — Google Cloud Blog
Gemini Enterprise Ends Bundled Gemini Code Assist Entitlements
Google Cloud's November 6 release notes announce that bundled Gemini Code Assist entitlements for existing Gemini Enterprise Standard and Plus subscriptions end on March 31, 2027. Until then, support is limited to the Gemini 3.x model family. New Gemini Enterprise subscriptions have not included a Code Assist entitlement since October 9, 2026.
Google points developers to Google Antigravity, which is included in Gemini Enterprise editions, as the replacement for agentic coding. Organizations that rolled out Code Assist IDE extensions through Gemini Enterprise should plan their migration this quarter. That includes re-evaluating IDE plugins, admin policies and any code-customization indexes built on Code Assist.
Read more — Google Cloud Release Notes
Links & Sources
You May Also Enjoy
