Amazon Web Services has debuted an agent that it says will evaluate your cloudy environment “as an experienced cloud architect would” and recommend useful changes. The cloud colossus named its bot the “AWS Well-Architected Agent,” a nod to the Well-Architected Framework that outlines best practices for using the Amazonian cloud. Amazon’s announcement says the agentic incarnation of the Framework analyzes AWS environments “against Well-Architected best practices across 65+ AWS services” and then delivers “targeted, contextual recommendations for improving your applications’ cost, security, performance, and resilience.” “It generates recommendations aligned to your declared business goals, delivers implementation packages with every finding, and surfaces cross-pillar trade-offs making it simpler to remediate the findings,” we’re told. The agent also delivers “ready-to-implement fixes” and “provides individual resource findings with specific dollar impact (where applicable) and step-by-step remediation, consolidated findings across multiple resources scoped to your application, and broad architectural patterns and designs with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) code changes needed to align with Well-Architected best practices.” AWS offers myriad services — some of them with overlapping features and functions. Customers often find themselves using more services than they intended, or using services that aren’t quite right for their intended use. AWS is generally happy if customers change to more appropriate services, even when that sees them spend less, and offers assistance from its own staff or channel partners to make it happen. This agent may make some of that human assistance less necessary. AWS is far from alone in suggesting agents should take on some of the chores that human IT professionals perform today - an approach that’s come to be known as AIOps. When your correspondent chats to IT pros about AIOps, they express distrust on grounds that they cannot be sure agents make valid suggestions and feel following bad advice offered by a machine would indefensible if things go pear-shaped. Vendors I’ve spoken to believe IT pros will first cautiously verify recommendations from AIOps systems, and if they see good results allow agents to take more actions without human oversight - but always with the ability to quickly roll back changes. AWS seems to recognize that users won’t go all-in immediately and therefore offers several manual means to apply recommendations the agent suggests, including the command line interface. For now, the agent is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) regions, but can handle workloads from any AWS commercial Region. It’s only available for users with an AWS support plan. ®

Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft’s status page says it has “paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event.” The event started at 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026. ExpressRoute Gateway is a service that connects on-prem networks to virtual networks in Azure, making it an important element of a hybrid cloud. Azure VPN Gateway creates a secure tunnel between on-prem infrastructure and Azure. Microsoft pitches its Azure VMware Service as an ideal way to build a hybrid cloud on VMware. This incident is therefore likely to make life hard for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud customers. At the time of writing, the incident impacts 18 Azure regions: West US, West US 3, North Europe, West Europe, France Central, UK West, UK South, Switzerland North, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Japan West, Korea Central, South Africa North, UAE North, Mexico Central, Germany North, South India, and Jio India Central. The Azure VMware service isn’t impacted in the last four of those regions. As of 23:13 UTC, Microsoft says it is “seeing continued recovery across impacted ExpressRoute gateways and are monitoring this recovery to confirm that it remains durable.” The company also advised that some affected VPN Gateways have experienced reduced redundancy rather than a complete loss of connectivity. “Some supporting network management components have not recovered automatically and are contributing to management operation failures in a subset of affected regions,” the update adds. “Engineering teams are actively restoring these components using alternate healthy instances where available.” Microsoft doesn’t know what happened, or why, but says its investigation “continues to show a correlation between this event and infrastructure operating system servicing activity.” The Register will update this story as Microsoft releases more information. ® UPDATED AT O3:30 UTC, OCTOBER 1 To add that Microsoft says it has mitigatged the incident, in a status update which also mentions more products – the Azure Firewall, Application Gateways, and Web Application Firewall – as being impacted. Redmond has promised to release more info, too.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran. In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the update says. "After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this Region." After the first Bahrain Availability Zone was damaged in March, AWS advised customers to migrate their workloads to other Regions. The company said most did so before further attacks disrupted a second Availability Zone in April and rendered the entire Region unavailable. AWS has reached a similar conclusion about one Availability Zone in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), saying it cannot re-establish access to the resources and data hosted there. The affected Zone, mec1-az2, is one of three in AWS's UAE Region. Two AWS facilities in the country were hit by drones back in March as Iran retaliated against US-Israeli strikes on its territory. AWS says it continues to work on recovering resources in the Region, including some hosted in the other affected Availability Zones (mec1-az1 and mec1-az3). It adds that "most customers" have been able to restart operations in other AWS Regions by restoring from backups or copying any data that remained accessible. The company says its support teams remain available to help customers move their applications to alternate Regions. The Register asked AWS to comment, but the company declined to add to the information on its Health Dashboard. In AWS terminology, a Region is a geographic area containing multiple isolated Availability Zones. Each Zone consists of one or more discrete datacenters with independent power, cooling, and network connectivity. AWS recommends distributing applications and resources across multiple Availability Zones to withstand the loss of a single location. That approach cannot protect against a Region-wide failure, however. Workloads that must survive such an event require a disaster recovery plan involving another Region. AWS and several other tech companies advised customers after the first strikes to recover whatever resources they could and replicate them in alternate Regions, ideally in Europe, rather than wait for services in the Middle East to return. That advice appears to have been well-founded. AWS said at the time: "Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions." ®

Amazon Web Services on Tuesday tapped mobile chip titan and aspiring datacenter SoC maker Qualcomm to develop "customized" silicon for AI inference and 1.6 Tbps optical networking gear to tie it all together, though it offered few details. Amazon's purchases and other commercial commitments under the agreement could total up to $60 billion in payments through September 2036. “Qualcomm is pleased to work with AWS on customized silicon and connectivity solutions, bringing decades of leadership in advanced processing and power-efficient compute, to deliver breakthrough performance and enable the next generation of AI infrastructure,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in a canned statement that tells us absolutely nothing about the nature of the deal. While details remain vague, custom chip deals of this sort aren’t unusual for cloud providers like Amazon. The cloud giant has previously engaged Intel to develop customized versions of its Xeon processors. Similarly, AMD has built custom CPUs, like the Epyc 9V64H, for Microsoft. Qualcomm’s involvement could involve the development of fully custom silicon, chiplets, or customized versions of its emerging datacenter accelerator portfolio. Detailed during Qualcomm's annual investor day earlier this summer, the new rack-scale AI platform swaps pricey high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for what the chip biz calls high-bandwidth compute. Qualcomm boasts that the technology will enable it to achieve higher “effective” memory bandwidth — a key bottleneck for AI inference workloads — using cheaper LPDDR memory by shifting some of the compute to the memory’s base die. The technology is expected to launch next year as part of Qualcomm’s AI250-series of Dragonfly rack systems. It’s entirely possible that, just like Intel builds customized versions of its Xeon 6 processors for AWS, Qualcomm will bring a customized version of its AI250-series chips to the cloud provider as well. Qualcomm is also working on a new datacenter CPU called the C1000 that it claims will touch 5 GHz and scale to more than 250 cores when it arrives in the second half of 2028. We reached out to Amazon and Qualcomm for additional color on what the multi-generation tie will eventually entail, but hadn’t heard back at the time of publication. While the AI inference side of the equation is about as clear as mud, Qualcomm’s networking contributions are far more obvious. As part of the collab, Amazon will employ Qualcomm’s serializer-deserializers (SerDes) and optical digital signal processors (DSPs) — likely acquired with the purchase of Alphawave Semi late last year — to boost port speeds to 1.6 Tbps. This points to AWS expanding its supply chain to include Qualcomm as a source of optical pluggables, or potentially near- or co-packaged optics. High-speed optical interconnects have become a major supply chain hurdle for scaling AI infrastructure, particularly as compute scales from a rack with a few dozen accelerators to hundreds or thousands spanning multiple racks. The customer-supplier relationship also runs both ways. While AWS hoovers up its chip tech, Qually plans to expand its use of Amazon’s Bedrock platform for electronic design automation workloads — after all, this wouldn't be an AI deal if it didn't contribute to the circular economy somehow. ®