aws7 articles
AWS Snaps Up DuckLabs as DuckDB Moves Into the Cloud Giant's Orbit
AWS has acquired DuckLabs, the company behind the popular open-source in-process OLAP database DuckDB, though financial terms were not disclosed. DuckDB and its related projects will remain free and open source under their MIT licenses, with the independent DuckDB Foundation continuing to oversee the project's direction. The DuckLabs team will remain based in Amsterdam, and the Foundation's governance role is expected to expand to give the broader community more influence over the project's development.
Iran Claims It Hit AWS Bahrain Again. The Region Has Been Offline For Months Anyway.
Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claims to have struck AWS infrastructure in Bahrain again with cruise missiles, describing it as retaliation for a reported US attack on an Iranian nuclear facility under construction. AWS services in Bahrain have already been offline for months following earlier Iranian strikes in late February, making it difficult to verify whether a new attack actually occurred. Iran has also designated facilities linked to other major tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, as potential targets for future retaliatory strikes.
AWS Billing Console Loses the Plot, Tells Users They Owe Trillions
A software bug in AWS's billing system caused wildly inflated cost estimates to be displayed in the Cost Explorer console, with some users receiving estimates in the billions or even trillions of dollars despite negligible actual usage. AWS confirmed the figures were inaccurate and did not reflect real charges, pausing further estimate updates while investigating the issue. The company identified and mitigated the root cause and expected corrected billing figures to be restored for all customers by noon Pacific time on Saturday, July 18.
Amazon Mechanical Turk Is Being Put Out to Pasture
Amazon Web Services has announced it will stop accepting new customers for its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, with the service closing to new users from July 30, 2026, signalling the eventual retirement of one of the internet's earliest crowdsourcing marketplaces. Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk allowed users to post tasks for remote workers to complete, and later found a use case in human-reviewed data annotation for AI training. Amazon has not given an official reason for the wind-down, though it has developed competing services such as SageMaker GroundTruth, and reports suggest the platform has been in decline for some time.
Nobody Wants Grok on Bedrock. AWS Is Adding It Anyway.
AWS is reportedly in talks to add Elon Musk's Grok AI models to its Bedrock platform, despite there being virtually no enterprise demand for the product, with industry insiders expressing strong disinterest or outright aversion to it. The author argues that the real motivation isn't customer demand but rather a strategic pattern AWS has already used with Anthropic and OpenAI — investing in AI labs in exchange for large commitments to use Amazon's Trainium chips, with the Bedrock listing serving merely as the public-facing wrapper. The arrangement is complicated by the fact that SpaceX, which now owns Grok's parent company, is also a direct competitor to Amazon's own satellite internet service, Amazon Leo.
Amazon Builds a Walled AI Film Studio and Greenlights Three Animated Series Nobody Asked For
Amazon MGM Studios and AWS have launched a "GenAI Creators' Fund" to finance AI-powered film projects, alongside a proprietary production platform called "Project Nara" that integrates AI models into industry-standard tools like Blender, Maya, and Adobe Suite. Three animated series are already in production for Prime Video, with teams given just five weeks to produce pilots to demonstrate AI's speed advantage over traditional methods. Project Nara aims to address common AI video shortcomings such as inconsistent characters and continuity errors, with Amazon claiming it has built the only end-to-end AI content creation ecosystem in the industry.
CISA Left Its Passwords in a Public GitHub Repo Called 'Private-CISA'
CISA, the US cybersecurity agency, had a trove of sensitive credentials — including plaintext passwords, SSH private keys, and tokens — exposed in a public GitHub repository called "Private-CISA" since at least November 2025, with GitHub's default secret-protection features deliberately disabled. Security testing confirmed the leaked credentials provided high-privilege access to multiple AWS GovCloud accounts, and the repo appears to have been managed by CISA contractor Nightwing. The incident marks yet another security embarrassment for CISA, following a separate January 2026 incident in which the acting director uploaded sensitive government documents to ChatGPT.