AWS Podcast #742: Amazon QuickSuite, AWS MCP, and Lots More!

Date: October 20, 2025
Hosts: Simon Elisha (B), Gillian Ford (A)

Overview

This packed episode dives into nearly 60 AWS service updates, with an emphasis on the general availability of Amazon QuickSuite (an AI-powered workspace), the launch of the AWS API MCP Server (for seamless AWS API interaction via natural language), wide-ranging highlights covering analytics, AI, compute, security, and more. A strong recurring theme is robust IPv6 support across services, marked by the hosts’ repeated good-natured ribbing about 2025 being the “Year of IPv6.”

Key Highlights & Discussion Points

1. Amazon QuickSuite: Agentic AI Workspace (00:18)

• Announcement: General Availability of Amazon QuickSuite
• Features:
  • “Agentic teammates” can retrieve insights from both the internet & internal business data (docs, 3rd-party apps, databases)
  • Performs actions: e.g., creates/updates Jira tickets, ServiceNow incidents, automates RFP responses, preps meeting docs
  • Single point—from “insights to action”
  • Data Privacy: “Your queries and data are never used to train models.” (Simon, 01:30)
  • Customizable/tailorable experience, 30-day free trial (up to 25 users)
• Experience/Use Cases:
  • Simon recounted using QuickSuite for iterative domain research:

    "In just a few points I said, you know, this should be more about, you know, the Australian experience. … It responded in that next iteration… it felt humanistic in doing it that way." (Simon, 01:51)

  • Gillian exploring AI/healthcare trend analysis in spreadsheets and is “especially excited for automation.”

2. AWS API MCP Server v1 (Model Context Protocol) (03:22)

• Announcement: AWS API MCP Server (Open-source)
• What it does: Enables foundation models (LLMs) to interact directly with any AWS API using natural language. Auto-generates syntactically correct CLI commands.
• Pain Point Addressed: LLMs often generate incorrect AWS CLI commands.

  “A lot of the LLMs I use are pretty good… but more often than not, they issue the CLI command they think they should issue… then they get an error.” (Simon, 03:50)

• Major Tip:

  “Tell the LLM to use the Call AWS tool instead of the Use AWS tool. … That’s the little syntactic sugar that makes life easy.” (Simon, 06:33)

• Features:
  • “Suggest AWS command” tool, improved security/input validation, logs via CloudWatch agent, streamable HTTP transport
  • “Get Execution Plan” experimental tool (shows plan before running)
• Where to Find: AWS Labs GitHub repo (not in standard AWS docs!)
• Third-party infrastructure-as-code Support: Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation

3. Analytics, AI, & Data Services (07:01)

AWS Clean Rooms Updates (07:01)

• Cross-region Data Collaboration: Now easier to collaborate without moving/copying data. “[It] is just going to make it a lot simpler, especially… optimizing those costs.” (Gillian, 07:21)
• Data Access Budgets: Privacy control to limit number of analyses (not cost budgets).

Glue, Kinesis, and OpenSearch (08:07–08:54)

• Glue: Write ops for SAP, OData, Adobe, Salesforce, Hubspot—enables full ETL pipelines in/out.
• Kinesis Video Streams: Now supports IPv6.
  “The year of IPv6.” (Ongoing running joke throughout episode)
• OpenSearch Ingestion: Batch AI inference for large datasets (billions of vector embeddings in batch).

4. Application Integration & Messaging (09:27)

Apache Airflow 3.0 Support

• Fully managed with new scheduling, improved UI, Python 3.12 support, security enhancements, scheduler-managed backfill.

AWS End User Messaging

• Now supports real-time onboarding progress alerts via Slack, email, or any EventBridge target; improves tracking for communication platforms.

5. AI & Machine Learning (10:58)

Amazon Bedrock

• Cohere Embed v4 supported: Multimodal embedding model that natively understands text, images, tables, diagrams, code, handwriting.
• Open-source MCP Server in Agent Core: Natural language interface for building/deploying AI agents; available globally via GitHub.
• Enhanced Audio Transcription:
  • Speaker diarization (who said what)
  • Channel identification (track speakers/channels separately)
  • “This can just make it easier for additional downstream processes…” (Gillian, 12:28)

AWS Knowledge MCP Server

• Now GA/Public: Freely accessible, details on regional API/CloudFormation resource availability.
• “And most importantly, it is publicly accessible at no cost. It does not require an AWS account.” (Gillian, 13:50)

Amazon Q Developer

• New Cost Estimation: Use natural language to get service pricing and workload estimates (e.g., “How much does RDS extended support cost?”)
• “Super exciting for businesses of all different sizes.” (Gillian, 14:41)

Amazon SageMaker

• Unified Studio: Corporate identity support and SSO for Spark via AWS Identity Center.
• Notebook instance now supports Amazon Linux 2023.

6. Marketplace, Business Apps & Amazon Connect (15:29–18:56)

AWS Marketplace

• Usage-based private offers now support Euro, GBP, AUD, JPY.
• Sellers: Up to 200 pricing dimensions, more flexibility.

Amazon Connect

• Improvements: GenAI-powered email overviews, improved prompts for outbound calls, more customizable service-level calculations.
• New: Screen recording for Chrome OS, bulk agent config editing, adherence notifications, robust case management APIs, time-off analytics in data lake.
• “The team that does the absolute highest rate of changes for their customers … They have a list of things…” (Simon, 17:59)

7. Compute & EC2 (18:56–22:17)

• EKS/ECS Upgrades: Support for Kubernetes 1.34 and new ECS event features.
• New Instance Types:
  • C8i/C8i Flex (Custom Intel Xeon 6): 15% better price/perf, 2.5x memory bandwidth vs previous gen
  • M8A (AMD EPYC): 30% higher performance, 19% better price/perf vs M7A; up to 60% faster for JVM, 39% for Cassandra
• EC2 Instance Connect & Keyspaces: IPv6 support
• Parallel Computing Service: 60+ new customizable Slurm parameters, node reboot support

Quote:
“If I work up to 60% faster for my application, I’d be like this is awesome.” (Simon, 22:04)

8. Databases (23:09–23:43)

• Amazon Keyspaces, DynamoDB: Now IPv6-enabled
• Amazon Neptune: Integrates with Graphstorm for scalable graph ML
• RDS for DB2: Native database-level backups—easier migrations

9. Developer Tools & Gaming (24:01)

• AWS Builder ID: Now supports Google sign-in for seamless access across AWS learning/career resources.
• Amazon GameLift: Console access to servers/instances, IPv6 streaming for Windows apps.

10. Management, Migration, Networking (24:59)

• Invoice Correction: Self-service updates to invoice info — major for enterprise cycle-time.
• Automatic Quota Management: Warnings before quota exhaustion—configurable notifications (Slack, email, SMS).
• CloudWatch App Map GA: Auto-discovers and visualizes distributed app dependencies.
• AWS DataSync: Now supports VPC endpoint policies.
• AWS Client VPN: Supports latest macOS, VPC Lattice now allows configuring IPv4 address counts per gateway ENI.
• Secrets Manager: PrivateLink FIPS endpoints.

11. Security, Identity & Compliance (28:23)

• Directory Service: Programmatic upgrade from Standard to Enterprise AD Edition.
• Cognito: Custom Terms of Use/privacy policy for managed login pages—no-code customization.
• Amazon Detective: PrivateLink VPC endpoint access.
• Directory Service: Now supports IPv6 connectivity from Managed Microsoft AD and AD Connector.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "The year of IPv6." (Multiple times, running gag; e.g., Simon, 08:41; Gillian, 23:21; 29:44)
• “Remember to tell the LLM to use the Call AWS tool instead of the Use AWS tool.” (Simon, 06:33)
• "If I work up to 60% faster for my application, I'd be like this is awesome." (Simon, 22:04)
• "And most importantly, it is publicly accessible at no cost. It does not require an AWS account." (Gillian, 13:50)
• "In all seriousness, I mean, IPv6 is critical for the future of the Internet, so the fact that it's all there is not a small thing." (Simon, 30:10)

Episode Flow & Recommended Timestamps

| Segment & Topics | Timestamps | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Amazon QuickSuite: Overview, use cases, automation | 00:18–03:21 | | AWS API MCP Server: How it works, key tips | 03:22–06:55 | | Analytics & AI: Clean Rooms, Glue, OpenSearch, Bedrock, Q Developer | 07:01–15:01 | | Marketplace, Connect, Business Apps, Compute innovations | 15:29–22:17 | | EC2, Parallel Computing, Databases, Slurm, Keyspaces/DynamoDB IPv6 | 22:17–23:43 | | Developer Tools, Gaming, Invoice mgmt, Service quotas, CW AppMap | 24:01–24:59 | | Management, Migration, Networking, Security, Cognito, Detective | 24:59–29:44 | | IPv6 wrap-up, closing reflections | 29:44–30:22 |

Conclusion

This episode is a whirlwind tour of AWS innovation—especially notable for the new QuickSuite AI workspace, the robust AWS API MCP Server for LLM integration, and strong signals (with lots of dry humor) on AWS’s all-in public IPv6 support. Developers, cloud architects, and IT decision-makers will find actionable takeaways on cost estimation, automation, seamless integrations, and maximizing security across cloud workloads.