The templates in this collection cover many common production needs, including titles, logo reveals, slideshows, video openers, intros, lower thirds, animated typefaces, and icons. Some provide a complete sequence, while others handle one specific part of a larger edit. Colors, typography, footage, audio, and timing can usually be changed to suit personal and client projects.

Free templates vary considerably in quality. Some are carefully organized and include helpful documentation, while others may require fonts, plugins, presets, or older versions of After Effects. Checking these details before downloading will save time later.

The best results come from treating an After Effects template as a foundation rather than a finished design. Small changes to the pacing, type, color, and movement can make a familiar animation feel far more appropriate for your content. The collections below offer plenty of options for different styles, skill levels, and video formats.

What to Look for in an After Effects Template

A polished preview does not tell you everything about a template. Before downloading, check how the project was built and whether it will work with your version of After Effects.

• After Effects compatibility: Confirm the minimum version required to open the project.
• Plugin requirements: Check whether the template relies on paid or third-party plugins.
• Included assets: See whether fonts, sound effects, music, footage, and images are supplied or need to be downloaded separately.
• Project dimensions: Check the resolution, frame rate, orientation, and duration.
• Layer organization: Clearly named compositions, layers, and placeholders will make editing much simpler.
• Documentation: Look for written instructions or a video showing how the main controls work.
• License terms: Confirm whether commercial and client work is permitted and whether attribution is required.

Titles After Effects Templates

A title sequence is often the first design element viewers see, so typography, timing, and movement all matter. Even a simple title can give a video personality and prepare the viewer for what follows.

Designing animated titles from scratch is rewarding, but it can also take hours of testing keyframes, transitions, and effects. A good template handles much of that groundwork while leaving plenty of room for your own creative choices.

This collection features free title templates for a range of styles and project types. Each can be customized in After Effects with your preferred text, colors, fonts, and timing to create an opening that fits your video.

800+ Text Effect Elements for After Effects

This extensive After Effects template includes over 800 animated text effect elements. Each element is easy to edit with simple text and color controls. These text elements are perfect for bold titles, clean openers, and social videos that need modern animated typography.

2001 Space Odyssey Movie Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This free title template recreates the 2001 Space Odyssey film’s familiar typography style and effects in After Effects. You can quickly adjust the text size and spacing for unique branding while honoring the original 2001 look.

Retro Movie Titles for After Effects

Try the Retro Movie Titles template if you’re looking for retro-style typography. The template comes with easily editable layers and full color control, making it easy to customize the title to match your brand.

Glitch Text Maker for After Effects

The glitch effect will help make your videos stand out. This template pack makes it easy to add your own text and is a perfect choice for anyone looking for a retro or vintage effect.

Switch To Text Box Titles After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free kinetic title template includes seven scenes with two media placeholders. Each element is labeled to help speed up the editing process, and the design is suitable for various purposes, including corporate slideshows and personal videos.

Liquid Animation Titles for After Effects

This well-organized title animation opener template is ideal for promoting anything. It contains 110 animated elements pre-rendered into .mov files with a JPEG + Alpha codec. It also includes nine pre-designed text scenes, and you can easily add more.

Flipped Titles After Effects Template

Free to Download

Flipped Titles is a clean and well-organized free template for After Effects. It includes seven unique full-screen titles with some cool and creatively animated effects.

Simplicity Title Pack for After Effects

This After Effects pack includes over 60 different titles. The titles are modern and minimal, making them suitable for most projects.

Swirling Letters Title Template for After Effects

Free to Download

Add a simple yet impressive title to your next video project with this free swirling letters titles template. Easily add a video, edit the text, and match your colors to make this title template your own.

Elegant Serif Titles for After Effects

If you’re looking for an elegant After Effects Title template, look no further than this template pack. It includes 16 different typography styles and a detailed help file to help you customize the project to your needs.

Poly Titles After Effects Titles & Graphics

Free to Download

These title templates will come in handy if you want to give your titles an abstract look and feel. The template includes nine different titles and graphics, and it is easy to customize with your own colors.

4K Rolling Titles for After Effects

This modular 4K After Effects template includes 10 title scenes with up-and-down rolling text animations. It offers editable timing controls and easy text customization. It is ideal for openers, title sequences, or social media videos that need modern kinetic typography.

Basic Animated Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template includes animated titles and lower thirds in a clean, minimal style. It’s simple to edit with text placeholders and color controls. Great for presentations, YouTube videos, or social content that needs clear and simple text animation with no extra setup.

4K Fullscreen Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

This 4K After Effects template includes nine full-screen animated titles. Each title template is fully editable with text and color controls. These clean titles are ideal for openers, presentations, or promotional videos that need a clear, modern, and simple title animation.

Clean & Simple After Effects Titles

Free to Download

This free titles template has a modern aesthetic, with smooth animations and beautiful typography. The title is easy to customize with editable text and color controls. It is perfect for corporate videos or presentations that need a quick title animation with a professional look. It is compatible with After Effects 2023 and above.

Minimal Titles Pack for After Effects

Free to Download

This Free Minimal Titles pack includes 20 animation styles and titles and a royalty-free music track that can be used even in commercial projects. To use it, you just need to add your text and render the file.

Tagline Bold Title Template for After Effects

Free to Download

Make your headlines pop with this bold titles template. It is a collection of 25 free-to-download titles that can be quickly customized to match your brand.

Cinematic Title Style Library for After Effects

Free to Download

This style library for After Effects and Adobe Premiere is a great way to add style to your titles without wasting time creating them from scratch. You can quickly download and import this style library and use it in your projects.

Pop-Up Titles After Effects Templates

Free to Download

If you’re looking for stylish typography, use this free pop-up title template for After Effects. The template allows you to edit the text and customize your titles’ colors and duration.

Classic Kinetic Titles for After Effects

Free to Download

Free Classic Kinetic Titles is a universal and multi-purpose title template perfect for your company’s business presentations. The project includes a color controller for quick changes and editable text layers.

Modern After Effects Titles Template

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a smooth and elegant title pack, check out this pack of six free After Effects titles. The titles feature a fresh and modern style that’s perfect for young startups and small businesses.

Logo Reveal After Effects Templates

Logo reveals turn a static brand mark into a short animated sequence. By combining motion, sound, and visual effects, they give a logo more presence at the beginning or end of a video.

The best logo animations are usually brief. A few well-timed movements can say more than an overly complicated sequence, whether the logo belongs to a global company, a local business, or a personal creative project.

The free After Effects templates below cover styles ranging from restrained and minimal to energetic and cinematic. They can be adapted for promotional videos, presentations, social media, YouTube channels, and client work, subject to each template’s license.

Typographic Logo Intro for After Effects

This logo reveal or intro template uses bold typography and kinetic transitions to present your brand beautifully. It is easy to customize. Simply swap in your logo, edit the text, tweak the colors, then render. It would be an ideal template for app launches or brand reveals.

Click Three Logo Reveals for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects logo pack includes three reveals in a modern and minimal style. They include a simple circle reveal, a mouse click-to-reveal, and an animated button push.

White Scroll Logo Reveals for After Effects

If you’re looking for a more classic-style logo opener, try the White Scroll logo reveal. The template comes with three background versions and three different logo placement options.

Glitch Logo Reveal for After Effects Templates

Free to Download

This free After Effects logo reveal template uses pixelation and static noise to give your logo reveal a glitchy look and feel. This is a great template for gaming content or digital-themed videos.

Search Logo Reveal for After Effects

A unique way to reveal your logo is to use an animated search bar with a sample question. Your logo then shows up as the answer. You can customize the text and quickly drop in your logo.

4K Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This logo reveal template would be great for a startup or a small business. It is easy to use and includes detailed instructions on how to customize and render your logo reveal project.

Battle Logo Reveal for After Effects

The Battle Logo Reveal template would be perfect for a sports or gaming brand. It comes with a detailed help file, a logo placeholder, and an extensive set of backgrounds that you can use to customize your logo reveal.

Hi-Tech Logo Reveal for After Effects

This premium animated logo reveal features a dark blue background paired with light blue HUD elements. It’s a perfect logo template for any tech company looking to stand out online.

Super Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free logo reveal template features a clean and high-energy animation with bold transitions and dynamic light effects. It’s very easy to customize. All you have to do is drop in your logo and edit the colors or background. It is perfect for intros, brand openers, or YouTube channels that want a sharp, professional-looking logo animation without any extra setup.

Clean & Light Logo After Effects Template

Free to Download

This simple 4K logo reveal template is super-easy to make your own. All you have to do is swap out the logo placeholder and edit the text layer. It is compatible with After Effects CS6 and above.

MoGraph Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

This logo reveal template uses MoGraph Lines. They are animated lines used to connect elements and add flow or rhythm to animated scenes. The template is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

MoGraph Logo Reveal Template

Free to Download

The MoGraph in this logo reveal templates are animated geometric elements used to create movement or transitions within a composition. This bold style is perfect for many business types. It is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

Another 2D Logo Introduction Template

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a 2D style logo reveal, try this 2D logo introduction Template. This template allows you to easily customize the colors and insert your own logo. It also includes a detailed help file.

Three Animated Logo Reveals for After Effects

Free to Download

This free template pack contains three different logo reveals suitable for any corporate video. This template is an excellent choice for a modern and professional logo reveal.

4K Logo Reveal v.1 After Effects Template

Free to Download

This elegant logo reveal would be perfect for a high-end fashion or luxury brand. The template includes logo placeholders, editable text layers, and an intelligent color controller.

Fast Flip After Effects Logo Reveal Template

Free to Download

The free Fast Flip After Effects logo reveal template is a great starting point if you’re on a budget. It uses stock photography, which you can replace with photos of your team or company to reveal an elegant logo at the end. All you have to do is customize the colors, replace the images, and add your logo.

Blue Action Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

Try the Blue Action Logo Reveal template if you’re looking for a minimalist logo opener. It features a dynamic animation style, and includes a logo placeholder and editable text layers. You can also easily adjust the colors.

Hiro Anime-Inspired Logo Reveal for After Effects

Free to Download

Try this logo reveal template if you’re looking for an action-packed, hi-tech animation style. To edit the project, drop your logo or text into the logo composition and then render the project.

Hi-Tech Logo Reveal After Effects Template

Free to Download

If you want a logo reveal template designed in a Matrix-style, try the Hi-Tech Logo Reveal template. This template contains two color versions, logo placeholders, and two editable text layers.

Slideshow & Gallery After Effects Templates

A good slideshow depends on more than placing images in sequence. The order, timing, transitions, and music all influence how the work is presented. It can be used to showcase a portfolio, document an event, tell a visual story, or bring a set of photographs to life.

Galleries take a slightly different approach, displaying several images within the same composition. Grids, frames, and animated layouts allow related photos to be viewed together without making the screen feel crowded.

Building every layout and transition from scratch takes time. The free After Effects slideshow templates below have the structure, while giving you control over the images, colors, typography, pacing, and soundtrack.

Wall Gallery Photo Slideshow for After Effects

This After Effects template gives you a wall gallery-style photo slideshow with smooth camera moves and realistic lighting. It includes multiple image placeholders and editable text layers. It would be excellent for weddings, personal portfolios, or family photo collections.

Bold Slideshow for After Effects

Try the Bold Slideshow if you want a bold and colorful look. This template includes a detailed help file, editable placeholders and text layers, and full color control so you can easily customize the colors to match your brand.

Old Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Old Slideshow template is an excellent choice if you’re looking for a retro-style gallery or slideshow. The template comes with full-color control, so you can easily customize the color scheme.

Wall Slideshow for After Effects

Try the Wall Slideshow if you want a cool-looking, modern gallery to display your family photos and albums. The template is easy to customize and comes with full-color control.

Modern Zoom Telescopic Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This Modern Zoom Telescopic Slideshow Video features a unique zoom effect visualized through a telescopic transition. It also includes multiple light leaks and six image placeholders.

Slideshow Constructor for After Effects

This template features a vintage-style slideshow of polaroid photos. It’s a great choice if you want to combine all your photos and create a truly unique photo album.

Parallax Scrolling Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

Parallax is a popular animation effect used on many websites. Thanks to this template, you can also use the effect in your videos. This template contains nine image or video placeholders and nine text placeholders.

Creative Slideshow After Effects Template

This Creative Slideshow template features a dynamic, fast-paced animation style and bold typography. It would be perfect for a corporate video presentation and includes full-color controls and editable text layers.

Stylish Slideshow Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects slideshow template includes 23 image or video placeholders and six text layers. It has smooth transitions, clean animation, and allows for simple customization. Replace the media, edit the text, and render. It would be great for photo reels, travel videos, or quick promo videos.

Romantic Photo Slideshow Template for After Effects

This After Effects template creates a polaroid-style photo slideshow with a rustic aesthetic. It includes multiple media and text placeholders and would be perfect for wedding photoshoots, travel reels, or event highlights that need a vintage or a touch of romance.

Digital Film Strip for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template features a digital filmstrip animation with photo or video frames moving in sequence. It includes 18 media placeholders and 10 text layers. The layout is simple to edit and renders in full HD. It is compatible with After Effects CS4 and above.

Fast Slides After Effects Slideshow Template

Free to Download

Use this template if you’re working on a video that needs fast-moving animation. This slideshow would be perfect at the beginning of a video to introduce the different concepts.

Modern Tile Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Modern Tile Slideshow is an excellent choice for professional and corporate videos. The slideshow template features a unique, tiled look and a 3D tile drop-down effect to reveal your images and transition between them in 3D. The template also includes multiple light leaks.

Dynamic Colorful Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This dynamic template features a modern and colorful style paired with minimal typography. It’s an excellent choice for both business and personal video slideshows. The template includes 23 media placeholders, 19 editable text layers, and an intelligent color controller.

Stylish Spinning Columns Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

Consider the Stylish Spinning Columns Slideshow Template if you’re working on a high-end project. The template includes six image placeholders, a modern spinning column transition effect, and multiple light leaks.

Elegant Slideshow After Effects Template

Free to Download

This After Effects template is perfect for corporate and business slideshows. The template features elegant slide transitions and includes several placeholder images. You can easily add more and customize text and colors to match your brand.

After Effects Slideshow Templates

Free to Download

In this template, you will find 14 image placeholders arranged in a stunning grid layout. Thanks to the intelligent color controller, you can easily adjust the colors and replace the text with your own.

Clean Slideshow After Effects Templates

Free to Download

If you want a clean slideshow that you can use to present your family photos or if you need a clean slideshow for a corporate project, the Clean Slideshow template is the right choice. It features a stylish design, simple text animations, and smooth transitioning effects.

Opener After Effects Templates

Video openers have a lot to accomplish in a short amount of time. They combine footage, typography, graphics, and sound to establish the pace of a video before the main content begins.

Getting those elements to work together can involve detailed editing and plenty of keyframes. A pre-built template provides the timing and structure, while After Effects presets can help with individual animations and effects.

This collection includes free After Effects opener templates for YouTube videos, presentations, promotions, event films, and other creative projects. The styles range from quiet and minimal to fast, colorful, and effects-heavy. Replace the sample footage and text, adjust the colors, add your soundtrack, and shape the opener around your own content.

Colorful AE Opener Template

This creative and colorful opener template works well for travel, fashion, or kids’ brands. It’s also a great choice for simple video or photo slideshows, showreels, corporate presentations, or even a family album.

YouTube Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

This classic YouTube opener can be used in business and corporate projects. It comes with full-color control, and you can easily change the text and other elements to make it your own.

Glitch Media Opener for After Effects

Try this Glitch Media opener template for any grunge or retro-style video project. It comes with a detailed help file, animated fonts, and full color control

Mozaic Opener for After Effects

This mosaic opener template is versatile and works for many types of projects. It has a unique mosaic design, and you can easily add your own text and change the colors.

Colorful Sketch Speech Opener for After Effects

This After Effects opener has a fun, hand-drawn style with doodle textures and comic-style speech bubbles. It comes with six editable text spots, a logo slot, and a photo cut-out. It’s great for social media clips, creative presentations, or talk-show intros.

Good News Opener Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This After Effects opener uses bold text, smooth animation, and bright transitions to create a fresh news-style intro. The template is easy to edit with text and media placeholders. Replace the footage, update the titles, and render, and your intro will be ready.

Animated Slideshow Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

This slideshow-style opener template uses clean transitions, a simple layout, and subtle motion to present your photos or video clips. Just swap the placeholders with your media, edit the text and colors, then render. It is compatible with After Effects 2022 and above.

Dynamic Style Opener Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free 4K opener template provides a rapid editing setup for Adobe After Effects. It supports multiple aspect ratios (horizontal, vertical, and square). Use the horizontal format for YouTube, the vertical format for social media, and the square format for posts.

Dynamic & Fast After Effects Opener

This is another opener template that would work well for a company that targets a young audience. It features an energetic, fast-paced animation style. It comes with 16 image or video placeholders and six text placeholders.

Web Presentation Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template includes eight scenes and a logo reveal, making it ideal for promoting digital products or online services. It includes 45 text placeholders, 12 media placeholders, and a logo placeholder, along with color controllers for quick customization.

Parallax Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

If you’re looking for a stylish and elegant opener, look no further than this parallax opener. The template includes a stunning parallax animation with eight editable text layers, eight photo or video placeholders, and one logo placeholder.

Creative After Effects Opener

Try this template if you’re looking for a modern opener. It features a fast-paced animation in a slideshow style. You can easily change the colors and fonts, add your own elements, and render the project.

Elegant Corporate Intro AE Template

This elegant intro template can be used in corporate-style videos, weddings, or fashion projects. It includes eight text and image placeholders.

Short Opener After Effects Template

Free to Download

If you need something simple to quickly create a video opener, this is the free After Effects intro template you need. The template is as simple as possible, and you can easily customize colors and add your chosen text.

Glitch Effect Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

Looking for a sleek and edgy way to introduce your video? Check out this glitch template for After Effects. The best part is that no plugins are required – simply edit and render. Even if you’re new to After Effects, you’ll find this glitch intro template easy to customize to your needs.

Instagram Opener for After Effects

Free to Download

Use this opener to engage your Instagram or YouTube followers and stand out in their feed. The template comes with 27 image and video placeholders, 20 editable text layers, and one logo placeholder.

Modern Website Presentation AE Template

If you need a creative and unique way to present your design client work or portfolio, try this modern website presentation template. You can also use it to showcase your website templates or CMS themes.

Clean & Elegant After Effects Intro Templates

Free to Download

This free After Effects intro template comes with 15 image placeholders and can be used for corporate videos or any video promoting a fashion or jewelry brand.

Intro After Effects Templates

An intro gives recurring video content a consistent identity. It can combine a channel name, series title, logo, short clips, and music into a sequence that viewers soon recognize.

The most effective intros are usually short enough to avoid delaying the main content. Clear typography, purposeful movement, and well-timed sound can establish the visual style in just a few seconds. They work particularly well for YouTube channels, podcasts, tutorials, episodic content, and branded video series.

These free After Effects intro templates provide the animation and timing needed to build your sequence. Add your logo, replace the text and footage, adjust the colors, and choose music that fits the character of your content.

Boiled Down Intro After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Boiled Down opener template makes things bold and fast. It has six media placeholders, one logo slot at the end, and 17 text-replaceable comps. The resolution is 4K, and it is compatible with After Effects 2020 or later.

Big Bold Typography Intro or Opener

This free opener template, as the name suggests, features overly large, bold text and some lovely clip transitions. It would be perfect as the opener or intro of any travel or vacation-related video.

Retro Wave Intro AE Template

Free to Download

This free Retro Wave Intro template is perfect for any vintage or retro project. The template has a colorful design, two editable text layers, one logo placeholder, and a full-color controller.

Cyberpunk Intro for After Effects

If you’re a fan of the cyberpunk style, don’t miss this Cyberpunk Intro. This is an excellent choice if you want to have a cinematic look in your videos, and it would also be an ideal fit for a tech company.

Smooth After Effects Intro Template

Free to Download

This free intro template features bold titles and duotone colors. You will get five image or video placeholders, four text placeholders, one logo placeholder, and a custom color controller.

Scribble Logo Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

This free After Effects template displays your logo with a hint of elegance. The animation starts by outlining your logo and gradually reveals the full design. The animation’s simplicity adds to its beauty, making it the ideal choice for anyone looking for a refined, polished way to showcase their brand.

Business Intro for After Effects

Free to Download

This bright, clean After Effects intro template features seven media and seven text placeholders. It features an elegant animation perfect for corporate or business video projects.

Lower Thirds After Effects Templates

Lower thirds may occupy a small part of the screen, but their design still requires careful thought. Names, job titles, locations, and other details need to be readable without drawing attention away from the footage.

Good lower thirds use clear type hierarchy, controlled movement, and enough contrast to remain legible against different backgrounds. They are useful for interviews, documentaries, news videos, presentations, YouTube content, and branded productions.

These free After Effects lower-third templates offer a range of layouts and animation styles. Each can be edited to match your visual identity by changing the typography, colors, timing, shapes, and displayed information. Some collections also include several coordinated designs for speakers, locations, captions, and social media details.

Lower Thirds B&W After Effects Template

The Lower Thirds After Effects template features a classic black-and-white style. Your text appears as a stylish box, and you can easily edit the colors and adjust the text and the duration.

4K Lower Thirds for After Effects

Free to Download

This huge template pack includes 24 lower third templates in a bold and colorful style. You can easily adjust the colors to match your brand and set your desired duration.

Titles & Lower-Thirds for After Effects

Another combo pack, this titles and lower-thirds After Effects template features a modern and minimal style that can be used in various video projects. This template comes with full-color control and a detailed help file.

20 Minimal Lower Thirds for After Effects

Free to Download

If you love minimalism, try this free lower third pack. The template includes 20 lower thirds and ten premade color schemes. Customize the colors, set the duration, replace the text, and render your project.

After Effects Titles & Lower Thirds

This After Effects template pack includes titles and lower thirds, so it’s an excellent choice for those who need both for their video projects. The template is incredibly easy to edit as it comes with text boxes that automatically adjust to your text size and width.

Sports Lower Thirds Template for After Effects

Free to Download

This free sports-themed lower thirds template features a callout with a performance chart and space for a headline and profile picture. With its modern and classy design and customizable features, this template is a great way to add some extra flair to any sport-related video.

Image Lower Thirds & Titles After Effects Templates

Free to Download

This creative and colorful pack of lower thirds also includes images and cartoon-style icons that you can use for extra eye candy. The package comprises 15 titles, lower thirds, and a detailed help file.

Elegant Lower Thirds Templates for After Effects

Free to Download

Consider this template if you’re looking for an elegant lower thirds template. It comes with lower thirds, transitions, a logo reveal, and more. With five text placeholders and a spot for your logo and tagline, this template is an excellent choice for corporate videos.

Flat Lower Thirds After Effects Template

Free to Download

This simple lower thirds template has been designed in a flat and modern style. It features a circular call-out container that’s easy to use and customize. It’s an excellent choice for modern companies and businesses.

Stylish Lower Thirds After Effects Template

Free to Download

This is another elegant and stylish After Effects template with four different graphics. All the text layers and colors are easy to edit, and the project renders super fast, which makes it an excellent choice if you have a rush project.

Dynamic Lower Thirds AE Template

Free to Download

This dynamic template offers eight beautiful animations that you can fully customize with colors of your choice. With 24 text placeholders, you can quickly replace them and enjoy fast rendering. These lower thirds are a great way to add visual appeal to your next video.

Modern Call-Out After Effects Template

Free to Download

This free lower thirds template includes a left-to-right call-out with floating rating sliders underneath. It’s perfect for brands, businesses, and projects that want to add a touch of modern style to their videos and presentations.

Animated Box Entrance Lower Thirds Template

Free to Download

This modern, beautifully designed free lower thirds template features two call-out boxes, a flawless entrance animation, and a bounce effect.

Animated Text & Font Templates for After Effects

Animated typefaces give individual letters their own movement and character. Text can bounce, stretch, rotate, flicker, or appear one character at a time, making them a playful option for video titles, captions, and short promotional graphics.

Rather than animating every letter by hand, these After Effects templates include pre-built animations, text placeholders, and adjustable controls. You can type your own words, change the colors, refine the timing, and combine different letter movements to suit the project.

The free animated typefaces in this collection cover several visual styles, from clean geometric movement to rough, hand-drawn effects. They are particularly useful for music videos, social media clips, opening credits, and other projects where typography takes a leading role.

PolyNoise Alphabet Animated Typeface

This animated typeface features a glitchy look, so it’s perfect for videos that use glitchy animations. The colors are easy to customize, and you don’t have to worry about dropping each letter on a separate timeline with this typeface.

Alquimia Animated Font

Free to Download

The Alquimia Animated Font has a truly unique look. The font can be freely used in both personal and commercial projects, and you can easily modify the colors.

Paper – Grotesque Shady Animated Typeface

The Paper is a perfect choice if you’re working on a video that requires a creative touch. The font includes a full alphabet, numerical characters, basic currency symbols, and basic math symbols.

Neon Animated Typeface for After Effects

Free to Download

This free preset includes all 26 letters, numbers (0-9), and After Effects AEP file for quick customization. The preset’s glowing neon aesthetic will create an energetic and modern look and feel to any After Effects creation.

Helvetica Neue Free After Effects Template

Free to Download

Consider the Helvetica Neue animated font if your next project needs an elegant or classic touch. This After Effects template font has 43 unique letter, number, and punctuation compositions.

Sketch Animated Font After Effects Template

Free to Download

The Sketch Animated Font is perfect if you want a handwritten look and feel. It includes capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.

Paint on Animated Typeface

The Pain On animated typeface is a must-have if you want to add a unique style to your videos. Each character paints white, black, and blue colors, which can easily be customized to match your own brand colors.

Animography Animated Font for AE

Free to Download

The Animography font is a full-featured animated font created as a collaborative project between 110 animators and one designer. It has a distinct, bold look and can be used for corporate videos.

Animated Icon Templates for After Effects

Static icons already communicate a lot with very little space. Add movement, and they can also show an action, change of state, or response. A loading symbol can rotate, a notification can pulse, and a button can confirm that it has been selected.

These small animations work well in app demonstrations, interface presentations, explainer videos, infographics, and social media content. Careful timing keeps the movement clear without distracting from the information around it.

The free animated icon templates below save you from keyframing every shape individually. They include coordinated icon sets in several styles, with controls for adjusting colors, scale, timing, and movement to match the rest of your project.

Technicons Animated Business Icons for After Effects

Free to Download

Technicons is a set of technical icons for After Effects. This icon pack comes with 30+ animated icons, and you’ll also find a variety of business icons, making this pack suitable for all kinds of projects.

Animated Icon Set for Video Editors

Free to Download

This free icon pack includes 20 different icons for business and personal projects. The icons are all pre-rendered footage, so you can use them in any video editing or motion graphics software. The project file is also included in the download.

390 Animated Icons for After Effects

This is another icon pack with a large selection of icons for business, technical, and other types of videos. The icons feature a modern, flat design, and you can change the size and color of each icon.

Animated Technical Icons for After Effects

Free to Download

This creative icon pack has 15 icons perfect for any technical niche. The template’s intelligent color controller makes it easy to customize the icons with your brand colors.

Social Media Icons for After Effects

Consider this social media icon pack if you’re looking for icons with a unique design. This icon pack is an excellent choice for any food-related business or brand that specializes in children’s products and uses video as part of its marketing strategy.

AE Animated Social Icons Pack

Free to Download

Check out this free icon pack if you need social media icons for your project. You’ll find icons for all major social media networks, and you can use the default colors or customize them with your own.

Flat Animated Icons Library for After Effects

This icon pack includes an impressive 1,000 icons covering almost any niche. You’ll likely use this library repeatedly in your projects, especially since it was designed using flat design.

Anicons: Customizable Icon Library for After Effects

Free to Download

Consider the Anicons icon pack if you want a complete icon library that can easily be customized. The icon pack allows you to quickly animate and adjust the icon parameters easily. The package contains 40+ icons.

How to Install an After Effects Template

Most After Effects project templates do not need to be installed. They are downloaded, extracted, and opened like any other project file. Keep all supplied folders together so After Effects can locate the linked assets.

• Download the template and extract the ZIP archive to a dedicated project folder.
• Read the included documentation before opening or moving any files.
• Check the required After Effects version, fonts, and plugins.
• Open the supplied .aep file through File > Open Project.
• If After Effects converts an older project, save the converted version as a new file.
• Relink missing footage, images, or audio when prompted.
• Open a .mogrt file through File > Open Project when it needs to be edited in After Effects. Templates intended for Premiere Pro should be added through its Graphics Templates panel.

How to Customize an After Effects Template

Template creators organize projects differently, but most use clearly labeled compositions and placeholder layers. Work on a duplicate of the original project so you can return to the untouched version if an edit causes problems.

• Open the main composition and identify the editable text, image, video, and logo layers.
• Replace placeholder media while preserving its position, scale, and timing.
• Edit the text, then check that longer words do not extend beyond the composition.
• Change the colors and fonts to match the project rather than the preview.
• Adjust keyframes or layer durations when the original animation feels too fast or slow.
• Review any controller, Essential Properties, or Effect Controls layers supplied by the creator.
• Preview the entire sequence before rendering to catch missing media, clipped text, or abrupt cuts.

Tips for Improving Performance

Templates can contain large footage files, complex effects, 3D layers, and many nested compositions. A few temporary adjustments can make editing and previewing them much more manageable.

• Reduce the preview resolution to Half or Quarter while editing.
• Use a Region of Interest when working on one small part of the composition.
• Keep source files and the disk cache on a fast local drive when possible.
• Close unused panels and other memory-heavy applications.
• Temporarily disable motion blur, depth of field, shadows, and demanding effects.
• Use proxies or pre-rendered compositions for large video files and complex scenes.
• Remove unused footage and compositions from a working copy of the project.
• Clear the memory and disk cache if previews become unreliable or storage space runs low.

Final Thoughts & Recommendations

The most useful After Effects template is rarely the one with the busiest preview. A simpler project with clear controls, organized layers, and restrained animation is often easier to adapt and more useful across different types of work.

Choose a template that suits the pace and purpose of the video. A rapid sequence may work well for an event promo but feel out of place in a documentary or portfolio presentation. Typography and movement should support the content rather than compete with it.

Before committing to a template, check its license, After Effects version, plugin requirements, and included assets. Open the project and test a short section before replacing every placeholder. This can reveal performance issues or missing dependencies early in the process.

Finally, spend time changing more than the sample text. Adjust the timing, type choices, colors, transitions, and sound so the finished sequence belongs to the wider project. Free After Effects templates can remove hours of setup, but thoughtful editing is what stops the result from looking like the original preview. Keep an untouched copy nearby, make deliberate changes, and give the animation enough space to do its job.

More After Effect Templates

Read more articles by Paul Andrew

The post 80+ Best Free After Effects Templates in 2026 appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of new low-cost burstable Amazon EC2 T8i instances powered by custom sixth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Granite Rapids), available only on AWS. T8i instances are among the lowest-cost EC2 instances and deliver up to 30% better price performance over previous generation T3 instances. These instances are designed to run a variety of low-to-moderate CPU utilization workloads such as freemium services, training and demo environments, staging and development, data processing, microservices, low-traffic websites, and login gateways.

T8i instances
Thousands and thousands of customers run various lightweight workloads on T3 instances that require small, cost-effective compute configurations. These include microservices architectures, low-traffic websites, development and testing environments, small databases, data processing jobs, and short-duration compute tasks. Many of these customers like T family’s burstable performance model, which provides a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline when needed using CPU credits.

As customers modernize their infrastructure, migrate from on-premises environments, adopt event-driven and microservices architectures, and experiment with AI inference workloads, they have asked for newer generation cost-optimized small instances, better price performance to reduce their total cost of ownership, and a seamless migration path that leverages their existing knowledge and tooling.

T8i instances address each of these requests:

• Up to 30% better price performance. Powered by the AWS Nitro System and custom sixth generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Granite Rapids), T8i instances enable customers to lower their total cost of ownership with up to 30% better price performance.
• Up to 70% higher compute performance. T8i instances deliver up to 70% higher compute performance, up to 1.25x higher network bandwidth, and up to 2.4x higher EBS bandwidth compared to T3 instances.
• Seamless upgrade from T3. For existing T3 customers, upgrading to T8i is straightforward. The instances offer the same CPU credit system and the same familiar lightweight compute options customers already know. Customers simply select T8i instead of T3 and immediately benefit from improved price performance.
• Cost-effective entry point for new customers. For customers new to AWS or migrating from on-premises, T8i instances provide one of the most cost-effective entry points to run workloads that need low-to-moderate CPU utilization or for running short-duration compute tasks such as batch processing, event-driven functions, or CI/CD pipelines.

Instance specifications
T8i instances offer four sizes, each with two vCPU offered as a single core. The following table summarizes the specifications.

Like T3, T8i instances offer unique vCPU-to-memory ratios such as 1:0.25, 1:0.5, and 1:1 that are not offered by other EC2 instances. Like T3, T8i instances utilize the CPU credit system along with the Standard and Unlimited credit configuration modes. Unlimited mode is the default on T8i.

For workloads that need larger instance sizes above T8i offerings (nano, micro, small, and medium), I recommend M8i Flex instances that offer up to 30% better price performance than equivalent previous generation T3 instances along with the flexibility to scale up to 16xlarge.

Now available
Amazon EC2 T8i instances are available today in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad, Malaysia, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris). For Regional availability and upcoming Region expansion, search the instance type in the CloudFormation resources tab of AWS Capabilities by Region.

You can purchase T8i instances via On-Demand instances, and Spot instances with Savings Plan option coming soon. T8i instances support shared tenancy only and do not support Dedicated tenancy or Dedicated Hosts. t8i.micro and t8i.small instances are also available under the AWS Free Tier. To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing page.

Try T8i instances in the Amazon EC2 console and send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

Updated on September 18 — Corrected the memory size for each instance type.

The post New low-cost burstable Amazon EC2 T8i instances are generally available appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Since the first launch of AWS Elastic Beanstalk in 2011, customers have deployed full-stack applications in Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and Go, trusting Elastic Beanstalk to manage deployment and infrastructure operations so they could focus on business logic. Fifteen years later, that trust has only deepened, and the service has been rebuilt to match it. Now, AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the application management service on AWS that takes full operational responsibility for your production environments. Bring applications however they exist today: source code, Dockerfiles, or container images. Elastic Beanstalk creates and manages the production environment underneath. You manage your application. AWS manages everything else, deploying, scaling, patching, monitoring, and maintaining it continuously. That operational responsibility stays with AWS, for the life of the application.

We have been rebuilding the operational engine underneath and delivering a series of capabilities that make it more powerful than ever. Elastic Beanstalk now uses AI-powered environment analysis to diagnose health issues and recommend fixes automatically. A new official GitHub Action lets teams deploy directly from their existing CI/CD workflows with a single YAML configuration. And we rebuilt the infrastructure foundation to deliver OpenTelemetry-based observability, traffic-splitting deployments with automatic rollback, event-driven autoscaling, secrets management through AWS Secrets Manager, and HTTPS by default via AWS Certificate Manager.

Today, we’re announcing the next chapter of AWS Elastic Beanstalk: a new fully-managed Cluster Mode that deploys, scales, patches, monitors, and upgrades your applications continuously for the life of the workload. You bring your application. AWS runs it.

A new Cluster Mode is built for teams running a portfolio of applications. Instead of operating each application in isolation, you run multiple applications that share infrastructure powered by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), fully managed with a single operational baseline. Multiple applications share resources, so per-application cost decreases as your portfolio grows without adding operational complexity. Whether you run ten applications or a hundred, you manage them through one experience, with the same operational guarantees across every stack.

Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode benefits for your workloads:

• Source code to production, any runtime. Upload source code in Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, or Go. Elastic Beanstalk handles containerization automatically through Cloud Native Buildpacks when needed. No Dockerfile and no rearchitecting required. You can bring legacy applications from on-premises or deploy new services in any supported language.
• Enterprise compliance built in. Elastic Beanstalk is HIPAA eligible, PCI DSS compliant, and aligned to SOC 1/2/3 with no additional configuration, so teams in regulated industries can deploy production workloads with the compliance posture they already require.
• Production-grade deployment strategies. All-at-once, rolling, immutable, and traffic-splitting deployments with automatic rollback on failure. Event-driven autoscaling. AWS Secrets Manager integration. All native OpenTelemetry enabling easy integration with most observability backends, including Amazon CloudWatch.
• AI-powered troubleshooting. When something goes wrong, Elastic Beanstalk collects service-side logs and provides AI-generated recommendations to help you resolve issues faster without digging through infrastructure.

A first look of Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode
To get started, go to the Elastic Beanstalk console, create a new environment, and choose the Cluster in the Deployment type.

Elastic Beanstalk accepts source code, docker file, or container image to deploy your application. For example, you can provide the application code for your environment by selecting Local file and specifying container image build options. For the rest of the sections, the default values should be good for most scenarios.

Choose Create button and the deployment will begin! Note that the first deployment for a given set of subnets triggers EKS cluster creation, which takes about ten-ish minutes. Subsequent deployments are faster because they reuse an existing EKS cluster.

Here’s what it looks like when deployment is successful:

You can also use AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), the EB CLI, or AWS SDKs. For example, consider deploying an application made up of several microservices to Kubernetes. Create an application first.

aws elasticbeanstalk create-application 
    --application-name "my-microservice" 
    --description "Multi-services demo" 

Each microservice may have pre-built images in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR). Register them as application versions:

IMAGES=(
    "frontend-v1|public.ecr.aws/my-microservices/frontend:v1"
    "cartservice-v1|public.ecr.aws/my-microservices/cart:v1"
    "paymentservice-v1|public.ecr.aws/my-microservices/payment:v1"
    "shippingservice-v1|public.ecr.aws/my-microservices/shipping:v1"
)

for entry in "${IMAGES[@]}"; do
    IFS='|' read -r label uri <<< "$entry"
    aws elasticbeanstalk create-application-version 
        --application-name $APP_NAME 
        --version-label "$label" 
        --image-configuration Source="{Uri=$uri}" 
	--region "us-west-2
    echo "Registered: $label"
done

You can set and deploy the corresponding service options for each service. For example, the frontend service is the only service that needs a public internet interface such as Application Load Balancer and also sets a health check path since it’s an HTTP service:

[
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks", "OptionName": "cluster-role", "Value": "arn:aws:iam::0123456789012:rol<...>"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks", "OptionName": "node-role", "Value": "arn:aws:iam::0123456789012:role/E<...>"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:environment", "OptionName": "observability-role", "Value": "arn:aws:iam::0123456<...>"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:environment", "OptionName": "subnets", "Value": "subnet-1,subnet-2,subnet-3,<...>"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:environment:autoscaling", "OptionName": "min-replica", "Value": "1"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:environment:autoscaling", "OptionName": "max-replica", "Value": "2"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:environment", "OptionName": "cpu", "Value": "0.5"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:environment", "OptionName": "memory", "Value": "256Mi"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:environment", "OptionName": "memory-limit", "Value": "512Mi"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:environment", "OptionName": "service-port", "Value": "8080"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:alb", "OptionName": "scheme", "Value": "internet-facing"},
    {"Namespace": "aws:elasticbeanstalk:eks:alb", "OptionName": "healthcheck-path", "Value": "/_healthz"}
] #frontend-options.json namespaces

Now, create the frontend service environment with these options. You can continue to deploy each service environment in a similar manner.

aws elasticbeanstalk create-environment 
    --application-name my-microservice 
    --environment-name frontend 
    --version-label frontend-v1 
    --tier Name=Cluster,Type=EKS 
    --option-settings file:///tmp/frontend-options.json 

Here’s a look at the console once all services are deployed:

Elastic Beanstalk Standard powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) continues to be fully supported. Standard and Cluster Mode environments run side by side within the same Elastic Beanstalk application, enabling teams to migrate one environment at a time at their own pace. Validation checks confirm compatibility before any changes are made, so no environment is forced to move.

Elastic Beanstalk Standard Mode remains the best fit for:

• Single applications or single-environment use cases
• Windows/.NET Framework workloads on IIS
• Applications that cannot be containerized
• Workloads spending under $500/month where the EKS control plane fee and EKS Auto Mode premium add overhead that a single application cannot offset through bin-packing

To learn more about how to deploy and manage your applications in the Cluster Mode, visit the Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode documentation.

Now available
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode is generally available today in all AWS Regions that Elastic Beanstalk is available. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region. If you want to call APIs, search documentation, find regional availability, and troubleshooting about this new feature, try using the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI tool.

There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode. You pay only for the underlying AWS resources your applications consume, including the EKS control plane fee, EKS Auto Mode compute, Amazon ECR, and Amazon CloudWatch. Note Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode is not AWS Free Tier eligible. To learn more, visit the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Pricing page.

Give it a try in the Elastic Beanstalk console and send feedback to AWS re:Post for AWS Elastic Beanstalk or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post AWS Elastic Beanstalk introduces Cluster Mode appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) started with a handful of foundational infrastructure services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), so that anyone with an idea could start building. As the world’s largest companies and governments adopted AWS, they asked for features to optimize their configuration for a range of global business contexts, security requirements, and operational needs. To meet these needs, AWS expanded globally through new Regions and added breadth and depth of services in security, networking, governance, and cost controls, so those customers could operate wherever they needed and at the scale they require. That combination of global reach, breadth, and depth remains essential for those customers, but if you are at the start of a new idea, every configuration option is effort standing in the way of shipping your dream product fast.

Today, we’re announcing a new simplified experience on AWS for builders who are working at the pace of AI. Instead of having to complete configuration tasks before you can work on your project, you start with sensible defaults and simple administration. You sign up using an existing identity from providers including Google, GitHub, and Apple. For most new customers, no credit card is required to start and you receive $100 in free credits as part of the AWS Free Tier. You can build immediately in your first project. As you continue to work, you can invite collaborators with just an email address, without learning about AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or AWS IAM Identity Center. When your project grows beyond the free credits, you can set a spend limit so you stay within your budget on the paid plan. If you grow to need additional customization, you can activate advanced AWS features to access the full breadth and depth of AWS without migrating.

How it works
When you sign up, AWS organizes your work in a project. A project contains an AWS account, where you create resources, and settings for sharing with team members. AWS creates that structure for you and applies additional security controls so you can start building your idea. After signing in, you get a prompt to paste into your coding agent that configures it to work with your new AWS environment. From there, your agent can deploy resources, run workloads, and iterate on your application following best practices for working with AWS.

You can create another project with a click. When you want to work with an additional team member, you send an invitation to their email address. Identity permissions are handled for you, so there are no IAM users to create; each person you invite only gets access to the projects you specify. Console workflows and coding agents also configure permissions between supported services and resources automatically, so you do not have to set up or troubleshoot resource permissions by hand.

When you’re ready to move beyond free credits, you can upgrade to a paid plan by entering your payment method. You can set a monthly spend limit on a project based on your usage trends, starting at $20 per month. The spend limit is the ceiling for that project’s costs, and you pay for what you actually use up to that amount. For example, if you set a $50 spend limit and your project incurs $32 in charges that month, you pay $32 (plus taxes). AWS will suggest a spend limit based on your usage, and you can accept that recommendation or set a custom amount if you are planning to further scale your usage. If your project approaches the limit, you first receive notifications. If spend reaches the limit, AWS pauses your project rather than accumulating charges, and you can resume working on it when you raise the limit. Each project has its own spend limit so you can give a larger budget to a workload that is gaining traction while keeping a smaller budget on an experimental idea.

Let’s try it out
To get started, I went to aws.amazon.com and chose Create account. I signed in with my Google account and within seconds had a new project ready to go, as shown in the following screenshot.

The Sign up for AWS page, with options to continue with email or sign in using Google, GitHub, Apple, or Amazon.

The first thing I saw was a prompt to configure my coding agent. I copied the prompt and pasted it into my agent. The agent set up the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and the Agent Toolkit for AWS, logged me into AWS, and created a CLAUDE.md file in my project with guidance for the new experience.

The Setup Agent Toolkit for AWS dialog, with a prompt to copy and paste into your coding agent.

With the agent connected, I gave it a short prompt: build an API that returns a new unique sequential ID on every request. The agent created an AWS Lambda function, an Amazon DynamoDB table, and an Amazon API Gateway API, then deployed them for me. I did not have to configure resource permissions by hand. Within a few minutes I had a public endpoint that returned a newly minted ID on each request. My project started with $100 in free credits, and I received an additional $20 when the Lambda function was deployed.

A coding agent prompt to build an API that returns a unique sequential ID on every request.

The coding agent presents architecture options for the sequential ID API, with AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB selected.

The coding agent confirms the API is live and lists the Amazon DynamoDB table, AWS Lambda function, and Amazon API Gateway API it deployed.

From the project, I could manage settings, invite team members by email, and monitor billing, as shown in the following screenshots.

The Projects page, showing remaining free-plan days, credits, and a project.

The project Members page, with the option to invite a new team member by email.

The Billing page, showing a $0.00 balance on the free plan, remaining credits, and cost by project.

Activating advanced features
If you reach the point where you need multiple Regions, or governance features like custom policies in AWS Organizations, you can activate advanced features at no additional cost. You’ll find yourself in a fully configured AWS Organization built according to best practices, with no migration and no downtime. Everything you configured previously is preserved and reflected in the underlying AWS services.

Now rolling out
We’ve heard from builders that they do not want to spend their first hours configuring an AWS environment. They want to build what they came to build, and we listened. AWS began as a place where anyone with an idea could start building, and this new simplified experience brings that starting point back, with sensible defaults so you can begin immediately, and with the global reach, breadth, and depth of AWS still there when your idea needs it. We are gradually rolling this experience out to new customers. We cannot wait to see what you build, and we want your feedback on the experience.

To try the new experience, create a new AWS account. To learn more, see Sign up for AWS (new).

The post AWS reimagines the getting started experience appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

There’s a particular energy to mid-September in New York. Pumpkin spice lattes are flowing, temperatures are dropping, and it’s nearly sweater weather. The city is back at full speed, and so is the AWS launch calendar. This week that energy showed up in a new frontier model on Amazon Bedrock, a desktop app for Amazon Quick, and a reminder that the developers seeing the biggest gains from AI agents aren’t just using better tools — they’re working differently.

Let’s dive in.

Headlines
OpenAI GPT-6 Astra is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock – GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI’s latest and most capable model to date, and you can now run it on Amazon Bedrock. It brings deeper reasoning and judgment, professional-quality writing and design, and advanced computer and browser use to demanding business workflows. The model supports a context window of up to 1 million input tokens, so you can send it large codebases, long contracts, or extensive document collections and ask it to reconcile competing inputs.

You can call GPT-6 Astra through supported Amazon Bedrock APIs, or configure ChatGPT Work and Codex to use the model on Amazon Bedrock. Alongside the launch, OpenAI is introducing new enterprise plugins for ChatGPT Work that extend Astra’s browser-use capabilities across common business applications. Established AWS controls help you secure workloads, govern access, and audit model invocation activity, and your inference data isn’t used for model training. Read more

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Amazon Quick desktop app is now generally available on macOS and Windows – The Amazon Quick desktop app brings Amazon Quick to your computer, where it can work with local files and stay connected to your calendar, email, and business apps in the background. Conversations, context, and agents stay synchronized across desktop and mobile, so work you start on one surface carries over to the other. With this release, Quick agents also keep running after you close your computer, which means you can start a long-running task before you leave the office, add input from the mobile app on the way home, and review the result when you get there. Existing Quick users can download the desktop app, and the mobile app is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Read more
• AWS Lambda now supports a 90-minute function timeout on Lambda Managed Instances – You can now configure a function timeout of up to 90 minutes for asynchronous and event source mapping (ESM) invocations on Lambda Managed Instances, a 6x increase from the previous 15-minute limit. That opens the door to data processing, media transcoding, financial calculations, AI inference, and batch jobs that need longer continuous execution, without splitting the work across multiple functions. Synchronous invocations keep the existing 15-minute maximum. The longer timeout also applies to steps inside Lambda durable functions, which can still run for up to a year when invoked asynchronously. Read more
• Amazon EBS Volume Clones now copies volumes across accounts – Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Volume Clones can now copy a volume into another AWS account and re-encrypt it with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account. If you keep production and development in separate accounts, you can share a volume with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) and let the target account create a fresh copy in the same Availability Zone, for example, cloning a production database volume into an isolated development account. Cross-account copy works for all volume types, including unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with customer managed keys. Read more
• Second-generation single-rack AWS Outposts is now generally available – The new single-rack AWS Outposts is a self-contained 42U rack that puts compute, storage, and networking into one compact unit for locations that need low latency, local data processing, or data residency, and don’t have room for a larger footprint. A single rack delivers up to 2,688 vCPU and 100 TB of Amazon EBS storage, and supports the latest x86-powered Amazon EC2 instances, including general purpose (M7i, M8i), compute-optimized (C7i, C8i), memory-optimized (R7i, R8i), and Outposts accelerated networking instances. You get the same APIs, console, automation, governance, and security controls as multi-rack Outposts and AWS Regions. Read more
• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available on v0 by Vercel – You can now describe a search or AI application in natural language inside v0 by Vercel and get a full-stack app backed by Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. v0 provisions a collection, indexes your data, and uses the OpenSearch Serverless endpoint for full-text search and vector search for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads, without leaving the v0 interface. OpenSearch Serverless scales capacity up and down for you, so you can focus on the application instead of cluster management. You can provision under a new AWS account or link an existing one. Read more
• AWS Transform for .NET modernization is now generally available via CLI – You can trigger an AWS-managed .NET modernization in AWS Transform custom with a single CLI command, then run it interactively or script it into an existing pipeline. The CLI sits alongside the existing AWS Transform for .NET experiences in the web application, Visual Studio IDE, Kiro Power, and MCP agents. Use it to upgrade language versions, migrate frameworks, optimize performance, and analyze codebases with transformations you can run as-is or customize. The .NET modernization transformation includes 50,000 free agent minutes per month. Read more

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

• Clare Liguori on frontier engineering – If you already use an AI coding assistant but don’t feel like you’re shipping much faster, start here. Clare Liguori, Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, published a practitioner’s manifesto on frontier engineering: ten principles, drawn from teams across Amazon, for changing how you build software with AI agents. The argument is direct. Software development has split in two, people who changed how they work with agents, and people who only changed their coding tools. Frontier engineering is not vibe coding. You spend the first weeks writing steering files, refactoring the codebase, and learning to decompose work for agents. Those weeks feel slower. The weeks after feel dramatically faster, because you’re no longer building the software directly — you’re building the agent setup that builds the software.
• A free year of Kiro for students around the world – The Kiro Students program is expanding from 11 universities to 121 new schools across 16 countries. Eligible students get one year of Kiro with 1,000 credits per month and full access to paid features such as premium models and Kiro Web, no credit card and no trial timer. You can work in the IDE, the CLI, Kiro Web in a browser, or Kiro Crew. If you’re a student, sign up with your university email.
• The state of AI for security: measuring what matters for trust – Security teams are using AI for triage, threat modeling, incident response, and code review, but a tool that flags everything doesn’t save time. In The state of AI for security, Anshumali Shrivastava and Neha Rungta introduce Deception Benchmark, a new evaluation that tests whether a model can tell a real vulnerability from code that looks risky but is actually safe. The benchmark includes 14,822 samples across 16 languages and more than 70 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) categories. Under standard prompting, precision landed in the mid-50s, about as likely to be inaccurate as accurate, and none of the 12 models tested kept both false positives and false negatives below 10 percent. The post links to the dataset, whitepaper, and submission workflow for verified scoring.
• Build full-stack AWS applications in minutes with AI-powered scaffolding – Version 1.0 of the Nx Plugin for AWS is an open source toolkit of deterministic generators for APIs, websites, databases, and AI agents, plus the AWS infrastructure to run them. Each generator writes working, deployable code with security, observability, and type-safety already in place, so an AI assistant can assemble the foundation and spend its effort on your application logic. Bingo Industries used it to take a multi-agent operations chatbot from idea to production in less than 3 weeks. The plugin is open source on GitHub. Create a workspace with pnpm create @aws/nx-workspace and point your coding agent at the included MCP server.
• The oldest architecture in computing – On All Things Distributed, Werner Vogels starts from a question customers always ask “Will AI take my job?”, and lands on memory. After spending time with Kiro Crew, he traces a line from Jeff Hawkins’ A Thousand Brains to how Crew stores, consolidates, and forgets across markdown files, a vector database, and a key-value index. His conclusion: the brain is the oldest architecture in computing, and the people who think hardest about how it works will build the next tools. Now, go build.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development. Browse here for upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Micah

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: OpenAI GPT-6 Astra on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Quick desktop GA, Kiro for students, and more (September 14, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Historically, part of this ritual includes installing a ton of apps. I add the requisite Adobe design tools, the Microsoft Office suite for productivity, and a host of other software. Apps for email, FTP, media conversion, and a local web server environment remain staples.

My current system is now a few years old, and I have dozens (hundreds?) of these apps. They still serve their purpose. But it recently dawned on me that most of what I use could be replaced by a web browser. That will likely mean fewer apps to install on my next computer.

These are words I never thought I’d utter. My web design career began before the first release of Netscape. As such, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with browsers. For every benefit, there have been limitations and quirks to deal with.

These days, you can do pretty much anything within your chosen browser. That got me thinking: are traditional design apps still relevant? Should we abandon them for browser-based tools? I’m not so sure, but let’s figure this out together.

Modern Web Apps Break Boundaries

It used to be that most browser-based apps were inferior to their desktop counterparts. Common workflows like text and media editing felt clunky and minimally useful. I used them in a pinch and usually came away frustrated.

Meanwhile, desktop powerhouses like Excel, Photoshop, and Dreamweaver were infinitely more flexible. They were built for those who care about quality and require high-level functionality. Such professional-grade tools have always been worth the cost.

That narrative has been turned on its head by a combination of more powerful web standards and server technologies. There are now online video editing platforms that can produce top-notch results. Design tools like Figma make it easy to create and share interactive mockups. Google’s suite of productivity tools offers all the bells and whistles without compromise. Even Photoshop has an online version these days.

Collaboration might be the biggest selling point of all. You can keep clients and colleagues in the loop with minimal effort. This improves efficiency and saves us from the never-ending email chains of yesteryear.

And the appeal of these apps goes beyond functionality and convenience. They’re also cross-platform and device-agnostic. It used to be that you’d need a desktop app built specifically for your operating system. Using a browser means it works on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, and more.

Then there are the hardware requirements. Granted, you should still have a system with plenty of memory and a modern graphics processor. However, having a massive hard drive isn’t necessary when storing files in the cloud.

The old boundaries of software have vanished. Doing all the things within a browser isn’t a chore like it used to be. And these apps may be enough for most web designers.

Trust and Content Ownership Are Concerns

Software is always an investment, regardless of how you access it. There are also privacy and security risks to consider. Browser-based tools often amplify those concerns.

Companies like Adobe and Microsoft have some level of tracking within their desktop apps. And they do connect to the internet. So, this is nothing new. But working in a browser opens up a different (or, at least, a bigger) can of worms.

For instance, cloud storage is quite convenient. But what happens if the provider gets sold or goes out of business? Will you lose access to your data? Are policies in place to maintain account security in the event of a breach or server crash? The answers aren’t always clear, and you may not find out until something bad happens.

Then there is the matter of artificial intelligence (AI). It seems like every tool on the planet has an AI integration of sorts. How are these features used on your content? Does the provider train their models with your work? Could your sensitive information become exposed online?

Working online also opens you up to third-party tracking. It may be something relatively innocent, like an analytics suite. But ad networks and similar companies could be watching you – and there is no guarantee they’ll abide by the rules.

These are important questions to answer when thinking about your (and your client’s) data. Again, desktop apps aren’t immune to these issues. But an online app that shows up overnight deserves an honest assessment. The risks could far outweigh the benefits.

Desktop Apps Are Still Relevant When Control Matters

It’s truly amazing to see how far web technologies have come in the past decade. You can see it in both commercial and open-source software. Functionality once reserved for powerful desktop devices can now exist in the palm of your hand (and with responsive design, for that matter).

I still believe there’s a tradeoff, however. The work-from-anywhere tools we use have plenty of benefits (provided you really do want to work from your lawn chair). But you lose a measure of control along the way.

There’s something to be said for storing files locally (with routine backups, of course). Not to mention the ability to customize an app’s layout or tool set to match your workflow. There’s a level of personalization you don’t seem to get in a browser.

The reality is that you don’t need desktop software for every purpose. There are plenty of online tools that will do the job. But there are scenarios where these old-school beasts make sense.

For example, I can’t imagine Disney making their next hit movie solely within a browser. And web designers who want full control of their workflow might want to keep a few items installed on their hard drives. I know I will.

here. He recently started a writing service for WordPress products: WP Product Writeup. He also has an opinion on just about every subject. You can follow his rants on Bluesky @karks.com.

Read more articles by Eric Karkovack

The post Are Browser-Based Apps Enough for Web Designers? appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Sooner or later, a CFO looks at your wireframes and asks what any of it actually does for the bottom line. Storyboards don’t answer that question, and the era when a 5-minute pitch could answer it ended, unfortunately, a while ago.

These days, if you want to win budget, buy-in, and backing for UX, the design has to be provably good for the business, not only for the people using it.

And proving that takes more than taping a dollar sign to a redesign. You have to understand how your organization defines value in the first place, how it measures that value, and how a credible line gets drawn between a design initiative and an outcome leadership already cares about.

Rather than scatter tips, this article follows one worked example the whole way through. Meridian is a mid-size B2B SaaS company, and it is entirely made up — that label matters, so it gets repeated where it counts. Its onboarding redesign carries the same figures from goal-setting through cost accounting, causal testing, and the final ROI number, because a framework only becomes tangible when the numbers connect. Every step is one you can rerun inside your own organization.

Why ROI Matters More Than Ever in UX Conversations

Companies now want clarity on what every dollar buys, and “delightful user experiences” stopped clearing that bar some time ago. I still remember a former colleague celebrating a $1 million redesign he’d gotten greenlit mostly on the strength of a couple of three.js tricks. Try that pitch in front of a finance team today and see how far the particles get you.

Executives don’t hate UX, they just hate vagueness. A pitch built on “users will find it easier” loses, every time, to the department promising 12% more sales in Q3. The difference is the one between a streamlined checkout flow that reduced cart abandonment with completed purchases up 22%, and the same work rewarded with “the QA testers like it.” One of those goes on your resume. The rest of this article is about earning the first version, with Meridian’s numbers doing the work.

When Business Goals And KPIs Don’t Exist Yet

Most writing about UX ROI makes a convenient assumption: that the organization already owns clean business goals and KPIs for you to hook your work onto. Real companies are messier than that. Plenty run on ambitions like “grow faster” or “improve the customer journey” that nobody ever broke into anything measurable, and an ROI case built on that ambiguity sounds impressive right up until somebody scrutinizes it.

So the first job is often to help the organization define what success even looks like. Interview stakeholders across departments — what does product consider a good quarter, where does customer success watch users struggle, where do sales deals stall — and listen for the themes that keep resurfacing across conversations, because those recurring themes are the company’s latent business objectives. A useful forcing function is the OKR model (Objectives and Key Results), which doesn’t tolerate vagueness.

At Meridian, the stated ambition was “improve the rate of new users’ adoption of the platform,” which you can neither design toward nor measure against. Interviews turned up the real shape of the problem. Trial users needed a median of 14 days to reach first value, most churned before getting there, and onboarding questions were burying the support queue. Out of that came an OKR with actual edges: reduce median time-to-first-value from 14 days to 7 with the use of a guided setup flow, and lift trial-to-paid conversion from 8% to 9.5%.

One warning about formalizing KPIs: Impose them from inside the UX team and leadership will suspect you’ve rigged the field in your own favor, so co-create them with whoever owns the outcome — though never at the price of accepting targets that set your team up for an uncomfortable situation. Meridian’s head of product agreed that setup-completion rate was a fair proxy for onboarding usability, and customer success signed off on time-to-first-value, a number already sitting on their own dashboard.

A KPI ladder that ends at a metric somebody already watches buys you credibility before any design work starts.

Quantifying The Full Cost Of The Investment

ROI has a denominator, and the denominator is where most UX teams go wrong. You can’t calculate a return without strategic financial planning, yet cost usually gets counted as designer salaries or consulting hours and nothing else. A finance team will find the rest whether or not you counted it, so count it first.

Direct costs are the visible ones. Meridian’s redesign ran $45,000 in design and research labor plus another $8,000 in tooling and participant incentives. Licenses for Figma, UserTesting, Hotjar, analytics platforms, research incentive spend — all of it belongs in the total, and that’s before the inevitable instances of vendor lock-in every UX team eventually faces. Engineering sits in the same column, because a UX redesign doesn’t stop at the mockup. Building the guided setup took two frontend sprints plus a QA pass, $38,000 worth, and the project generated about $4,000 of coordination overhead along the way in new syncs and shared dashboards.

The line item nearly everyone misses, and the one worth stealing from this article if you steal nothing else, is stakeholder time. Workshops, design reviews, and feedback sessions all pull senior people away from their primary work. A VP of Product spending four hours a week in UX reviews is a VP not spending those hours on roadmap planning or partner negotiations. Log the attendance — who came, for how long, at what seniority — and price it at fully loaded cost, meaning salary plus benefits divided by productive hours. A quarter’s worth of workshops, reviews, and interviews at Meridian priced out at $22,000.

Add it all up: $45,000 in design labor, $8,000 in tooling, $38,000 in engineering, $22,000 in stakeholder time, $4,000 in coordination. The investment is $117,000. Saying that number out loud beats saying “we spent $45K on design,” precisely because it already includes everything a finance team would have dug up on its own.

Proving Causation, Not Just Correlation

Most UX ROI pitches die right here. Conversions rose after the redesign, sure — and the CFO wants to know how you ruled out the new pricing, the seasonal traffic bump, and the marketing campaign that shipped the same week. Without a convincing answer, your entire ROI story crumbles.

After all these years, the gold standard for proving causation is still A/B testing: run the old experience against the new one on an even traffic split until the sample means something.

Onboarding happens to suit a phased rollout, which is why Meridian could do this cleanly. For eight weeks, half of new trial signups received the redesigned guided setup while half stayed on the legacy flow. Control converted to paid at 8.0%. The variant came in at 9.4%. With roughly 6,100 trials inside the window, the difference was statistically significant, but a 1.4-point gap on a single test is still the kind of result that deserves a second look before anyone builds a budget on it, which is one reason the team held back on attribution below. Where a split isn’t feasible — a change too structural, a user base too small — fall back to a time series instead. Measure steadily for weeks before the change, implement, then keep measuring against the baseline you established.

Documenting whatever else happens around the same time as your UX change is the unglamorous half of causation.

A pricing-page test from Meridian’s marketing team overlapped weeks five through eight of the rollout. The UX team noted it, confirmed it hit both cohorts evenly, and still chose to attribute only 70% of the observed lift to the redesign in the final math. There is no formula that produces that number; treat it as an illustrative assumption for this example.

The team asked how much of the lift could plausibly belong to the pricing test if it had helped one cohort slightly more than the other, settled on a ceiling of about a third, and rounded the redesign’s share down to 70%. Your figure will differ. What matters is that it is written down and argued for before the results arrive, not fitted to them afterwards. That restraint is worth money in a skeptical room. “We attribute roughly 70% of the lift to the onboarding change, with the remainder likely influenced by concurrent pricing work” survives cross-examination; claiming everything does not. Cohort analysis then backed the number up, since the lift held across acquisition channels and tenure bands, and at that point the skeptics had very little left to work with.

Leading and lagging indicators belong on the same slide, because each covers the other’s weakness. Meridian’s leading indicators moved first — setup completion climbed from 62% to 89%, median time-to-first-value dropped from 14 days to 6.5 — and the lagging trial-to-paid number followed. Mechanism first, business outcome second. Presented together, they form a causal chain that’s harder to poke holes in than either one alone.

The ROI Calculation, End to End

So what did Meridian actually earn? The company sees about 40,000 trial signups a year. Lifting conversion from 8.0% to 9.4% adds roughly 560 paying customers annually, and at an average of $1,800 in annual recurring revenue per account, those customers represent about $1,008,000 in new ARR. Applying the conservative 70% attribution from the causal work trims the defensible figure to roughly $706,000.

Set that against the full $117,000 investment and the first-year ROI lands near 5:1, with payback arriving in roughly two months. There’s a second line, too. Onboarding-related support tickets dropped about 30%, some 3,600 fewer tickets a year, worth another $54,000 annually at $15 per resolved ticket. Keep it as its own line rather than folding it into one swollen headline number. The case reads as more honest that way and loses none of its force.

Three assumptions carry that result, and each belongs on the slide next to it. The 40,000 signups and the $1,800 average ARR are the prior year’s actuals held flat, so a growth or pricing change moves the outcome in either direction. The 70% attribution is the illustrative assumption from the causal work, not a measured quantity. And the two-month payback counts new ARR as it lands rather than revenue recognized net of churn, which flatters the timeline; on a net basis the payback stretches to roughly a quarter. State those three plainly and a finance team can adapt the example to its own numbers. Hide them and the whole thing starts to look like marketing math, however careful the experiment was.

What persuades in the final presentation is not sophistication. Open with the baseline: what stalled trials and support volume were already costing. Show the delta in terms leadership reads fluently, metrics like conversion rate uplift chief among them. A chart of setup completion climbing from 62% to 89% will beat a paragraph of UX jargon, and a translation like “each abandoned setup costs us 0.3 support tickets” beats the chart. Above all, keep every figure identical from the first slide to the last. A room full of finance people forgives many things, but never numbers that wobble between slides.

Tailoring The Case To Whoever Holds The Purse Strings

Budget decisions come out of coalitions. A CFO may hold the final say when adding AI to the checkout process, but marketing, product, and customer success all lean on that decision, and each means something different by “value.”

A CFO hears cost, revenue, and risk. A CMO hears conversion and acquisition cost, since UX is a lever for increasing marketing ROI. Product counts support tickets; customer success thinks in retention. The underlying numbers never change; only the framing rotates, and a CFO wants a projection, not a moodboard. Meridian’s CFO slide read “the onboarding redesign protects roughly $706,000 in new ARR a year against a $117,000 investment,” while the CMO version led with what a 9.4% trial conversion does to blended acquisition cost.

Beyond the Dollar Sign: Qualitative and Non-Financial Metrics

Some UX outcomes never translate cleanly into revenue, and pretending they do weakens the parts of your case that are solid.

The trick with qualitative evidence is collecting it rigorously enough that nobody can wave it off as anecdote.

Scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS), CSAT, and Customer Effort Score already sit inside most reporting cadences, which makes them cheap to borrow. Tie your work to their movement, and segment wherever the data allows.

Meridian could say that NPS among trial users on the redesigned onboarding was 51 against 34 for the legacy flow, which lands far harder than any blended average. Verbatim feedback from surveys, support transcripts, and app store reviews adds the emotional weight the scores lack. Internal tools deserve the same discipline, since employee experience is increasingly recognized as a business driver — a dashboard redesign that hands account managers 45 minutes a day back is a productivity gain, a satisfaction gain, and a retention lever all in one.

Brand perception resists direct measurement but leaves tracks in repeat visits, organic referrals, and social sentiment. It carries extra weight in trust-sensitive industries like finance or healthcare, and it forms fast, given that UX design influences the first impressions of a whopping 94% of customers.

Whatever you collect, systematize the collecting. Run pre- and post-surveys with consistent question sets, use structured usability testing with task-based scoring, and put the qualitative right next to the quantitative when you present.

“Setup completion rose from 62% to 89%, and in post-test interviews 8 of 10 participants called the new flow intuitive, against 3 of 10 for the old one” — a pairing like that is much harder to dismiss than either half on its own.

Making the Case Stick

UX loses the budget battle unless it’s mapped to company-wide objectives, so phrase the proposal in the words of this year’s board presentation.

Nobody at Meridian pitched “simplify the onboarding UI”; the pitch was a redesigned trial experience worth 1.4 points of upgrade rate, roughly $1M in annual recurring revenue before attribution. Bring evidence in both registers, since that is what social proof is for: the case, clearly labeled, plus screenshots, impact graphs, and user quotes. Find internal allies who can repeat the ROI narrative in rooms you’ll never enter, and write the playbook down, because repeatable ROI is what earns recurring investment.

Resources for Going Deeper

This topic has been explored extensively by researchers, practitioners, and consultancies. Here’s a curated set of resources worth studying if you want to build a stronger ROI practice around UX.

• “Measuring the User Experience” by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert is the definitive guide to UX metrics. It covers everything from task-based measurements to survey design to statistical analysis, and it’s written for practitioners, not academics.
• Jared Spool’s “The $300 Million Button” case study is a classic example of how a single UX change (removing a mandatory registration step) generated massive revenue uplift. It’s a story every UX professional should have in their back pocket.
• Forrester’s research on UX ROI provides enterprise-focused frameworks for building business cases around experience design, including their widely cited finding that every dollar invested in UX returns $100.
• “UX Strategy” by Jaime Levy bridges the gap between design thinking and business strategy, offering practical tools for aligning UX initiatives with organizational goals and market positioning.
• The Design Value Index by the Design Management Institute tracks publicly traded companies that invest heavily in design against the S&P 500. The data consistently shows that design-led companies outperform the index by significant margins, and it’s a powerful data point for executive presentations.
• Google’s HEART framework provides a structured approach to selecting UX metrics at scale. HEART stands for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task success, and it’s particularly useful for teams that struggle to decide which metrics to track.

Conclusion

A seat at the table never comes from beauty or novelty. It comes from measurable, defensible impact, which means UX leaders have to trade the artist’s posture for the strategist’s. Speak in outcomes rather than outputs. Connect pixels to profit.

When someone challenges the numbers, don’t flinch. Show the controlled experiment, the cohort analysis, and the before-and-after metrics, every figure holding steady from the first slide to the last, the way Meridian’s did, with the customer quotes and the employee-satisfaction data sitting right beside the revenue impact. Prove the work does more than delight users, and be ready to defend the ratio line by line. That’s when the CFO leans in, and that’s when design stops being optional.

(yk)

The post Building A UX ROI Case That Survives The Boardroom appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last year, we introduced Volume Clones of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a new capability that lets you create instant point-in-time copies of your EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone.

Today, we are extending Volume Clones with cross-account copy, so you can create copies of your EBS volumes into other AWS accounts and optionally re-encrypt them with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key in the target account.

With this new feature, you can use your latest application data to develop, test, and experiment in a secondary environment, while protecting and isolating the information in the production environment. For example, you can create copies of a production environment to refresh test and development environments set up in separate accounts with the desired EBS encryption.

Copy EBS volumes across AWS accounts in action
To create a copy of an EBS volume across accounts, the owners of the volume can first grant the target account access to their volume in AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), which provides a way to share resources across AWS accounts or within an AWS Organization. Then, from the target account, they can locate the volume they have access to create a copy of it.

To get started, choose Share volume for the volume you want to share with the target account in the Amazon EBS console.

Share the volume with other AWS accounts by adding it to existing resource shares, or create a new resource share in the AWS RAM console. For more details, refer to the AWS RAM User Guide.

You can now see confirmation that the volume has been shared in the Volume sharing tab of the volume detail page.

A target account must accept the resource share on the RAM console.

Once they accept the resource share, they can see the volumes in the EBS volume page of the target account. Choose Copy volume for any shared volume.

To share and copy EBS volumes across AWS accounts programmatically, including calling APIs and searching documentation, try the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI coding tool. To learn more, visit the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Things to know
Let me share some important technical details that I think you’ll find useful.

• Encryption: You can share unencrypted volumes and volumes encrypted with a customer managed key (CMK). Volumes encrypted with the default AWS managed key (AMK) cannot be shared. When copying a shared volume encrypted with a CMK, the CMK must also be shared with the target account. You can specify a different CMK to re-encrypt the copy in the target account.
• Monitoring: You can monitor SharedVolumeCopyInitiated through AWS CloudTrail event in your account. You will also receive events in Amazon EventBridge at the start of the copy operation when the state of the copied volume is initializing, and at the end of the operation when the state of the copied volume changes to completed. You can see the shared volume ID, consuming account ID, and event time.
• Pricing: Once a copy is initiated, you’ll pay a one-time fee based on your volume size, charged to the account where the copy will reside. There’s no cost for sharing EBS volumes through AWS RAM. The copied volume will incur regular EBS volume charges upon creation.
• Availability Zone: The volume copy must be created in the same Availability Zone as the source volume. Use Availability Zone IDs (such as use1-az1) to identify the same physical location across accounts.

Now available
Cross-account volume clones for Amazon EBS are available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon EBS Volume Clones. For Regional availability and a future roadmap, visit the AWS Capabilities by Region.

Give this feature a try in the Amazon EC2 console today and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon EBS or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

The post Introducing Amazon EBS Volume Clones across AWS accounts appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Ever since the commercialisation of the Graphical User Interface pioneered by systems like the Xerox Star and popularised by the original Apple Macintosh, software has relied heavily on point-and-click interactions. If you wanted to book a trip, buy a pair of shoes, or research a health symptom, you were expected to navigate a labyrinth of user interfaces. You click menus, adjust range sliders, fill out multi-step forms, deal with cookie pop-ups, and open dozens of browser tabs just to cross-reference basic information. We have become accustomed to spending more time managing the software rather than actually achieving our goals.

That contract is officially changing. Driven by advances in artificial intelligence and large language models, a new generation of web tools is pioneering a radical philosophy: Intent-Driven Design. Rather than expecting our users to learn complex menus and click through elaborate sales funnels, these platforms operate by capturing high-level human goals and silently executing the grunt work in the background.

This vision builds on long-standing HCI concepts like Golden Krishna’s “The Best Interface Is No Interface” and Don Norman’s principles of human-centered design.

The ultimate goal of modern web design is no longer to build prettier buttons or flashy animations; it is to eliminate the interface entirely.

Well, at least what we understand based on our current experience.

It is essential for UX designers to understand the changes we’re witnessing and even re-evaluate our role, shifting our focus from designing visible interfaces to guiding transparent, intent-driven AI experiences.

The Death Of The “10-click” Process

To understand where web design is going, we first have to look at the friction we have accepted as “normal” for decades.

Consider the traditional workflow of buying a flight online. The user experience is intentionally hyper-interactive:

1. Navigate to a travel aggregator or airline website.
2. Select “Round Trip” from a dropdown menu.
3. Type the origin city and wait for auto-complete.
4. Type the destination city and wait for auto-complete.
5. Click a calendar modal, toggle through months, and select departure and return dates.
6. Choose the number of passengers and cabin class.
7. Click “Search” and wait for the results page to load.
8. Filter by price, layover duration, departure time, and airline.
9. Sort the results and scan through dozens of individual options.
10. Click through a three-page checkout funnel dodging upsells for rental cars and travel insurance.

This is a classic point-and-click UI paradigm. The computer acts as a passive container of data, and the human acts as the orchestrator, manually inputting parameters, interpreting raw outputs, and executing each micro-step along the way.

Intent-driven design flips this dynamic entirely. Instead of forcing you to navigate the mechanical steps of how to find a flight, the interface asks a simple question: What are you trying to accomplish?

When you express a goal, such as “Find me a non-stop flight to Chicago next weekend under $300 that arrives before 5 PM”, the software reads your intent, executes the multi-step search query behind the scenes, compares the options, and presents a single actionable resolution. The ten clicks dissolve into one clear intent outcome.

Three Web Platform Examples Replacing Buttons With Intent

This shift isn’t a theoretical vision of the distant future. Some of the world’s most accessible websites allow you to experience intent-capturing systems already.

1. Perplexity AI: Search Without The Open Tabs

Traditional search engines like Google were built as directories. You typed a keyword, and the interface rewarded you with ten blue links. The actual work of opening five tabs, skimming long articles, dodging ads, and manually assembling an answer was left to you. Although this is now changing, with AI content appearing first when you search on Google.

Perplexity AI allows anyone to perform instant intent-based searches. Instead of forcing you to click into multiple tabs, the interface synthesises the perfect result for your context.

• The interaction: You ask a complex question in plain English: “Compare the top three budget laptops for a computer science student, focusing on battery life and keyboard quality.”
• The invisible work: In under two seconds, the platform searches the web, reads dozens of articles, evaluates hardware specifications, and cross-references user reviews.

• The result: (See screen above) Instead of throwing web pages at you, Perplexity dynamically generates a single custom answer complete with formatted comparison tables, pros and cons lists, and concise inline citations. You get the outcome of thirty clicks in just one.

2. Vercel v0: Web Design Without Dragging And Dropping

For years, creating a website meant using visual builders like Figma or drag-and-drop web editors. As designers, we spent hours manually drawing rectangles, picking hexadecimal colour codes, adjusting padding values, and sometimes writing CSS code.

Vercel v0 lets anyone test its generative interface builder right from the home page without signing in.

• The Interaction: A user types a descriptive goal into the input prompt: “Create a modern dark-mode dashboard for a subscription SaaS app showing monthly revenue, active users, and a customer churn chart.”
• The invisible work: The underlying AI understands layout principles, accessibility guidelines, UI component libraries, and responsiveness. It writes clean HTML, Tailwind CSS, and React code in real time.
• The result: Rather than spending an afternoon manipulating elements, the user receives a fully functional, pixel-perfect user interface in seconds! The traditional visual design tool disappears, replaced by raw human intent.

3. Goblin.tools: Breaking Down Overwhelming Tasks

Many traditional productivity tools require you to manually construct task lists, drag items across Kanban boards, and assign micro-deadlines. Goblin.tools is a free, single-page suite of single-task AI tools designed specifically for neurodivergent users or anyone feeling overwhelmed, requiring zero sign-ups or configuration.

• The interaction: You enter a vague, intimidating goal into the Magic Todo tool, such as “Prepare for a job interview”.
• The invisible work: Instead of forcing you to plan every step, the system analyses the cognitive load of the goal and automatically breaks it down into small, actionable sub-tasks adjusted to your preferred level of detail.
• The result: The interface eliminates the stressful task-planning phase and presents a clean checklist tailored to your exact goal.

The Core Pillars Of Intent-driven Web Design

When you remove traditional menus, sidebars, and forms, how do you keep a website usable? Designers pioneering this space rely on three core pillars:

1. High-level Goals

An invisible interface doesn’t always wait for you to type a command — it leverages context to anticipate user needs. Guided by industry standards like Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines on Contextual & Ambient Design, modern systems read environmental metadata, such as device state, location, and past interaction patterns, to trigger proactive actions.

For example:

• Time and location: A food delivery web app prioritising your saved home address and dinner items automatically at 6:30 PM on a weekday.
• Cross-app history: A calendar application noticing an email about an upcoming appointment and surfacing a one-click “Add to Schedule” card without forcing you to copy and paste event details manually.

2. Generative UI

In traditional web design, every user sees the exact same layout. An e-commerce store shows the same navigation bar whether you are a first-time visitor looking for customer support or a returning customer tracking a package.

As highlighted in the Nielsen Norman Group’s analysis on AI as a new UX paradigm, computing is shifting from command-based interaction to outcome-specification. This enables Generative UI, where interfaces are rendered dynamically on the fly based on what you are trying to do in that exact moment. For example, platforms like Vercel v0 demonstrate how raw intent can instantly render functional code components without manual layout building. If you express a desire to compute complex financial data, the interface generates a dynamic calculator widget on demand, receding once your goal is completed.

3. Execution by AI Agents

Traditional interfaces are obsessed with prevention, constantly peppering users with confirmation pop-ups (“Are you sure you want to delete this file?”).

Intent-driven interfaces adapt Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics on User Control and Error Recovery by shifting the safety net from prevention to easy reversibility. Because autonomous agents take actions on your behalf, products prioritise frictionless rollback mechanisms. A prominent “Undo” button, simple revision prompts (“Make this summary shorter”), and transparent audit logs replace intrusive warning modals.

The Hidden Risks

While removing interface friction is liberating, stripping away visual controls introduces significant product design challenges. When software acts on inferred intent rather than direct point-and-click commands, designers must navigate critical ethical and technical pitfalls.

The Illusion Of Control

When a website makes decisions for you, it can quickly feel patronising or invasive. As explored by the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Group, automation must maintain clear boundaries to prevent user frustration. Furthermore, ethical frameworks from the Center for Humane Technology emphasise that product designers must guard against manipulative defaults.

Designers must strike a delicate balance: automate routine execution, but explicitly prompt the user for high-stakes confirmations (such as financial transactions, publishing public content, or altering privacy settings).

The Black Box Problem

In a traditional UI, if you get an unexpected result, you can usually diagnose the issue — perhaps you checked the wrong filter box or selected an incorrect date.

With an intent-driven interface, troubleshooting becomes harder. To address this “black box” challenge, the Google PAIR (People + AI Research) Guidebook advocates for transparent feedback loops. The system must explicitly state its interpretation (“Searching for non-stop flights to Chicago under $300…”) so users can calibrate trust and correct misinterpretations instantly.

From A UX Perspective

As a UX designer, always being curious to understand how our design approach is changing in the world of AI, I find it essential that we re-evaluate the foundational elements of our craft.

Rather than designing static buttons and rigid forms, we need to learn to map and present dynamic, generative UI components that adapt on the fly to user intent.

By mastering these evolving patterns, like ambient feedback, inline prompts, and transparent AI status indicators, we can ensure that screenless, agent-driven tools remain intuitive, ethical, and deeply human-centered.

Conclusion

The ultimate goal: The best design is no design.

For decades, the digital industry has evaluated software success through engagement metrics like time spent in app, click-through rates, and page views per session. Websites were deliberately engineered to maximise visual engagement and interaction volume.

The philosophy behind Golden Krishna’s seminal book The Best Interface Is No Interface, aligned with the broader Center for Humane Technology’s Time Well Spent movement, turns these metrics on their head. The ultimate test of a modern digital product is no longer how visually captivating its buttons are, but rather: How effectively did this software solve the problem and get out of the user’s way?,

We are entering an era where web applications will no longer be measured by the beauty of their interfaces, but by their ability to render those complex interfaces completely obsolete. The future of the web isn’t more interaction — it is seamless, invisible completion.

(ah, yk)

The post The Death Of The Button: Why The Best Interface Is No Interface appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Last week, Claude Fable 5.1 became available on AWS. According to Anthropic, Claude Fable 5.1 delivers frontier intelligence for ambitious tasks across coding, scientific research, and enterprise workflows. Claude Fable 5.1 is built for long-running, high-stakes work that runs for hours and spans many applications. It can own more of a software project on its own, handling features across an entire codebase, code review, and performance work over extended sessions.

Anthropic has designated Fable 5.1 a Covered Model, a category of Claude models that carry additional data retention, safety review, and access policies wherever they’re offered. Claude Fable 5.1 is subject to data retention for up to 30 days and human review by Amazon personnel, with a new aws_review data retention mode. In this mode, AWS retains your prompts and outputs for human safety review within the AWS boundary. The provider_data_share mode is legacy, and Amazon Bedrock does not share your data with the model provider. In addition, Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS), built in partnership between AWS and Anthropic, will let eligible customers use Covered Models while keeping their data in a cloud environment they control.

You have two ways to access Claude Fable 5.1: Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. To learn more, see the Claude Fable 5.1 model card on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

• Amazon Linux 2027 (AL2027) in public preview: AL2027 is the next version of the Amazon Linux operating system. It runs on kernel 7.1+, purpose-built for cloud-native workloads on AWS with performance, scale, and security in mind. Built on AL2023’s baseline, AL2027 is designed for customers who need a secure, stable, and AWS-native operating system running web applications, databases, containerized microservices, AI/ML workloads, and large-scale infrastructure.
• Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd memory-optimized instances: These instances are powered by AWS Graviton5 processors, delivering the best price performance for memory-intensive workloads running on Amazon EC2. R9g and R9gd instances deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to AWS Graviton4-based R8g and R8gd instances. They are up to 30% faster for databases, up to 35% faster for web applications, and up to 35% faster for machine learning. To learn more, read Daniel’s blog post.
• AWS Lambda SnapStart for container image functions: Lambda SnapStart is an opt-in capability that makes it easier for you to build highly responsive and scalable applications without provisioning resources or implementing complex performance optimizations. Previously, SnapStart was only supported for managed runtimes (Python, .NET, and Java). You can now use SnapStart for container images to reduce startup times from several seconds to as low as sub-second for latency-sensitive workloads such as ML inference and interactive APIs.
• AWS Agent Registry now generally available: AWS Agent Registry provides a private, governed catalog and discovery layer for agents, tools, skills, MCP servers, and custom resources within your organization. In addition to the capabilities launched in preview (manual and URL-based record creation, approval workflows, semantic and keyword search, and AWS CloudTrail audit trails), Registry now adds new enterprise features. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• Amazon Redshift now supports Apache Iceberg v3 tables: You can read from and write to Apache Iceberg v3 tables in your data lake of Amazon Redshift. With this launch, Amazon Redshift introduces support for default column values, row lineage, and deletion vectors. Amazon Redshift’s Graviton based provisioned and serverless clusters support the new v3 format. To learn more, visit Apache Iceberg v3 features in Redshift.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects and news items you may find interesting:

• AWS named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services: For the 16th consecutive year, Gartner has recognized AWS as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, and once again placed AWS highest on the Ability to Execute axis. We believe this recognition reflects our commitment to delivering the broadest and deepest set of cloud capabilities from infrastructure and AI to security and operations, so you can build, innovate, and scale with confidence.
• AWS Certified AI Business Strategist: This new certification targets professionals who evaluate, champion, and scale AI initiatives in their organizations: line-of-business leaders driving adoption across their teams, sales professionals articulating AI value to customers, consultants guiding client strategy from experimentation through production, program managers aligning AI investments to business outcomes. Beta exam registration opened September 1, 2026, with exam delivery beginning September 29.
• Agentic Security: Detection and Response at Machine Speed: We believe security should evolve ahead of AI adoption, not behind it. That belief drove our team to collaborate with the SANS Institute on a new chapter in the 2026 Cloud Security Exchange eBook, where we lay out a practical framework for securing agentic workloads at enterprise scale. Our chapter goes deeper on securing agentic workloads, with specific architectural patterns, implementation guidance, and frameworks for security teams at every stage of agentic AI maturity, whether you’re evaluating, piloting, or operating at scale.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Learn more about AWS, browse and join upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, startup events, and developer-focused events including AWS re:Invent, AWS Summits, and AWS Community Days. Join the AWS Builder Center to connect with builders, share solutions, and access content that supports your development.

That is all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Channy

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Fable 5.1 on AWS, Amazon Linux 2027 preview, AWS Certified AI Business Strategist, and more (September 7, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

That has led some seasoned (and not-so-seasoned) developers to go for the ultimate prize: replicating their favorite SaaS product. I admit to falling under the spell of such temptation.

It’s easy to see the potential benefits. SaaS subscriptions can be expensive, and the products may be more than what we need. Plus, there are always niche features that seem to be missing. Oh, and many are proprietary, raising data ownership concerns. Why not use AI to vibe code your own spinoff?

Can it really be that simple? Type a few prompts, and get a high-level tool to replace an enterprise app? As usual, it’s complicated.

Let’s take a hard look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of using AI to build a SaaS replica.

Taking Software Into Your Own Hands

My journey building a SaaS replica with AI began as I stood at a crossroads of sorts. I’m a longtime user of QuickBooks Desktop, which has served my accounting needs well over the years. However, the product I use was discontinued and moved online. Moving meant going from buying a license every few years to a monthly fee. I’m not keen on yet another subscription.

The desktop app is also starting to show its age. Some features are broken, and the interface is behind the times. Not to mention it’s a memory hog on my PC. This all coincides with some upcoming changes to my business that require a different approach.

So, I decided to take the plunge and build my own billing/customer relationship management (CRM) app as a WordPress plugin. I wanted something portable that would allow me (or others) to add features as needed. WordPress was the perfect fit.

The decision seemed like a no-brainer. I could use my existing skills to guide AI in the right direction. And I could leave out the things that weren’t necessary. I hoped to build a lean, functional plugin that streamlined my billing process.

This would also free me from the proprietary trap so many SaaS providers lock us into. I wouldn’t have to worry about higher rates, product limitations, or waiting for support tickets to be answered. Yes, this was exactly what I needed!

The only question was: Can I really build a suitable replacement?

The Challenge Is in the Details

The project started with a bang, as I used Claude to build a working prototype within an hour. Sure, there were some rough edges to be smoothed over. But the basic concept was coming together. Then, a bit of reality set in.

One of my goals was to create a tool that was close enough to what I’m accustomed to. The idea wasn’t to rebuild QuickBooks line by line, feature by feature. But I wanted something that provided a seamless transition.

My prototype allowed me to add customers, services, and invoices. I even built some import tools to bring my real-world data into the system. But I didn’t realize how many little details were missing until I used the plugin.

For example, I needed a way to share invoices with my clients. I also needed to distinguish between hourly-based and project-based services. Other needs seemed to pop up every few minutes:

• Custom reports for my business and individual customers.
• A way to email invoices to multiple contacts at the same company.
• A log to remind me whom I sent invoices to and when.
• Navigation to and from different areas of the plugin.
• User permissions for scenarios where you want to provide CRM access to a non-administrator.
• A front-end version of each relevant screen.

This was a different experience for someone who hadn’t taken a product from start to finish before. It felt more like being a product designer than a developer. That requires a different type of thinking.

AI proved capable of writing the code. However, I found myself having to provide extra context along the way. There was a lot of trial and error, and each new feature opened another set of decisions and potential.

There’s also danger in adding too many features. I didn’t want a bloated plugin that was difficult to use. As such, I had to practice restraint when considering my options.

It was a positive learning experience, for sure. But it also made me realize how much is involved in building a plugin that does more than merely function. Good things do indeed take time.

Questions To Ask Before You Build

The temptation to dive right in and generate code for the next HubSpot or Asana is understandable. AI makes relatively short work of complex coding tasks. These models can also advise you on how to replicate specific features.

It’s worth taking a step back and asking yourself a few key questions first, though. The answers will help you navigate the project or save you from making a massive mistake.

Are You Serious or Curious?

First, determine why you want to build this amazing new thing that’s based on an existing thing. Experimental side projects can be fun and a great way to learn. However, it’s different than a serious bid to create software that your entire company will use.

The former encourages you to be patient and test your ideas. The latter is often a mandate to increase efficiency while saving money. There’s an entirely different level of pressure in that scenario. You’ll also need to dedicate more resources toward the project.

It’s not necessarily a deal breaker either way, but a consideration nonetheless.

Do You Need Third-Party Integrations?

Integrating with other tools and services is a SaaS superpower. For example, adding Stripe to your CRM enables online payments, while Mailchimp adds email capabilities. AI tools can help you connect the various APIs out there.

The downside is the responsibility that comes with these integrations. APIs frequently change, and you need to stay ahead of them. Failing to keep up could lead to software that doesn’t work. Plus, there are security and privacy risks.

Remember: Once you build it, you’re responsible for it.

Do You Need Your App To Scale?

SaaS applications often require a robust infrastructure. That’s why AI companies are building data centers everywhere. This could be a concern if you’re expecting a stampede of users and use cases.

Smaller, more focused apps like my CRM plugin aren’t as big of a problem. A few users on a WordPress site won’t require a ton of memory or CPU cycles. But the calculus changes as your needs grow.

This is where a fun little project can turn into something more complex. That app you just vibe coded could turn you into a systems engineer. There’s also a cost to server space and other necessities. Are you prepared to go that far?

You Can Replicate a SaaS With AI, but Should You?

Using AI to generate code opens up a world of possibilities – and it’s only getting more powerful. New models continue to evolve to help us get things done faster. That leads to bigger and bolder ideas on our part.

Even so, it’s a good idea to think about the long-term consequences of what you build. It may be fun to try and replicate Gmail, but do you really want the responsibilities that go with it?

That may be an extreme example, but the theory also applies to smaller projects. The reality is that the best SaaS products are popular for a reason. They scale, have dedicated security teams, and professional product designers working to improve every aspect. Even the best AI models can’t match that quite yet.

So, have fun and experiment! Just know what you’re getting into before you begin.

here. He recently started a writing service for WordPress products: WP Product Writeup. He also has an opinion on just about every subject. You can follow his rants on Bluesky @karks.com.

Read more articles by Eric Karkovack

The post Can You Really Replicate Your Favorite SaaS With AI? appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

Today, Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are generally available, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. R9g instances are memory-optimized and deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based R8g instances, powered by the most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built.

R9g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads including databases, in-memory caches (Valkey, Redis, MemCached), real-time big data analytics, Linux-based workloads including containerized and micro-service-based applications (e.g. Kubernetes, Docker, EKS, ECS), as well as applications written in popular programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP.

R9gd instances include local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage, ideal for memory-intensive workloads requiring fast, low-latency local storage such as open-source databases, distributed real-time big data analytics, large in-memory databases, and large caching workloads.

If you’re running workloads on R8g instances today, R9g gives you more performance per vCPU with faster memory, higher network and Amazon EBS bandwidth, and a larger L3 cache, all while using less energy.

What makes R9g different
Graviton5 processors bring several hardware improvements over Graviton4:

• Up to 25% higher compute performance per vCPU
• DDR5 8800 MT/s memory (up from 5600 MT/s in Graviton4), the fastest memory available in the cloud
• 5x larger L3 cache for better data locality
• Up to 2x higher network and EBS bandwidth for the largest instance sizes (up to 100 Gbps network, up to 72 Gbps EBS on the 48xlarge)
• Up to 3x higher packet-processing performance

R9g and R9gd instances support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC), which lets you adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networking by 25%. This helps optimize performance for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements such as databases and caching.

All R9g and R9gd instances run on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads virtualization, storage, and networking to dedicated hardware. This gives your applications near-bare-metal performance while maintaining strong security isolation between instances.

R9g and R9gd instances feature the Nitro Isolation Engine (NIE), the same enhancement to the Nitro System introduced with C9g and M9g instances earlier this year, which enforces isolation of instances and harnesses formal verification to provide assurances of isolation with mathematical precision. Nitro Isolation Engine is a purpose-built component that is responsible for enforcing isolation between virtual machines, including mediation of all access to virtual machine memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs. Nitro Isolation Engine leverages formal verification, a technique to mathematically demonstrate that the hardware or software behaves as intended, and not just in specific test cases. This intensive verification technique establishes Nitro as the first formally verified cloud hypervisor, pioneering a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security. To learn more about the Nitro Isolation Engine, visit the blog post. For details on the formal verification results, including scope and assumptions, see the technical white paper.

EC2 R9g and R9gd instance specifications
R9g and R9gd instances are each available in 11 sizes, from medium to metal-48xl. The following tables show the full specifications for each size.

R9gd instances offer the same compute and networking performance as R9g, with the addition of local NVMe-based SSD storage for workloads that need fast, low-latency scratch space or temporary caches.

Getting started
You can launch R9g and R9gd instances from the Amazon EC2 console using any supported Arm-based AMI. R9g instances support Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 22.04+, RHEL 8.4+, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3+, Debian 12+, and other major Linux distributions.

If you’re migrating from R8g, no code changes are required for most applications. Select the equivalent R9g instance size and your application runs with better performance. For containerized workloads, R9g works with Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and standard Kubernetes deployments. Multi-arch container images built for Arm64 run without changes.

Several resources help you get started: the AWS Graviton Getting Started Guide covers how to build, run, and optimize workloads on Graviton-based instances. The Graviton Savings Dashboard helps you track cost savings. AWS Transform automates code transformations for migrating Java applications from x86 to Graviton. To learn more, visit AWS Graviton Processors or Level up your compute with AWS Graviton.

Pricing and availability
Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions.

R9g and R9gd instances are available for purchase through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts. For detailed pricing, visit the Amazon EC2 pricing page.

Ready to get started? Launch R9g instances from the Amazon EC2 console. For more details, visit the Amazon EC2 R9g instances page.

If you want to call APIs, search documentation, find regional availability, and check troubleshooting about this feature, try using the AWS MCP Server and plugins with your preferred AI tool. Share your feedback on AWS re:Post for Amazon EC2 or reach out through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Daniel Abib

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