AWS Recent Announcements RSS

AWS Direct Connect now provides Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route visibility, allowing you to view the routes exchanged between AWS and your on-premises routers across your private, transit, and public virtual interfaces (VIFs). You can now see which routes AWS accepted from your router and which routes AWS is advertising to your router, along with their AS path and BGP community values. This visibility helps network administrators troubleshoot routing issues, verify route propagation, and monitor their hybrid network connectivity.

With this feature, you can view accepted routes (routes AWS received from your router) and advertised routes (routes AWS sends to your router) directly in the Direct Connect console or programmatically using the ListVirtualInterfaceRoutes API action. Each route displays its prefix, address family, AS path, community values, and installation timestamp, giving you comprehensive insight into your routing topology. You can filter routes by prefix, AS path, community, or address family to quickly identify specific routing behaviors. This capability is particularly valuable when managing complex multi-region architectures, validating BGP policy configurations, or diagnosing unexpected traffic patterns.

This feature is available in all AWS commercial Regions and the AWS China Regions (Beijing, operated by Sinnet, and Ningxia, operated by NWCD).

To learn more about BGP route visibility, visit the AWS Direct Connect documentation or access the feature through the Direct Connect console.

Amazon Redshift now supports Graviton-based RG instances on the trailing track. Starting today, rg.large and rg.12xlarge instance types are available for customers running workloads on the trailing track on patch P202 and onwards.

The trailing track is designed for customers who prioritize stability for production workloads, running on a version already validated through the leading track. With RG instances now available on both tracks, customers can take advantage of AWS Graviton-powered performance - delivering up to 2.4x faster query performance than RA3 instances at 30% lower price per vCPU.

Customers on the trailing maintenance track (patch P202 and later) can now create Amazon Redshift RG clusters in all AWS regions where RG is generally available. To get started, customers can provision a new cluster or resize an existing cluster to an rg.large or rg.12xlarge instance type using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs.For more information, see Amazon Redshift cluster versions.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) announces a major update to IAM Policy Simulator, the tool you use to test and validate the permissions your IAM policies grant before you deploy them. This update changes the simulator in three ways: it now lives in the IAM console, it can test service control policies (SCPs), and it adds flexibility to model more of the scenarios that security and platform teams simulate in practice.

IAM Policy Simulator is now part of the IAM console, replacing the standalone simulator site, so you can test policies in the same place you manage your identities and policies. You can also now include SCPs in your simulation to test how your organization's SCP hierarchy interacts with identity and resource policies, and through the API, test how condition keys such as Region restrictions and tag requirements affect the outcome. Finally, new flexibility lets you exclude specific policies to model "what if I remove this policy?" scenarios, and cross-account simulations now report per-policy decisions for identity and resource-based policies, with the matched statements returned for a denied request reflecting only the policies that drove the decision. Together, these changes help teams automate policy unit testing, detect over-permissive access, and validate guardrails with greater confidence.

These features are available in all AWS Regions where IAM Policy Simulator is available. You can access IAM Policy Simulator in the IAM console by choosing Policy simulator in the navigation pane.

To learn more, see the following resources:

• Testing IAM policies with the IAM policy simulator

• API reference on SimulatePrincipalPolicy and SimulateCustomPolicy

Today, OpenAI announced lower prices for GPT‑5.6 Luna and GPT‑5.6 Terra. Effective July 30, 2026, on-demand inference prices on Amazon Bedrock for GPT‑5.6 Luna are reduced by 80%, while prices for GPT‑5.6 Terra are reduced by 20%. These reductions are in-line with OpenAI's first-party pricing changes for these models. 

GPT‑5.6 Luna is optimized for fast, high-volume workloads and can use tools to complete multi-step workflows, making it well suited for content processing, classification, customer-service automation, and routine implementation tasks. GPT‑5.6 Terra balances intelligence, speed, and cost for everyday production workloads requiring more sophisticated reasoning. These price reductions enable customers to apply their capabilities across more applications, process larger workloads, and lower the cost per completed task. Pricing for GPT‑5.6 Sol remains unchanged. The new prices apply automatically, with no changes required from customers.

GPT‑5.6 Luna and Terra are available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) through the OpenAI Responses API on the bedrock-mantle endpoint. To get started, see the Amazon Bedrock OpenAI model documentation. For the latest pricing information for GPT-5.6 models on Amazon Bedrock, please visit the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.

AWS Transit Gateway now supports Policy-Based Routing (PBR), giving network administrators granular control over how traffic is forwarded across their AWS network. With PBR, forwarding decisions can be based on a combination of packet attributes including source and destination IP addresses, ports, and protocol rather than destination IP address alone.

Previously, customers needing traffic steering or workload isolation had to build multi-VPC architectures with additional routing hops, adding complexity and operational overhead. PBR eliminates this by extending Transit Gateway's native routing capabilities, enabling security architects and enterprise network teams to classify and direct traffic inline without extra infrastructure. Customers associate a policy table with a Transit Gateway attachment and define an ordered set of rules. Each rule classifies traffic and directs matching packets to a specified route table using first-match-wins logic. This supports use cases such as steering sensitive workloads through AWS Network Firewall or third-party inspection appliances, routing application traffic over AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN paths based on source, port, or protocol, and isolating production and development environments into separate routing domains to limit lateral movement.

Policy-Based Routing for AWS Transit Gateway is available in all commercial AWS Regions where Transit Gateway is available. You can configure PBR using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK). PBR incurs no additional charge beyond standard Transit Gateway fees. To learn more about Policy-Based Routing for AWS Transit Gateway, visit the AWS Transit Gateway product page .

Amazon MSK Express brokers now delivers data to Amazon S3 general purpose buckets, providing a fully managed capability to deliver Apache Kafka data in Amazon S3 for downstream processing in the easiest and most reliable way. This capability automatically scales to deliver high-throughput Kafka data to S3 with end-to-end reliability for mission-critical workloads, while reducing ingestion and delivery costs by up to 60% compared to self-managed alternatives.

Customers deliver Apache Kafka data to Amazon S3 for use cases such as log archival, compliance retention, Kafka replay, and training AI/ML models, and typically build these pipelines with self-managed connectors that grow costly and operationally complex as workloads scale, forcing teams to build or source S3 connector plugins, secure approvals to deploy them, and continually scale capacity, and apply security updates across connector fleet. With this capability, MSK Express automatically handles scaling, retries, and backpressure so customers no longer manage connector fleets or coordinate across teams. MSK Express  supports throughput of up to 10 GB/s for data delivery to Amazon S3, and manages routine operations such as capacity scaling and version upgrades without introducing delivery gaps. Additionally, customers add this delivery capability without provisioning additional broker egress throughput, which eliminates the incremental infrastructure costs that scaling connector-based pipelines typically incurs, so customers scale delivery to actual workload demand rather than provisioning for peak, achieving reliable, high-throughput delivery to Amazon S3 while removing operational overhead and lowering costs.

Amazon MSK data delivery to Amazon S3 is available today in every AWS Region where Amazon MSK Express brokers are offered. For pricing information, visit the pricing page. To learn more, visit the Amazon MSK Developer Guide and Amazon MSK AI skills.

Amazon MSK Express brokers now deliver data to streaming tables for Apache Iceberg, a new capability that continuously materializes Apache Kafka topics as Apache Iceberg tables on Amazon S3 Tables. Amazon MSK data delivery to streaming tables can reduce the cost of ingesting and delivering Apache Kafka data into Amazon S3 Tables by up to 60% versus self-managed deployments and reduces downstream query costs by up to 30% versus self-managed Apache Kafka deployments.

Customers rely on Apache Kafka to ingest real-time data for use cases like fraud detection and personalization and increasingly want to unify that data with Apache Iceberg tables for near real-time analytics but integrating the two forces them to operate complex custom pipelines, manage format conversions, and contend with the small-file problem, where high-volume ingestion creates many small parquet files that slow downstream queries and increase costs. With this capability, intelligent inline compaction eliminates the performance impact of small files and keeps query performance predictable without sacrificing data freshness, while built-in coordination resolves concurrent writer conflicts across high-throughput consumers. Amazon MSK supports throughput of up to 10 GB/s for delivery to Apache Iceberg on Amazon S3 Tables, and because this native capability adds no broker egress throughput, customers avoid the incremental infrastructure costs of scaling connector pipelines and match capacity to actual demand rather than peak. Customers deliver data to streaming tables and query or transform the data with any engine of their choice, including Apache Spark, Trino, or Apache Flink. 

To get started, customers open the Amazon MSK console, select the Express cluster, and enable the capability in a few clicks, or use the MSK APIs or MCP server. Amazon MSK data delivery to streaming tables is available today in every AWS Region where Amazon MSK Express brokers are offered. For pricing information, visit the pricing page. To learn more, visit the Amazon MSK Developer Guide and Amazon MSK AI skills.

xAI's Grok 4.3 model is now available on Amazon Bedrock in AWS GovCloud (US-West). With this launch, xAI joins Amazon Bedrock as a model provider in AWS GovCloud (US-West), giving you even more choice as you build generative AI applications across reasoning, agentic, and enterprise workflows.

Grok 4.3 is a reasoning-first model that offers configurable reasoning effort (none, low, medium, high). It also offers strong tool use and instruction-following capabilities for building reliable agents, and token efficiency to help keep high-volume inference cost-effective. Grok 4.3 is especially well suited to enterprise workloads such as customer support, web development, case law research, and financial document Q&A, while delivering consistent, high-quality results across conversational Al, search, chat, and multi-turn workflows. Grok 4.3 runs on Mantle, a new inference engine in Amazon Bedrock designed for price performance, with support for tool calling, structured output, and response streaming.

See region availability of Grok 4.3 for list of supported regions. To get started, visit the Grok 4.3 model detail page in our documentation.

The Gemma 4 family of open-weight models from Google DeepMind on Amazon Bedrock in AWS GovCloud (US-West). With Gemma 4, you can build generative AI applications across reasoning, multimodal understanding, agentic, and software engineering workflows.

The Gemma 4 family on Amazon Bedrock includes three variants - Gemma 4 31B, Gemma 4 26B-A4B, and Gemma 4 E2B - spanning dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures with built-in reasoning, native function calling, support for 35+ languages and multimodal input across text, image, video and audio. Gemma 4 31B is suited for reasoning- and coding-heavy workloads with a 256K-token context window, Gemma 4 26B-A4B targets cost- and latency-sensitive workloads, and Gemma 4 E2B is the smallest variant, designed for low-latency interactive use cases. Gemma 4 runs on a new innovation in Amazon Bedrock designed for price performance, with improved support for tool calling, structured output, reasoning, and response streaming, so customers can build reliable generative AI applications with open-source models.

To get started, visit Gemma 4 model detail pages in our documentation.

AWS Directory Service now allows you to upgrade your AWS Managed Microsoft AD directory from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition directly through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and API without migrating to a new directory or re-joining your existing workloads.

Standard Edition is designed for organizations with up to 5,000 users and objects, while Enterprise Edition supports up to 500,000 objects and provides greater scalability for larger deployments. Customers who have outgrown Standard Edition limits can now upgrade in place, preserving existing trust relationships, application integrations, and group policies. The upgrade requires no changes to your DNS configuration or connected AWS workloads.

This new capability is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Directory Service is available. To get started, navigate to the AWS Directory Service console, select your Standard Edition directory, and choose Upgrade Edition from the directory actions menu. See the administrator guide for step-by-step instructions. For pricing details, go to the AWS Directory Service pricing page.

You can now run OpenSearch version 3.7 on Amazon OpenSearch Service. OpenSearch 3.7 introduces improvements in vector search performance, search relevance, and Query Insights.

With this launch, 1-bit scalar quantization on the Faiss and Lucene engines compresses vectors, reducing the storage and memory required by vector workloads while maintaining search accuracy. You can now retrieve vectors faster using doc values instead of document source, with no reindexing required. Search Relevance Workbench adds new evaluation metrics, CSV judgment uploads, and expanded hybrid search optimization, helping you measure and improve search quality.

This launch also introduces new Query Insights capabilities, including automated query recommendations, a finished-queries cache for observing recently completed queries, and the option to export top query data to Amazon S3, helping you identify expensive queries and analyze trends over time.

For information on upgrading to OpenSearch 3.7, please see the documentation. OpenSearch 3.7 is now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon OpenSearch Service is available.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports Instance Refresh as a new AWS CloudFormation update policy. When you configure the new AutoScalingInstanceRefresh update policy and update properties that require instance replacement, CloudFormation automatically triggers an Instance Refresh.

With this integration, you can now access Instance Refresh capabilities including replace root volume for in-place updates, launch-before-terminate, alarm-based monitoring, and checkpoints with bake time for controlled rollouts. Auto Scaling features such as scaling policies and health checks remain active throughout the update, so your service health is not at risk during deployments. Rollback is handled through CloudFormation stack rollback.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions at no additional cost. To learn more, see AutoScalingInstanceRefresh update policy in the AWS CloudFormation Template Reference.

Amazon Redshift Data API introduces new capabilities that reduce the number of API calls to retrieve SQL statement metadata or results, provide visibility into sessions, and allow batch statements to execute on separate transactions.

Long polling: Long polling enables you to retrieve SQL statement metadata or results without polling repeatedly until the SQL statement reaches a terminal state, by delaying returning a synchronous response until the SQL statement finishes. To use this feature, specify the WaitTimeSeconds parameter on ExecuteStatement, BatchExecuteStatement, DescribeStatement, GetStatementResult, or GetStatementResultV2.

ListSessions: Applications that reuse sessions across multiple queries can now enumerate active sessions and filter by status, compute target, or database, eliminating the need to track session identifiers externally.

Flexible batch execution: BatchExecuteStatement now supports an ExecutionMode parameter with AUTO_COMMIT mode, allowing each SQL statement in a batch to execute independently so a single failure no longer rolls back the entire batch — useful for ETL pipelines and administrative scripts where partial completion is acceptable. In addition, BatchExecuteStatement now accepts an array of SqlParameter, enabling parameter reuse across all statements in a batch: define parameters once and reference them in any statement, eliminating the need to embed literal values in each query.

These features are generally available for Amazon Redshift Provisioned and Amazon Redshift Serverless in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions that support Amazon Redshift Data API. To get started, visit the Amazon Redshift Data API developer guide.

AWS Glue now supports VPC connections, filter pushdown, and partition support for the REST API connector. The REST API connector enables you to ingest data from any source that exposes a REST-based API, including proprietary systems and emerging platforms without native AWS Glue connectors. With this launch, you can operate your ETL pipelines from data sources with REST API endpoints by securely connecting to private endpoints, transfering only the data they need, and parallelizing reads for faster ingestion, all without writing custom code

With VPC support, you can use the REST API connector to access data sources hosted in private subnets or connected through VPNs or AWS PrivateLink, without exposing traffic to the public internet. Filter pushdown translates your query predicates into API-native parameters, so only matching records leave the source, reducing data transfer costs and improving job performance. Partition support splits large datasets across multiple Spark workers using field-based or record-count strategies, providing parallel reads that reduce ingestion time for high-volume, paginated APIs.

These capabilities are available in all AWS commercial regions where AWS Glue is available.

To get started, visit the AWS Glue REST API connector documentation.

Today, AWS WAF adds pre-parse text transformations for query arguments and ten new text transformations for use in any rule statement. Both help you normalize request content so that AWS WAF inspects requests the same way your application interprets them.

Pre-parse text transformations normalize a raw query string before AWS WAF parses it into key-value pairs, closing HTTP parameter pollution and parser differential evasion gaps. You can chain up to ten transformations, including URL decode, Combine Duplicate Query Arguments by Comma, and Replace Semicolons with Ampersands, then layer standard post-parse transformations on top within a single rule statement.

The new text transformations give you more ways to normalize content before inspection, including industry-standard options such as Uppercase, Trim, Remove Whitespace, and SHA256, plus operating-system-aware command line and JavaScript decoding functions developed by the Amazon Threat Research Team.

Each new transformation consumes 10 WCUs, with no additional charge beyond standard AWS WAF pricing, and is available in all AWS Regions. To get started, see the following resources:

• Pre-parse text transformations in AWS WAF: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/waf-rule-statement-preparse-transformation.html

• Text transformations in AWS WAF: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/waf-rule-statement-transformation.html

• Getting started with AWS WAF: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/getting-started.html

AWS announces the general availability (GA) of AWS Interconnect — multicloud with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Customers have been adopting multicloud strategies while migrating more applications to the cloud. They do so for many reasons including interoperability requirements, the freedom to choose technology that best suits their needs, and the ability to build and deploy applications on any environment with greater ease and speed. Previously, when interconnecting workloads across multiple cloud providers (CSPs), customers had to go the route of a ‘do-it-yourself’ multicloud approach, leading to complexities of building and managing global multi-layered networks at scale. AWS Interconnect - multicloud is the first purpose-built product of its kind and a new way of how clouds connect and talk to each other, allowing customers to quickly provision resilient, scalable private connections to other cloud providers.

In May, OCI launched support for AWS Interconnect in public preview and became the latest CSP to adopt the open specification that powers the service. With today’s GA launch, AWS customers can now rely on the same consistent, simple experience to interconnect their workloads on OCI and Google Cloud. Microsoft Azure will launch later in 2026.

Interconnect - multicloud is available with OCI in the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) AWS Region. You can create an Interconnect using the AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface (CLI), or API. For more information, see the AWS Interconnect - multicloud documentation.

Amazon Connect Customer now automatically surfaces relevant examples of an agent's evaluations when managers are preparing coaching feedback, so they can deliver actionable, evidence-backed coaching to agents. When a manager prepares agent coaching feedback in Amazon Connect Customer, they automatically receive examples of recent evaluations where the agent scored high or low on the chosen coaching topic, along with human or AI evaluator notes explaining the agent behaviors that drove the result. For example, while preparing feedback for an agent on "de-escalation," a manager receives example calls where the agent successfully calmed a frustrated customer, alongside calls that were escalated, with insights into the agent behaviors that led to each outcome. This enables managers to deliver tailored coaching that accelerates agent performance improvement, while saving the time spent manually searching for examples.

This feature is available in all regions where Amazon Connect Customer is offered. To learn more, please visit our documentation and our webpage. 

Amazon EFS now supports cross-account Replication in AWS GovCloud (US), allowing customers to replicate file systems between AWS accounts. EFS Replication enables you to easily maintain an up-to-date replica of your file system in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region of your choice. With this launch, EFS Replication customers can meet business continuity, multi-account disaster recovery, and compliance requirements by automatically keeping replicas of their file data in separate accounts. 

Customers often use multiple AWS accounts to help isolate and manage business applications and data for operational excellence, security, and reliability. Starting today, you can use EFS Replication to replicate your file system to another account in any AWS GovCloud (US) region. This eliminates the need to set up custom processes to synchronize EFS data across accounts, enhancing resilience and reliability in distributed environments. 

To learn more, visit the Amazon EFS documentation and get started by configuring EFS Replication in just a few clicks using the Amazon EFS Console, AWS CLI, AWS CloudFormation, and APIs.

IAM Identity Center helps you configure the single sign-on experience of your workforce to AWS accounts and applications. You can now replicate IAM Identity Center from the primary AWS Region where you first enabled it to additional Regions of your choice when using Identity Center directory as your identity source. This extends the multi-Region support capability, previously available for Identity Center organization instances connected to external identity providers, to instances that use the Identity Center directory to manage and authenticate their workforce. This feature enhances resilience of user access to AWS accounts and helps you deploy AWS applications in the AWS Regions that best align with your business needs such as application data residency and proximity to users.

When you enable this feature, IAM Identity Center automatically replicates your identities, entitlements, and other information from the primary Region to additional Regions. If IAM Identity Center is affected by a disruption in the primary Region, IAM Identity Center users continue to have access to their AWS accounts using the already provisioned entitlements in the additional Regions. 

AWS application administrators can use the standard application deployment workflow to deploy their application in an additional Region while you continue to administer IAM Identity Center in the primary Region.

IAM Identity Center multi-Region support is currently available in the 17 enabled-by-default commercial AWS Regions for organization instances of IAM Identity Center. The IAM Identity Center organization instance must be configured with a multi-Region customer managed KMS key (CMK). To find out which AWS applications support deployment in additional Regions, visit AWS applications that you can use with IAM Identity Center. Standard AWS KMS charges apply for storing and using CMKs. IAM Identity Center is provided at no additional cost. To learn more about IAM Identity Center, visit the product detail page. To get started, see the IAM Identity Center User Guide.

Amazon EKS now delivers faster pod autoscaling across all Provisioned Control Plane clusters by increasing Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) sync concurrency to up to 40 times the default Kubernetes value. This reduces the time it takes for HPA-driven workloads to scale in response to increased load, enabling faster responsiveness to demand.

The Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) continuously monitors workload metrics and adjusts pod counts to match demand. In clusters running hundreds or thousands of HPA objects, the speed at which the Kubernetes control plane processes these objects determines how quickly workloads scale in response to changing demand. The HPA sync concurrency setting controls how many HPA objects the control plane evaluates in parallel. By increasing this value, Provisioned Control Plane clusters now process more HPA objects simultaneously, reducing the time between detecting increased load and scaling out pods.

This enhancement is available to all customers using EKS Provisioned Control Plane and requires no configuration changes. To learn more about this enhancement, see EKS Provisioned Control Plane in the EKS User Guide.

AWS Console Home now supports the Cost and Usage widget in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) Region, allowing customers to surface insights from Cost Explorer and Cost Optimization Hub on their Console Home dashboard.

With the Cost and Usage widget, customers can track month-to-date and forecasted costs, identify savings opportunities, and see how their spend breaks down by service over time.

To get started, sign in to the AWS Management Console, select Add widgets, and drag the Cost and Usage widget onto your Console Home dashboard. To learn more, see Working with widgets in AWS Console Home documentation.

Second-generation AWS Outposts racks are now supported in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. Outposts racks extend AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any on-premises data center or colocation space for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

Organizations from startups to enterprises and the public sector in and outside of India can now order their Outposts racks connected to this new supported region, optimizing for their latency and data residency needs. Outposts allows customers to run workloads that need low latency access to on-premises systems locally while connecting back to their home Region for application management. Customers can also use Outposts and AWS services to manage and process data that needs to remain on-premises to meet data residency requirements. This regional expansion provides additional flexibility in the AWS Regions that customers’ Outposts can connect to.

To learn more about second-generation Outposts racks, read this blog post and user guide. For the most updated list of countries and territories and the AWS Regions where second-generation Outposts racks are supported, check out the Outposts rack FAQs page.

AWS DataSync Enhanced mode now supports Amazon EFS and Amazon FSx for Lustre as source or destination locations.

AWS DataSync is a secure, high-speed data transfer service that simplifies moving data over a network. Enhanced mode processes data in parallel, removes file count limitations, and provides detailed transfer metrics. Previously, customers who wanted to move data to or from EFS or FSx for Lustre were limited to Basic mode. Now customers can use Enhanced mode for these locations, simplifying workflows for large-scale migrations, agentic AI and machine learning training, high-performance computing, genomics processing, and media rendering.

This capability is available in all AWS Regions where AWS DataSync is offered. To get started, visit the AWS DataSync console. For more information, see the AWS DataSync documentation.

AWS DataSync Enhanced mode now supports agent-based data transfers with Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS), Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and self-managed object storage. Additionally, Enhanced mode agents can now be deployed on Microsoft Hyper-V. Using a DataSync agent, customers can transfer data to and from these locations with the parallelism, unlimited file counts, and detailed metrics that Enhanced mode provides.

Enhanced mode HDFS support includes multiple NameNode configurations for high availability and Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) with Kerberos authentication, enabling organizations in regulated industries to securely migrate petabyte-scale encrypted Hadoop data without sacrificing availability.

This capability is available in all AWS Regions where AWS DataSync is offered. To get started, visit the AWS DataSync console. For more information, see the AWS DataSync documentation.

Amazon S3 Tables now support the Variant data type as defined in the Apache Iceberg Version 3 (V3) specification. You can now write semi-structured data like JSON directly to S3 Tables without defining a fixed schema in advance, allowing you to land data faster while still getting efficient analytical query performance.

With the Variant data type, Apache Iceberg V3-compatible engines shred your semi-structured data into hidden columns as you write it, generating Parquet column statistics that query engines use for optimizations like file pruning, which reduces the data your analytical queries scan. S3 Tables also provide ongoing table maintenance, including compaction, for Variant columns, so you can consolidate data from small files into large files that Iceberg engines can read.

Variant support in S3 Tables is available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), and South America (São Paulo).

To learn more, see Amazon S3 Tables and the AWS Prescriptive Guidance for working with Iceberg table format specification version 3.

Amazon Neptune Database now supports tag-based access control (TBAC) for IAM, enabling customers to use AWS resource tags and IAM principal tags as conditions in IAM policies and Service Control Policies (SCPs) to control access to Neptune data-plane operations. Neptune already provides robust security through VPC isolation, TLS encryption, and IAM authentication, but customers managing multiple clusters at scale needed a dynamic, attribute-based mechanism to enforce organizational access boundaries. TBAC addresses this by allowing administrators to govern cluster access without enumerating specific cluster ARNs in every policy.

With TBAC, IAM principals can only perform `neptune-db:*` actions against Neptune clusters whose tags match their own — for example, a principal tagged `Project=FraudDetection` is automatically restricted to clusters sharing that same tag. This eliminates lateral access risk within shared VPC environments, enforces team and environment-level isolation across projects, and supports federated identity workflows using SAML or OIDC session tags from external identity providers. Granular permissions like neptune-db:QueryLanguage can be used alongside TBAC for more fine-grained access control.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Neptune is available and requires Neptune engine version 1.2.0.0 or later with IAM authentication enabled.

To learn more about configuring tag-based access control for Amazon Neptune, including how to tag your DB clusters and IAM principals and deploy organization-wide guardrails using SCPs, visit the Amazon Neptune documentation.

AWS Glue Data Quality now supports anomaly detection for Catalog-based data quality evaluations and the ability to write evaluation results to AWS Glue Data Catalog (GDC) tables. These capabilities work across both ETL jobs and Catalog evaluations, giving you a consistent data quality experience regardless of workflow type.

With anomaly detection support for GDC, you can identify unexpected changes in data statistics such as sudden drops in distinct values or row count spikes in your GDC tables using ML-powered time-series forecasting, without writing rules with explicit thresholds. This is especially valuable for data engineers monitoring hundreds of tables in the GDC who need to surface issues automatically.

With results storage in GDC, Data Quality rule outcomes, profiling metrics, and anomaly predictions (with confidence bounds) are written back to GDC tables, creating a queryable record of all quality evaluations. Whether the evaluation runs in an ETL job or directly on a Catalog table, results can be queried at any time using standard SQL.

AWS Glue Data Quality anomaly detection and Catalog results storage are available in all AWS commercial regions and AWS GovCloud (US) regions.

To get started, visit the AWS Glue Data Quality documentation.

AWS Glue Data Quality now supports a new Distribution Analyzer that generates frequency distribution profiles for your data. Using this new Distribution Analyzer in the Data Quality Definition Language (DQDL), you can generate histograms for numeric columns and value distributions for categorical, date, and boolean columns. With support for custom bin counts, you can explore the shape and patterns of your data at the granularity that matters most to your use case.

Understanding how data is distributed is foundational to building reliable data pipelines. Distribution statistics help you quickly identify skewness, outliers, and unexpected patterns across your datasets, without writing custom code. The capability integrates directly with your existing DQDL rulesets, so you can add distribution profiling alongside your current data quality checks in a single evaluation run. Distribution statistics are stored in Amazon S3 for future querying through services like Amazon Athena, and are also surfaced through APIs, making it easy to integrate distribution insights into monitoring workflows and visualization tools, including SageMaker Unified Studio.

AWS Glue Data Quality distribution statistics are available in all AWS commercial regions and AWS GovCloud (US) regions.

To learn more about Glue Data Quality, visit the AWS Glue Data Quality documentation. To get started with using Distribution Analyzer, visit the Analyzers documentation.

Amazon GameLift Streams now supports Custom Aspect Ratio and Dynamic Resolution, giving you greater control over the streaming experience across diverse player devices and network conditions.

With Custom Aspect Ratio, you can configure a specific resolution per stream session to match your player's device — including portrait, landscape, ultra-wide, and square aspect ratios. This eliminates letterboxing or pillarboxing, delivering native full-screen experiences on mobile phones, tablets, and non-standard displays. Specify any resolution from 320 to 4096 pixels per dimension (up to 1080p total pixel budget) using the DisplayConfiguration parameter in the StartStreamSession API. You can also try custom resolution from the AWS Console.

Dynamic Resolution automatically adapts stream quality when a player's network bandwidth fluctuates. When bandwidth drops, the stream gracefully reduces resolution to maintain smooth playback without frame drops or disconnections — and automatically recovers to full quality when conditions improve. Dynamic Resolution is enabled by default for all new stream groups with no configuration required. Customers will need to download the new Web SDK.

Both features are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon GameLift Streams is offered. To learn more, see Custom stream resolution in the Amazon GameLift Streams Developer Guide. 
 
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gameliftstreams/latest/developerguide/custom-stream-resolution.html

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports AWS PrivateLink for the cluster OIDC discovery and JWKS endpoint. You can now reach the endpoint used by IAM roles for service accounts (IRSA) privately from your VPC without requiring internet egress.

Each EKS cluster publishes public signing keys at its OIDC endpoint for IRSA. With AWS PrivateLink for the cluster OIDC endpoint, tools running inside your VPC, such as eksctl, Terraform, or custom token validators, can now reach the OIDC discovery document and JWKS privately by creating an interface VPC endpoint for the com.amazonaws.<region>.oidc-eks service. This enables IRSA setup and token validation in VPCs without internet egress and ensures correct DNS resolution when the EKS management VPC endpoint is enabled with private DNS.

AWS PrivateLink for the cluster OIDC endpoint is available at no additional cost beyond standard AWS PrivateLink pricing in all AWS Regions where Amazon EKS is available. To get started, see Access the cluster OIDC endpoint using AWS PrivateLink in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

AWS announces the preview of the AWS Security Hub MCP App, a local Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that brings your Security Hub exposure findings directly into Claude Desktop.  This capability can help accelerates your security investigations by reducing context switching and manual triage, letting you explore and act on your exposures without leaving your AI-assisted workflow.

With the Security Hub MCP App, you can investigate your security posture in natural language: view your top exposure findings, drill into a finding’s attack path and expanded network path, examine correlated findings and affected resource configurations, and get remediation recommendations. Each tool call returns both a text summary for your AI agent to reason overover and an interactive visualization for you to verify in the same conversation. The MCP server runs locally on your machine using your existing AWS credentials, and every tool is read-only,-- no changes are made to your environment.

The Security Hub MCP App is available at no additional cost to Security Hub customers. This feature is available in preview in all AWS commercial Regions that support Security Hub. To learn more, see the AWS Security Hub User Guide and the AWS Security Hub product page. For the full list of Regions, see the AWS Regional Services List.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor now gives you direct control over ad decision server (ADS) timeout. Previously, changing these settings required contacting AWS Support. You can now configure individual HTTP ad request timeouts, total ad personalization time budgets for live, VOD, and live ad prefetch, and enable parallel ADS requests.

These settings allow you to optimize ad delivery performance for your specific workflows. For example, you can increase the personalization time budget for live events to improve ad fill rates or enable parallel ADS requests in VOD workflows to reduce overall response time for faster video startup. New prefetch-specific timeout settings give you additional granularity for livestream ad retrieval.

You can configure these settings through the AWS Elemental MediaTailor console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs using the new AdsPersonalizationTimeouts and AdsPersonalizationConcurrency parameters on your playback configurations.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Elemental MediaTailor is available. 

To learn more about configuring ADS request timeouts, personalization time budgets, and concurrency, see Advanced settings in the AWS Elemental MediaTailor User Guide.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now supports restoring Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)-enabled SQL Server databases on Multi-AZ instances and instances configured with a read replica in the same region, using native backup and restore. Previously, TDE-enabled database restore was available only for Single-AZ instances, requiring you to disable TDE or migrate to a Single-AZ configuration before restoring encrypted databases.

You can restore TDE-enabled database backups directly to Amazon RDS for SQL Server Multi-AZ instances and instances configured with a read replica in the same region. Back up your existing TDE certificate, store it in Amazon S3, and restore it to your Amazon RDS instance with the TDE option enabled. Then, restore your TDE-enabled database backup from Amazon S3 using Amazon RDS native backup and restore. This simplifies your migration and recovery workflows when you require both encryption at rest with TDE and the high availability of Multi-AZ deployments.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon RDS for SQL Server is supported. To learn more, see the Amazon RDS for SQL Server User Guide.

Agents using Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) or Windows 365 Cloud PC can now take calls directly from their virtual desktop session with audio optimization enabled. To get started, IT administrators need to complete a one-time setup for their virtual desktop environment. Once configured, media is redirected from the virtual desktop to the agent's local device, improving audio quality.

Agents simply log into their Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows 365 Cloud PC session and start accepting calls using the Amazon Connect Customer agent workspace or a custom agent interface built with the Amazon Connect Customer open-source JavaScript libraries. This support is in addition to existing audio optimization for Amazon WorkSpaces, Citrix cloud desktops, and Omnissa cloud desktops.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect Customer is offered, except AWS GovCloud (US-West). To learn more, see the Amazon Connect Customer Administrator Guide.

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) now supports Apache Airflow version 2.11.2. Amazon MWAA is a managed service that runs Apache Airflow at scale without the operational overhead of managing the underlying infrastructure. Apache Airflow 2.11.2 is a maintenance release that includes security improvements, bug fixes, and dependency upgrades.

This release upgrades core dependencies with security patches and stability improvements to the Airflow webserver and task execution layers. It also includes fixes to task lifecycle management for queued tasks, enhanced secrets masking in logs, UI corrections in the Task Instances list view, and provider package updates for S3 and CloudWatch log delivery.

You can create a new Apache Airflow 2.11.2 environment on Amazon MWAA or upgrade your existing environments with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console in all currently available Amazon MWAA regions. To learn more, visit the Amazon MWAA documentation, review the Apache Airflow 2.11.2 release notes, and explore the list of available Airflow versions on MWAA.

Starting today, customers can create Host Resource Groups (HRGs) for EC2 Dedicated Hosts without the previously required step of creating Self-Managed Licenses (SMLs) and associating AMIs through AWS License Manager.

This flexibility is particularly valuable for EC2 Mac Instance customers and for customers who need Dedicated Hosts for hardware-level isolation rather than Bring Your Own License (BYOL). Customers with BYOL workloads can continue to create HRGs with SMLs to ensure that only instances from associated AMIs can be launched on the host and track host-level license consumption.

To create an HRG without SML, uncheck the "Restrict to AMIs associated with self-managed license" option when creating a Host Resource Group in the EC2 Console, or set instance-launch-option to license-configuration-required via the AWS CLI.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Host Resource Groups are supported. To learn more, visit the Host Resource Group User Guide

Duplicate patient records are one of the costliest problems in healthcare data management, scattering a patient's information, leading to redundant tests, missed diagnoses, billing errors, manual reconciliation, and broken analytics that count one patient as many.

AWS HealthLake now supports resource matching, which automatically identifies and links duplicate records in a datastore. Healthcare organizations can build accurate longitudinal patient records and trustworthy population health datasets without specialized master data management tooling.
Resource matching works across seven Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) resource types: Patient, Practitioner, Organization, Location, Device, RelatedPerson, and PractitionerRole. It matches high-confidence healthcare identifiers such as Social Security, medical record, and national provider numbers, applying each identifier's real-world scope and filtering out placeholder values to avoid false matches.

Once enabled, every record that is created or updated is automatically evaluated and matches are connected through FHIR Linkage resources. Resource matching requires no configuration, matching rules, or third-party tools. Original records are never modified or deleted, preserving full provenance. Linkages are automatically re-evaluated as source records change and removed when records no longer match.

AWS HealthLake resource matching is available in gated preview in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (London), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific SouthEast (Sydney), and Canada (Central) Regions. To turn it on for your datastore during the preview period, request to be added to the allowlist here.

To learn more, see Matching duplicate FHIR resources documentation in the AWS HealthLake developer guide.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams is a serverless streaming data service that makes it easy to capture, process, and store data streams at any scale. On-demand streams automatically increase ingest capacity in response to rising data ingest usage. With On-demand Advantage mode, you can proactively manage stream capacity using warm throughput to prepare streams for sudden changes in data traffic. We are extending warm throughput with the ability to also scale down ingest capacity, giving you full control to scale your stream's write throughput up or down.

To scale down, simply set a lower warm throughput value on your on-demand stream. The stream adjusts to the requested capacity or the amount needed to support peak data ingest usage in the last hour, whichever is higher. This ensures your stream always retains sufficient capacity for current traffic while releasing excess capacity you no longer need. As a result, you get optimal stream-processing performance and cost efficiency. 

Warm throughput scale-down is available at no additional cost for all on-demand streams with On-demand Advantage mode enabled.  For more information about On-demand Advantage, see Choose the right mode to stream in in the Amazon Kinesis Data Streams Developer Guide. To get started with the feature, see Update a stream. For pricing details, see Amazon Kinesis Data Streams pricing.

The feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Kinesis Data Streams On-demand Advantage is supported. 

AWS Lambda now publishes logs for Lambda Managed Instances (LMI) capacity providers to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, giving you visibility into scaling activity and instance lifecycle operations. LMI enables you to run Lambda functions on Amazon EC2 instances while maintaining serverless operational simplicity. Capacity providers are resources that let you define compute resources that Lambda provisions on your behalf. With capacity provider logs, you can monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize these managed EC2 instances, helping you quickly diagnose provisioning issues and understand scaling behavior.

Customers use LMI to operate high-volume, predictable workloads with specialized compute configurations and achieve cost efficiency through EC2 pricing options like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. With this launch, Lambda automatically generates logs for compute resources managed by capacity providers and delivers them to CloudWatch Logs. Lambda publishes structured JSON logs capturing instance lifecycle events like launches, terminations, and health checks. This structured format lets you identify failed operations and provisioning errors through CloudWatch Logs filtering, helping you resolve issues quickly and shorten debugging cycles.

The capacity provider logs are available in all AWS Commercial Regions where LMI is available. The logs are enabled by default for all capacity providers. You can view your capacity provider logs by visiting the Lambda console's capacity provider page. You can use the Lambda API, Lambda console, AWS CLI, AWS SAM, or AWS CloudFormation to change capacity provider log configuration. Standard Amazon CloudWatch Logs charges apply. To learn more, visit the AWS Lambda Managed Instances product page and documentation. 

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) now offers a simplified console experience for sending emails over SMTP using Mail Manager. Mail Manager is a capability within SES for managing email flow, but configuring its resources individually to set up SMTP sending requires multiple steps. The new guided setup creates and configures these resources automatically, so developers can get started in just a few clicks.

The guided setup gives developers a working SMTP endpoint and downloadable credentials they can plug into any application or framework that supports SMTP. This is ideal for teams building applications that send email notifications, password resets, or transactional messages and need a fast path to a production-ready SMTP configuration.

This experience is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SES is available.

To learn more, visit the Amazon SES console or refer to the documentation.

AWS now offers Claude Opus 5 — the most advanced Opus model yet, and compatible with zero data retention (ZDR) — bringing a step-change in coding, long-running agents, and complex professional work to teams building at the highest level. 

Claude Opus 5 delivers advances in coding, understanding and navigating codebases like an experienced engineer and writing production-quality code while adapting its strategy as it works. It powers dependable agents that run for hours and even overnight, finding paths around obstacles, recovering from errors, and reaching their objectives. And it brings deeper reasoning to long documents and higher accuracy to complex analysis, with the largest gains on document-heavy enterprise work. 

Customers have two ways to access Claude Opus 5: Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. 

Amazon Bedrock offers Claude Opus 5 with zero data retention (ZDR) enabled by default, giving you Opus' top-tier intelligence while meeting your data governance requirements. It keeps your data within AWS infrastructure with regional data residency, and provides access through a unified service with AWS-managed features like Guardrails and Knowledge Bases. To learn more, see the Amazon Bedrock documentation and regional availability.

Claude Platform on AWS gives you direct access to Anthropic's native platform experience and capabilities via the AWS Console, with support for zero data retention (ZDR) available on request. Build, test, and deploy with the same APIs, features, and console experience you'd get working with Anthropic directly, unified with AWS billing and authentication. To get started, see the Claude Platform on AWS documentation. 

Amazon Redshift announces the availability of All Upfront payment option for 3-year Serverless Reservations, providing up to 50% savings over on-demand rates. With All Upfront pricing, you pay for the full reservation term at the start and receive the maximum discount on your Amazon Redshift Serverless compute costs. This new payment option joins the existing 1-year No Upfront, 1-year All Upfront, and 3-year No Upfront options, giving you greater flexibility to optimize costs based on your financial preferences

Amazon Redshift Serverless allows you to run and scale analytics without having to provision and manage clusters. Serverless Reservations help you further optimize compute costs and improve cost predictability by committing to a specific number of Redshift Processing Units (RPUs). Managed at the AWS payer account level, Serverless Reservations can be shared between multiple AWS accounts, reducing compute costs across all Amazon Redshift Serverless workloads in your organization. Any usage exceeding the reserved RPU level is charged at standard on-demand rates.

This pricing option is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where Amazon Redshift Serverless is available. You can purchase Serverless Reservations via the Amazon Redshift console or by invoking the Serverless Reservations API. To learn more, see the Amazon Redshift pricing page or the Amazon Redshift Management Guide.

Two new models are now available in the Kiro IDE and CLI for the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Claude Opus 4.8 is the most intelligent Opus model, delivering stronger self-verification, more efficient tool calling, and better follow-through on long-horizon projects. It plans before it edits, catches its own mistakes, and finds creative paths around obstacles instead of stalling, making it well suited for complex multi-step tasks that previously required close supervision. Available with a 1M context window and 2.2x credit multiplier.

Claude Sonnet 5 is the most agentic Sonnet model, bringing stronger reasoning, tool use, and coding at Sonnet-class pricing. It approaches Opus 4.8 on reasoning and agentic coding benchmarks while running at meaningfully lower cost, giving developers a cost-performance dial between maximum accuracy and higher throughput. Available with experimental support, a 1M context window, and 1.3x credit multiplier.

Kiro enterprise administrators now have full visibility into organizational usage through built-in monitoring and tracking. A usage dashboard provides aggregate metrics at a glance, per-user activity reports deliver daily CSV telemetry (credits, model usage, and more) to your S3 bucket for license optimization and audit, and optional prompt logging captures user prompts and Kiro responses for compliance and debugging. All data is stored in your own account with no additional charge beyond S3 storage.

Ensure your IDE or CLI is updated to the latest version, then restart it to access the new models from the model selector. For more details, visit the GovCloud documentation, the monitoring and tracking guide, or contact your AWS account team. To learn more about Kiro, visit the Kiro product page.

Today, AWS announces a research preview of aws-bench, an open-source benchmark that measures how accurately and efficiently AI agents complete real-world AWS tasks. Model providers and AI researchers building agents that operate on AWS infrastructure need an objective, reproducible way to measure performance and diagnose failures. aws-bench provides a public suite of test cases derived from analysis of real AWS usage, including investigation, troubleshooting, and infrastructure creation tasks.

Each test case pairs a natural-language query with a defined cloud resource state and a ground-truth answer, so you can score any agent or model on a consistent, verifiable basis. Researchers and model providers can use aws-bench to improve foundation model performance on AWS tasks, improve agent harnesses, and track improvement progress. The release includes an easy-to-use CLI tool to instantiate testing environments, execute and score evaluation runs, and reset resource state.

aws-bench is available now on GitHub. To get started, follow the setup instructions on the README. 

AWS Clean Rooms now supports larger worker types of 32 vCPUs with 244 GB of memory for SQL analyses, allowing you to run more compute and memory-intensive workloads. Previously, the largest worker type available was 16 vCPUs with 120 GB of memory. Larger workers can help improve performance for complex queries on large datasets, optimizing costs for customers. For example, an advertiser collaborating with a publisher can use larger workers to run complex feature engineering across billions of records to train their multi-touch attribution model, accelerating time-to-value and optimizing costs.

AWS Clean Rooms helps companies and their partners easily analyze and collaborate on their collective datasets without revealing or copying one another’s underlying data. For more information about the AWS Regions where AWS Clean Rooms is available, see the AWS Regions table. To learn more about collaborating with AWS Clean Rooms, visit AWS Clean Rooms.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduces zone-aware routing for ECS Service Connect, enabling customers to reduce cross Availability Zone (AZ) data transfer costs and latency by automatically prioritizing service-to-service traffic within the same AZ.

With this launch, ECS Service Connect preferentially routes requests to endpoints in the same AZ as the originating task while dynamically adjusting traffic weights as endpoints scale to maintain balanced load across target services. Previously, as customers distributed their applications across AZs for resiliency, service-to-service traffic led to significant cross-zone data transfer, requiring trade-offs between cost and resilience. Zone-aware routing eliminates this trade-off, and when local endpoints become unhealthy or fall below capacity thresholds, traffic automatically redistributes across healthy AZs to maintain availability without overloading any single zones.

Zone-aware routing is enabled by default for all new and existing services and requires no additional infrastructure or application code changes. Existing services require a one-time redeployment to enable the new routing behavior. You can use Amazon VPC Flow Logs with AZ metadata to monitor cross-AZ traffic patterns and validate routing effectiveness. This feature is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, where ECS Service Connect is supported at no additional cost. For more details, refer to our documentation and launch blog post.

AWS now enables customers who pay through electronic funds transfer to configure preferences for how credit memos are automatically applied to outstanding invoices. Customers can choose from different application preferences directly on the Billing and Cost Management console to match their internal payment processes. These options include combinations of applying credit memos to the original invoice, next eligible invoice, and oldest unpaid invoice. By default, credit memos are applied to the original invoice first, then to future invoices, unless a different preference is selected.

Automatic credit memo application preferences are available in all commercial AWS Regions. To get started, visit the Payment Preferences page in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console. To learn more, see Managing balance application preferences. 

Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports version community MySQL 9.7 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate the latest Release on Amazon RDS for MySQL. This preview environment provides a sandbox where you can test applications and explore new MySQL 9.7 capabilities before they become generally available.

MySQL 9.7 is the latest Long-Term Support release for community MySQL. MySQL Long-Term Support releases include bug fixes, security patches, as well as new features. Please refer to the MySQL 9.7 release notes for more details about this release.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are retained for a maximum of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. Amazon RDS database snapshots created in the preview environment can only be used to create or restore database instances within the preview environment. Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region. For further information, see Working with the Database Preview Environment.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of the AWS Lambda Durable Execution SDK for .NET, empowering C# developers to build resilient, long-running workflows using Lambda durable functions. With this SDK, developers can create multi-step applications like payment processing pipelines, AI agent orchestration, and human-in-the-loop approvals directly in their applications without implementing custom progress tracking or integrating external orchestration services. 

Lambda durable functions extend Lambda's event-driven programming model with operations that checkpoint progress automatically and pause execution for up to a year when waiting on external events. The AWS Lambda Durable Execution SDK for .NET provides an idiomatic C# experience for building with Lambda durable functions. It includes steps for progress tracking, callback integration for human and agent-in-the-loop workflows, durable invocation for reliable function chaining, and waits for efficient suspension. The SDK installs from NuGet into the .NET toolchain you use today. The local testing emulator in the SDK enables developers to build and debug locally before deploying to production.

To get started, see the Lambda durable functions developer guide and the AWS Lambda Durable Execution SDK for .NET on NuGet. For Regional availability and pricing details, see the AWS Regional Services List and AWS Lambda Pricing.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now delivers agent traces and prompts to the same log group as your agent's logs, giving you unified observability for AI agents in a single Amazon CloudWatch log group.

Previously, AgentCore split agent telemetry across multiple destinations trace spans went to the shared `aws/spans` log group while event logs containing prompts, inputs, and outputs went to a separate resource-specific log group. This meant debugging an agent invocation required searching across multiple log groups, and customers could not apply fine-grained access control or customer-managed key (CMK) encryption at the individual agent level. With today's launch, all of an agent's telemetry traces, prompts, structured logs, and standard output is delivered to a single per-agent log group (`/aws/bedrock-agentcore/runtimes/<agent_id>-<endpoint_name>`). You can now correlate traces and logs in one place, scope IAM policies and CMK encryption to individual agents, and export all telemetry by subscribing to a single log group. For multi-agent systems, each agent's complete execution history stays together, making end-to-end debugging straightforward.

All newly created agents starting July 20, 2026 in supported AWS Regions use unified observability by default starting no configuration needed. For existing agents, set the `UNIFIED_TRACES_DESTINATION_ENABLED=true` environment variable on your agent runtime and upgrade ADOT to version 0.17.1 or later. This feature is available in all AWS commercial regions where AgentCore runtime is supported. Learn more in the AgentCore Developer Guide.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports Application Load Balancer (ALB) logs as vended logs, improving observability and simplifying debugging for network traffic patterns. You can now analyze ALB access, connection and health check logs directly in CloudWatch to gain insights into client connections, traffic distribution, connection status and target health, helping you identify and troubleshoot network issues faster. Additionally, you can set up CloudWatch telemetry enablement rules to automatically configure logging of both existing and newly created ALB resources, for your organization, specific accounts, or specific resources, ensuring consistent monitoring coverage without manual setup.

With this CloudWatch Logs integration, you can track detailed access patterns using CloudWatch Logs Insights queries, create metric filters for monitoring and alarming, and review traffic patterns in real time using Live Tail. ALB logs can be configured through the integrations tab of your application load balancer in AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDKs. You can also configure delivery of ALB logs to Amazon Data Firehose or Amazon S3 with support for Apache Parquet format.

ALB logs delivery to CloudWatch is available in all AWS Commercial and GovCloud regions where Application Load Balancer and CloudWatch are available. ALB logs are charged as vended logs when delivered to CloudWatch Logs and Data Firehose, while delivery to Amazon S3 is free (Parquet conversion is charged at $0.035/GB - N. Virginia).

To learn more about configuring ALB logs in CloudWatch Logs, please visit our documentation. For pricing information, see CloudWatch pricing page.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the availability of Amazon EC2 I8ge instances in AWS Europe (London) and Canada (Central)  regions. I8ge instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 60% better compute performance compared to previous generation Graviton2-based storage optimized Amazon EC2 instances. I8ge instances use the third generation AWS Nitro SSDs, local NVMe storage, and deliver up to 55% better real-time storage performance per TB compared to previous generation Amazon EC2 Im4gn instances . They offer up to 60% lower storage I/O latency and up to 75% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to Im4gn instances.

I8ge instances are storage-optimized instances, and offer up to 120TB of local NVMe storage. They are ideal for workloads that demand rapid local storage with high random read/write performance and consistently low latency for accessing large datasets. These versatile instances are offered in eleven different sizes including two metal sizes, providing flexibility to match customers’ computational needs. They deliver up to 180 Gbps of network performance bandwidth and 60 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), ensuring fast and efficient data transfer for the most demanding applications.

To begin your Graviton journey, visit the Level up your compute with AWS Graviton page. To get started, see AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the I8ge instances page.

Today, we're announcing that Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (Zurich), and Europe (Stockholm) Regions. This expansion provides more options to leverage the scale and flexibility of AWS for running your VMware workloads in the cloud.

Amazon EVS lets you run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) directly within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on EC2 bare-metal instances, powered by AWS Nitro. You can set up a complete VCF environment in just a few hours, enabling rapid workload migration to AWS to help you eliminate aging infrastructure, reduce operational risks, and meet critical timelines for exiting your data center. This launch supports all existing Amazon EVS features, including VCF 9.0 and 9.1 support to take advantage of the latest VMware features, such as memory tiering.

The added availability in these Regions gives your VMware workloads lower latency through closer proximity to your end users, compliance with data residency or sovereignty requirements, and additional high availability and resiliency options for your enhanced redundancy strategy.

To get started, visit the Amazon EVS product detail page and user guide. 

AWS GovCloud (US) now offers Claude Sonnet 5 on Amazon Bedrock. Claude Sonnet 5 delivers strong performance across coding, professional work, and agentic tasks while maintaining the balance of capability, cost, and speed. For coding, it navigates large codebases, lands multi-file changes, and carries debugging and refactoring tasks through to completion with fewer rounds of correction. For agents, it calls tools precisely, holds state across many steps, and recovers from errors so more runs finish correctly the first time. For knowledge work, it builds spreadsheets, drafts documents, and turns unstructured material into structured analysis. 

With this launch, Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Sonnet 5 are available on bedrock-runtime endpoints in AWS GovCloud (US-West and US-East) and bedrock-mantle endpoints in AWS GovCloud (US-West) for performing inference. Bedrock Mantle, Amazon's next-generation inference engine, supports the Anthropic Messages API. Amazon Bedrock keeps your data within AWS infrastructure and provides access to Claude Sonnet 5 through a unified service with AWS-managed features like Guardrails, Knowledge Bases, and regional data residency. To learn more, see the Amazon Bedrock documentation and regional availability. 

We are pleased to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 G7e instances in Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) on Amazon SageMaker AI inference. G7e instances feature up to 8 NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs with 96 GB of memory per GPU, 5th Generation Intel Xeon processors, and up to 1,600 Gbps of Elastic Fabric Adapter networking bandwidth, delivering up to 2.3x inference performance compared to previous-generation G6e instances.

With this region expansion, you can now deploy inference endpoints on G7e instances closer to your end users in Asia and Europe, reducing latency for generative AI workloads. G7e instances provide up to 768 GB of total GPU memory on a single instance, enabling you to serve medium-to-large language models of up to 70B parameters with FP8 precision without multi-node configurations. These instances are well suited for LLM inference, image and video generation, spatial computing, and scientific computing workloads that require high GPU memory capacity and bandwidth.

G7e instances for SageMaker AI inference are now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), in addition to previously supported regions. For pricing information on these instances, please visit our pricing page.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 G6 instances in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) region on Amazon SageMaker AI inference. G6 instances are powered by up to 8 NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPUs, each with 24 GB of memory, and third-generation AMD EPYC processors, delivering up to 2x the deep learning inference performance compared to G4dn instances.

With this region expansion, government agencies and organizations operating in GovCloud can deploy inference endpoints on G6 instances to serve generative AI workloads—including small-to-medium language models, image generation, and computer vision tasks—while meeting strict compliance and data residency requirements. G6 instances offer strong price-performance for production inference workloads that fit within 24 GB of GPU memory.

G6 instances for SageMaker AI inference are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East), in addition to previously supported regions. For pricing information on these instances, please visit our pricing page.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of node lifecycle actions in AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS). With node lifecycle actions, you can run custom scripts automatically at defined points in a compute node's lifecycle. You can use them to prepare your nodes for work. For example, you can mount shared storage, join a directory service, install software, or set up monitoring.

You define node lifecycle actions in your PCS compute node group configuration when you create or update the group, and you can reuse the same script across multiple compute node groups and clusters. For each script, you set its location as an Amazon S3 or HTTPS URI, the arguments to pass, which lifecycle stage it runs in, whether it re-runs on reboot, and its error-handling behavior. AWS PCS writes the output to a dedicated log file, giving you visibility into what ran.

AWS PCS is a managed service that simplifies running and scaling high performance computing (HPC) workloads on AWS using Slurm. You can build complete, elastic environments that integrate compute, storage, networking, and visualization tools, and the service manages cluster updates and provides built-in observability.

Node lifecycle actions are available in all AWS Regions that support AWS PCS. To learn more, see the AWS PCS User Guide.

AWS Wickr now offers a managed Data Retention Service feature for Premium users, enabling organizations to retain conversations across their network for data archiving purposes. AWS Wickr is an enterprise-grade, secure collaboration product that provides end-to-end encrypted messaging, file management, screen sharing, and voice/video conferencing capabilities. The Data Retention Service feature provides a cloud-native alternative to traditional container-based data retention methods.

The Data Retention Service can retain conversations in your network, including direct messages and conversations in Groups or Rooms between internal members and external federated teams. The serverless architecture offers simplified deployment, managed infrastructure, automatic scaling, and comprehensive monitoring while maintaining Wickr's end-to-end encryption standards. This feature is particularly valuable for organizations that require comprehensive data archiving capabilities and maintaining audit trails.

AWS Wickr Premium customers can opt in to enable data retention for their networks. To learn more, visit the AWS Wickr documentation.

Amazon EC2 High Memory U7in-16TB instances (u7in-16tb.224xlarge) are now available in AWS South America (São Paulo) region, and U7in-24TB instances (u7in-24tb.224xlarge) are now available in AWS Europe (Ireland) region. U7i instances are part of the AWS 7th generation and are powered by custom fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids). U7in-16TB instances offer 16 TiB of DDR5 memory, and U7in-24TB instances offer 24 TiB of DDR5 memory, enabling customers to scale transaction processing throughput in a fast-growing data environment.

Both U7in-16TB and U7in-24TB instances deliver 896 vCPUs and support up to 100 Gbps of Amazon EBS bandwidth for faster data loading and backups, 200 Gbps of network bandwidth, and ENA Express. U7i instances are ideal for customers running mission-critical in-memory databases like SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

To learn more about U7i instances, visit the High Memory instances page.

Starting today, the compute optimized Amazon EC2 C7a instances are now available in AWS US West (N. California) Region. C7a instances, powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors (code-named Genoa) with a maximum frequency of 3.7 GHz, deliver up to 50% higher performance compared to C6a instances.

C7a instances offer new processor capabilities such as AVX-512, VNNI, and bfloat16. They feature Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) memory to enable high-speed access to data in memory and 2.25x more memory bandwidth compared to C6a instances, making these instances ideal for even latency sensitive workloads. C7a instances offer 12 sizes from medium to 48xlarge, including a bare-metal size. And with the launch of C7a instances, customers can attach up to 128 EBS volumes to an EC2 instance — by comparison, C6a instances allow up to 28 EBS volume attachments to an EC2 instance. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and ideal for high performance, compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly-scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

C7a instances are available through On-Demand, Spot Instances, and Savings Plans. To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, see C7a instances.

Starting today, the general-purpose Amazon EC2 M8a instances are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region. M8a instances are powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (formerly code named Turin) with a maximum frequency of 4.5 GHz, deliver up to 30% higher performance, and up to 19% better price-performance compared to M7a instances.

M8a instances deliver 45% more memory bandwidth compared to M7a instances, making these instances ideal for even latency sensitive workloads. M8a instances deliver even higher performance gains for specific workloads. M8a instances are up to 60% faster for GroovyJVM benchmark, and up to 39% faster for Cassandra benchmark compared to Amazon EC2 M7a instances. M8a instances are SAP-certified and offer 12 sizes including 2 bare metal sizes. This range of instance sizes allows customers to precisely match their workload requirements.

M8a instances are built using the latest sixth generation AWS Nitro Cards and ideal for applications that benefit from high performance and high throughput such as financial applications, gaming, rendering, application servers, simulation modeling, mid-size data stores, application development environments, and caching fleets.

To get started, sign in to the AWS Management Console. Customers can purchase these instances via Savings Plans, On-Demand instances, and Spot instances. For more information visit the Amazon EC2 M8a instance page.

Amazon EC2 M8id instances are now available in (Ireland). These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors and deliver up to 43% higher performance and 3.3x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation M6id instances.

M8id instances offer up to 384 vCPUs, 1.5TiB of memory, and 22.8TB of NVMe SSD storage, 3x more than previous generation instances. These instances deliver up to 46% higher performance for I/O intensive database workloads, and up to 30% faster query results for I/O intensive real-time data analytics than previous sixth-generation instances. Additionally, these instances support Instance Bandwidth Configuration, allowing 25% flexible allocation between network and EBS bandwidth, allocating resources optimally for each workload.

M8id instances are well-suited for balanced workloads including application servers, microservices, enterprise applications, and small to medium databases.

Customers can purchase these instances via Savings Plans, On-Demand instances, and Spot instances. For more information visit the Amazon EC2 instance type page.

Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports listener rules allowing you to route connections to different target groups based on the source IP address type. With listener rules, a single dual-stack NLB sends IPv6 client traffic to IPv6 targets and IPv4 client traffic to IPv4 targets, preserving the original client IP address end to end for both address families.

Previously, serving both IPv4 and IPv6 clients from one NLB meant accepting a tradeoff: either run two separate load balancers (one per IP version) and split clients with DNS, or send all traffic to one target group and lose the original client IP through protocol translation. Listener rules remove that tradeoff by enabling conditional routing at Layer 3, directing each connection to a same-family target group with no translation and no additional infrastructure.

You can add listener rules to existing dual-stack NLBs without recreating them. Rules are supported on TCP, UDP, TCP_UDP, and TLS listeners and work alongside existing NLB features including connection draining, target group stickiness, cross-zone load balancing, weighted target groups, and client IP preservation.

Listener rules for Network Load Balancer are available in all AWS commercial Regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions at no additional charge. Standard NLB pricing for load balancer hours and LCUs applies. To get started, see this AWS blog, and the Network Load Balancer User Guide.

AWS Entity Resolution now supports real-time matching with advanced matching workflows, enabling customers to match records in milliseconds using complex rulesets through the GenerateMatchId API. Previously, real-time matching was limited to simple rule-based workflows, while advanced rulesets—which support operators like Exact and ExactManyToMany combined with AND/OR logic—could only be used for batch processing that took minutes to hours. This created a critical gap for customers needing real-time entity resolution with sophisticated matching logic.

With this launch, customers performing fraud detection, real-time account lookup, or website personalization can define advanced matching rules and get results in real-time without maintaining separate matching infrastructure or re-architecting applications. To enable advanced real-time matching, customers set the enableRealTimeMatching parameter to true on their matching workflow, then call the existing GenerateMatchId API—no new endpoints or migration required.

Advanced real-time matching is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Entity Resolution is available. 

To get started, see Using GenerateMatchId in the AWS Entity Resolution User Guide.  

For more information about AWS Entity Resolution, visit the product page.

AWS Lambda durable functions now supports encryption of durable execution data with an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) customer managed key. Lambda durable functions lets you build long-running, reliable workflows directly in your Lambda function code with automatic state management. Lambda encrypts execution state at rest by default with an AWS owned key. Now with support for AWS KMS, you can choose and manage the encryption key yourself.

If you operate in regulated industries such as financial services or healthcare, your data governance policies may require customer-owned encryption keys. You can now configure a customer managed key for durable execution data, giving you control over key rotation and who can access execution history and state. The durable execution key operates independently of the function-level key that protects environment variables and SnapStart snapshots, so you can manage access to execution data separately from function configuration.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Lambda durable functions is available. Standard AWS KMS charges apply for customer managed keys. There are no additional Lambda charges for this feature.

To learn more, see Encrypting Lambda durable execution data in the AWS Lambda Developer Guide. 

On July 22, 2026, Amazon announced quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Support (LTS) and Feature Release (FR) versions of OpenJDK. Corretto 26.0.2, 25.0.4, 21.0.12, 17.0.20, 11.0.32, and 8u502 are now available for download. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK.

Starting with this release, the default Amazon Corretto Docker images are based on Amazon Linux 2023. Amazon Linux 2 images will continue to be provided as non-default options for customers who cannot yet migrate.

JavaFX binaries are no longer included with Corretto 8 starting from this release. You can learn more about the migration recommendations at Corretto 8 GitHub.

Visit Corretto home page to download Corretto 26, Corretto 25, Corretto 21, Corretto 17, Corretto 11, or Corretto 8. You can also get the updates on your Linux system by configuring a Corretto Apt, Yum, or Apk repo.

Feedback is welcomed!

AWS Organizations now supports up to 2,000 resource control policies (RCPs) per organization, doubling the previous limit of 1,000. RCPs enable centralized management of the maximum permissions available to resources across member accounts in your organization. This quota increase helps customers managing large, complex, multi-account environments define more granular resource access controls without encountering policy limits. 

With RCPs, you can restrict which external principals can access resources across your organization's member accounts, helping enforce organization-wide access control guidelines at scale — without updating individual resource-based policies. This is especially valuable for organizations that require fine-grained, centralized permission management across hundreds of accounts, where the previous 1,000-policy limit created barriers to sufficiently detailed access control configurations. 

The increased quota of 2,000 RCPs per organization is available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions where AWS Organizations is supported. No action is required — existing organizations automatically have access to the higher limit. 
 To learn more about resource control policies and managing quotas in AWS Organizations, visit the AWS Organizations documentation.

Amazon SageMaker AI inference now supports G7 instances powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, enabling you to deploy machine learning models with up to 4.6x AI inference performance compared to previous-generation G6 instances. Customers deploying generative AI models for production inference need high GPU throughput and memory capacity to serve medium-to-large models cost-effectively, but previous-generation instances often required over-provisioning expensive compute or quantizing models to fit within memory constraints.

G7 instances provide 32 GB of GPU memory per GPU with 5th Generation Tensor Cores, up to 700 Gbps of EFA-enabled networking (7x compared to G6), and up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe SSD storage for keeping large models close to compute. These capabilities make G7 instances well suited for serving models in the 7B–30B parameter range, image and video generation workloads, and multi-model inference endpoints that benefit from higher memory bandwidth and throughput. You can deploy models on G7 instances using the SageMaker AI Inference console, API, or SDK by specifying G7 instance types (such as ml.g7.xlarge through ml.g7.48xlarge) in your endpoint configuration.

G7 instances for SageMaker AI inference are available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio) and US West (Oregon). For pricing information on these instances, please visit our pricing page.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports Amazon EC2 placement groups and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) network device configuration for node pools on EKS Auto Mode and the open-source Karpenter project, enabling you to optimize EKS workloads for performance and availability. These capabilities allow you to control EFA network interface configuration and how EC2 instances are physically distributed across AWS infrastructure for distributed training and inference workloads.

With EKS Auto Mode and Karpenter’s EFA configuration, you can configure network interfaces as EFA-only or standard ENI on EFA-capable instances with both dynamic and static capacity node pools. EFA-only interfaces do not consume IP addresses, giving you fine-grained control over IP utilization in your VPC while achieving full interconnect bandwidth. With placement group support, you can launch EC2 instances using cluster, spread, or partition strategies directly from your EKS Auto Mode or Karpenter node pool configuration, giving you control over how instances are physically distributed without additional operational workarounds. Together, these capabilities let you optimize for the performance, availability, and fault isolation characteristics your workloads require, whether that's maximizing throughput for distributed training jobs or minimizing blast radius for critical production services.

These features are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EKS is available. To get started and learn more, see the EKS Auto Mode User Guide and Karpenter documentation.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now supports the latest Cumulative Updates (CU) and General Distribution Release (GDR) updates for Microsoft SQL Server. This release includes support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016 SP3+GDR KB5089271 (RDS version 13.00.6490.1.v1), SQL Server 2017 CU31+GDR KB5090354 (RDS version 14.00.3530.2.v1), SQL Server 2019 CU32+GDR KB5090407 (RDS version 15.00.4470.1.v1) and SQL Server 2022 CU25 KB5081477 (RDS version 16.00.4255.1.v1).

The GDR updates address vulnerabilities described in CVE-2026-40370. For additional information on the improvements and fixes included in these updates, see Microsoft documentation for KB5089271, KB5090354, KB5090407 and KB5081477. We recommend that you upgrade your Amazon RDS for SQL Server instances to apply these updates using Amazon RDS Management Console, or by using the AWS SDK or CLI. You can learn more about upgrading your database instance in the Amazon RDS SQL Server User Guide for upgrading your RDS Microsoft SQL Server DB engine.

AWS Secrets Manager now automatically publishes events to Amazon EventBridge whenever your secret values change, enabling you to build event-driven workflows that respond in real time to secret updates.

Until now, you had to rely on AWS CloudTrail events parsed into EventBridge to know when a secret value changed — requiring you to match multiple API events such as rotation success, PutSecretValue, and UpdateSecretValue. With this launch, Secrets Manager publishes events directly into EventBridge whenever your secret value changes. You can use EventBridge rules to detect when the active secret value changes — such as during rotation — and route notifications to targets like AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, or Amazon Step Functions. This enables you to proactively refresh cached credentials in your applications, restart dependent services, or update compliance reports for secret rotation.

Secret update notifications are published to your default event bus automatically with no additional configuration or opt-in required. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Secrets Manager is available at no additional cost. To get started, see secret event notifications in the AWS Secrets Manager User Guide.

Today, AWS announced the expansion of 100 Gbps dedicated connections at the existing AWS Direct Connect location within the Cirion data center in Lima, Peru. You can now establish private, direct network access to all public AWS Regions (except those in China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones from this location. This is the first AWS Direct Connect location in Peru to provide 100 Gbps connections with MACsec encryption capabilities.

The Direct Connect service enables you to establish a private, physical network connection between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment. These private connections can provide a more consistent network experience than those made over the public internet.

For more information on the over 150 Direct Connect locations worldwide, visit the locations section of the Direct Connect product detail pages. Or, visit our getting started page to learn more about how to purchase and deploy Direct Connect.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) is now available in six additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Bangkok), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Canada West (Calgary), and Mexico (Central). Elastic Disaster Recovery is the recommended service for disaster recovery to AWS. It helps minimize downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery. With Elastic Disaster Recovery, you can recover your applications on AWS from physical infrastructure, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and cloud infrastructure. You can also use Elastic Disaster Recovery to recover Amazon EC2 instances in a different AWS Region. AWS DRS replicates and recovers a wide range of applications, including critical databases such as Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server, and enterprise applications such as SAP. AWS DRS uses a unified process for drills, recovery, and failback, so you do not need application-specific skillsets to operate the service. With this launch, Elastic Disaster Recovery is now available in 36 AWS Regions. See the AWS Regional Services List for the most up-to-date availability information.

To learn more about AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, visit our product page or documentation. To get started, sign in to the AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Console.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R6in and R6idn instances are available in AWS Europe (Paris) and Canada (Central) regions. These sixth-generation network optimized instances, powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and built on the AWS Nitro System, deliver up to 200Gbps network bandwidth, 2x more network bandwidth, and up to 2x higher packet-processing performance over comparable fifth-generation instances. 

Customers can use R6in and R6idn instances to scale the performance and throughput of network-intensive workloads such as memory-intensive SQL and NoSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches (Memcached, Redis), in-memory databases (SAP HANA), and real-time big data analytics (Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark). 
 
R6in and R6idn instances are available in 10 different instance sizes including metal, with up to 128 vCPUs and 1024 GiB of memory. They deliver up to 100 Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth, and up to 400K IOPS. R6in and R6idn instances offer Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking support on 32xlarge and metal sizes. R6idn instances offer up to 7.6 TB of high-speed, low-latency instance storage. 
 
With this regional expansion, R6in and R6idn instances are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and AWS GovCloud (US-West). Customers can purchase the new instances through Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot instances. To learn more, see R6in and R6idn instances page. 

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M6in and M6idn instances are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) and South America (Sao Paulo) regions. These sixth-generation network optimized instances, powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and built on the AWS Nitro System, deliver up to 200Gbps network bandwidth, for 2x more network bandwidth over comparable fifth-generation instances. 

Customers can use M6in and M6idn instances to scale their performance and throughput of network-intensive workloads such as high-performance file systems, distributed web scale in-memory caches, caching fleets, real-time big data analytics, and Telco applications such as 5G User Plane Function.

M6in and M6idn instances are available in 10 different instance sizes including metal, offering up to 128 vCPUs and 512 GiB of memory. They deliver up to 100Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth, and up to 400K IOPS. M6in and M6idn instances offer Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking support on 32xlarge and metal sizes. M6idn instances offer up to 7.6 TB of high-speed, low-latency instance storage.

With this regional expansion, M6in and M6idn instances are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, Spain, Stockholm, Zurich, London), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad, Mumbai, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Seoul), South America (Sao Paulo), Canada (Central), and AWS GovCloud (US-West). Customers can purchase the new instances through Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot instances. To learn more, see M6in and M6idn instances page.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C6in instances are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei). These sixth-generation network optimized instances, powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and built on the AWS Nitro System, deliver up to 200Gbps network bandwidth, for 2x more network bandwidth over comparable fifth-generation instances. 
 
Customers can use C6in instances to scale the performance of applications such as network virtual appliances (firewalls, virtual routers, load balancers), Telco 5G User Plane Function (UPF), data analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), and CPU based AI/ML workloads. C6in instances are available in 10 different sizes with up to 128 vCPUs, including bare metal size. Amazon EC2 sixth-generation x86-based network optimized EC2 instances deliver up to 100Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) bandwidth, and up to 400K IOPS. C6in instances offer Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking support on 32xlarge and metal sizes. 
 
C6in instances are available in these AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Spain, Stockholm, Zurich), Middle East (Bahrain, UAE), Israel (Tel Aviv), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Malaysia, Melbourne, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Tokyo, Thailand), Africa (Cape Town), South America (Sao Paulo), Canada (Central), Canada West (Calgary), AWS GovCloud (US-West, US-East), and Mexico (Central). To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 C6in instance page. 

Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports Amazon OpenSearch as a data source, enabling you to query and analyze your search and log analytics data directly alongside your other data assets. With this new connection, you can combine operational search data in OpenSearch with data from sources like Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and relational databases - all within a single, governed environment.

This integration is particularly valuable when you need to correlate data across analytical and operational workloads. For example, you can join application logs and metrics stored in OpenSearch with transactional data to gain insights into system performance and user behavior. Data engineers and analysts can build data pipelines that bring together real-time search and analytics data with structured datasets, streamlining cross-source workflows without switching between tools. To get started, add an Amazon OpenSearch connection under your project’s data section. Your OpenSearch data now appears in the data explorer alongside your other project data. From there, you can query it directly using the query editor, explore it in notebooks, or incorporate it into a visual ETL job, all without leaving the studio.

Support for Amazon OpenSearch connections is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio is available.

To get started, see connecting to a new data source in the Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio User Guide. For more information about Amazon OpenSearch Service, visit the Amazon OpenSearch Service page.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports built-in blue/green, linear, and canary deployment strategies in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, making software updates for containerized applications safer and allowing you to release new application versions faster with greater confidence. Built directly into Amazon ECS, these capabilities eliminate the need for custom deployment tooling while providing production-ready controls including deployment lifecycle hooks, bake time, and quick rollback.

With these strategies, Amazon ECS provisions a new application version alongside the existing version and allows you to validate it before shifting production traffic. Blue/green deployments shift traffic in a single step, linear deployments shift traffic in equal increments over a specified period, and canary deployments shift a small percentage initially before shifting the remainder. You can use deployment lifecycle hooks, including Lambda hooks and pause hooks, to run custom validation logic and approval workflows at specific deployment stages. You can also configure bake time to evaluate the new version after traffic has shifted, and roll back without downtime if regressions are identified. To automatically detect failures, configure Amazon CloudWatch alarms or Amazon ECS deployment circuit breaker, or initiate a rollback directly using the StopServiceDeployment API.

These capabilities are available for Amazon ECS services using Application Load Balancers (ALB), Network Load Balancers (NLB), and Amazon ECS Service Connect. You can configure deployments using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, or infrastructure-as-code tools on new or existing Amazon ECS services. To learn more, see our documentation for Amazon ECS blue/green, linear, and canary deployments, and deployment lifecycle hooks.

Today, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) introduced pricing plans, making it easy to purchase and access SES capabilities without evaluating them individually. Amazon SES pricing plans include three hierarchical options: Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise. Each plan builds on the one before it, offering progressively more capability at a discount compared to à-la-carte pricing.

Businesses depend on email reaching the inbox and getting read, but the capabilities needed to ensure this have traditionally been sold as individual add-ons that must be evaluated and purchased independently. With pricing plans, customers pick a plan and have access to the right capabilities at no additional cost. Essentials provides deliverability insights, Pro adds managed dedicated IPs, email validation, and global inbox placement visibility to proactively prevent problems, and Enterprise adds multi-region resilience, workload-level reputation isolation, and an annual deliverability assessment.

Pricing plans are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SES is available, except the Middle East (UAE) and Middle East (Bahrain) Regions.

To get started, sign in to the Amazon SES console and navigate to the pricing plan section. To learn more, visit the Amazon SES Pricing page or the Amazon SES Developer Guide.

Today, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduces Action Logs, a new observability feature that delivers detailed, timestamped records of the actions Amazon ECS performs on behalf of customers during service deployments and ECS Managed Daemon updates. By surfacing service-side operations that were previously invisible, Action Logs help you monitor and troubleshoot your workloads directly, without contacting AWS Support or manually correlating data from multiple sources.

With Action Logs, you gain visibility into key deployment state transitions of service deployments, Managed Daemon updates. Each log entry includes the event name, log level(INFO, WARN, OR ERROR), relevant resource ARNs, and a status reason, helping you reduce mean time to resolution when issues arise. You can opt in at the cluster level through the Amazon ECS console or by using Amazon CloudWatch vended logs APIs, and choose to deliver logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon S3, or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose depending on your operational needs. At launch, Amazon Q in the Amazon ECS console integrates with Action Logs to automatically detect deployment issues such as circuit breaker rollbacks and unstable service revisions, providing customers with root cause analysis, resource-level comparisons, and step-by-step remediation guidance without leaving the console. Standard CloudWatch Logs, Amazon S3, or Amazon Data Firehose pricing applies for log ingestion and storage. For pricing details, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

Amazon ECS Action Logs are available in all AWS Regions, including the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, refer Monitor Amazon ECS operations with Action Logs in Amazon ECS Developer Guide.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports up to 1.5 billion active metric time series and up to 200,000 total recording and alerting rules per workspace. Customers can also create many workspaces per account, enabling the storage and analysis of billions of Prometheus metrics across their organization.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed, Prometheus-compatible monitoring service that makes it easy to monitor and alert on operational metrics at scale. It automatically scales ingestion and storage for high-cardinality workloads across containerized, serverless, and hybrid environments, and integrates with AWS security services for fast, secure access to data.

To get started, create an Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspace and increase your workspace active series or rules limits by filing a service limit increase request in AWS Support Center or AWS Service Quotas.

AWS Marketplace now enables India-based sellers to upload and manage their seller signatures directly through AWS Partner Central, eliminating the previous manual, email-based submission process. Sellers located in India are required to provide a valid seller signature for tax invoicing and regulatory compliance. This launch consolidates Goods and Services Tax Identification Number (GSTIN) registration and seller signature management into a single, centralized location purpose-built for India-based sellers transacting on AWS Marketplace.

Once uploaded, AWS Marketplace securely stores your signature and uses it for applicable buyer tax invoices generated on your behalf for transactions in India. This launch introduces automated real-time validation and a new tax summary container providing at-a-glance visibility into GSTIN registration and seller signature verification status. Sellers are notified by email when their signature is verified or rejected, and can resolve rejections independently by resubmitting directly in the console using the displayed rejection reason, ensuring real-time compliance visibility.

To learn more about managing your tax compliance and seller signature in AWS Partner Central, visit the AWS Marketplace Seller Guide.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2025 for Enterprise, Standard, and Developer editions.

SQL Server 2025 brings AI integration directly into the database engine, enabling customers to invoke external REST endpoints from T-SQL without additional middleware. Customers running RDS for SQL Server can use this capability to integrate existing database workloads securely with AWS services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon S3, and AWS Lambda, without re-architecting applications. This enables scenarios such as AI-powered query advisor, automated performance analysis, event-driven workflows, and calling custom web services on Amazon EC2.

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new free edition for development and testing without licensing costs (Standard Developer Edition, or Dev-SE), and significant Standard Edition capacity increases up to 32 cores and 256 GB buffer pool memory. Standard Edition also gains Resource Governor, previously exclusive to Enterprise Edition. SQL Server 2025 also introduces a native vector data type for storing and querying vector embeddings directly within the database.

Customers running earlier SQL Server versions on RDS can upgrade to SQL Server 2025 by modifying the DB engine version, and customers running SQL Server on premises can migrate to take advantage of these capabilities with fully managed infrastructure. For more information, see the Amazon RDS for SQL Server User Guide. See Amazon RDS for SQL Server Pricing for up-to-date pricing and regional availability.

AWS Partner Central agents now support all AWS Partner funding programs. AWS Partners can get guidance on eligibility requirements, application processes, and program details for any funding program and receive documentation-backed answers in seconds.

The agents already automate the full funding lifecycle for four funding programs, supported since the March 2026 launch. This expansion adds Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) and AWS Growth Initiative (AGI) funding programs, eliminating manual data entry and reducing eligibility errors. The agents validate eligibility against opportunity and partner data, review uploaded documentation against program requirements, and draft fund requests with auto-populated fields.

AWS Partner Central agents are available in all commercial AWS Regions. To get started, open an opportunity in AWS Partner Central to receive funding recommendations, or review the agents guide for more details.

AWS HealthOmics private workflows are now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and US East (Ohio) Regions, expanding access to fully-managed bioinformatics workflows for research, drug discovery, and agriculture science initiatives with regional compliance requirements. AWS HealthOmics is a HIPAA-eligible service that helps healthcare and life sciences customers accelerate scientific breakthroughs with fully managed bioinformatics workflows.

With HealthOmics private workflows, customers can build and scale genomics data analysis pipelines using familiar domain-specific languages including Nextflow, WDL, and CWL, enabling healthcare and life sciences customers to focus on scientific discovery rather than infrastructure management. HealthOmics provides built-in features, such as Git integrations for version-controlled workflow development and third-party container registry support through Amazon ECR, to make it easy to migrate existing pipelines and accelerate development of new genomics workflows while maintaining full data provenance and compliance requirements.  

Private workflows are now available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London), Israel (Tel Aviv), and Asia Pacific (Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo). To learn more, visit the AWS HealthOmics User Guide. For more information on pricing, visit AWS HealthOmics pricing.

Today, AWS announces standardized product metadata for Amazon Bedrock in AWS Data Exports (Cost and Usage Report), giving FinOps teams and cloud administrators consistent, structured attributes to understand  Bedrock costs. AWS Data Exports lets you create customized exports of your AWS cost and usage data and deliver them to Amazon S3 for querying with Amazon Athena or loading into your data warehouse. With these attributes, you can attribute Bedrock spend without building custom logic to parse various product metadata in CUR 2.0.

The standardized attributes include model provider, model name, pricing unit, inference type (such as input tokens or output tokens), and feature (the inference serving mode, such as On-Demand or Batch), along with a unified "Amazon Bedrock" product family name that consolidates all Bedrock costs. In CUR 2.0, the model provider, model name, inference type, and feature attributes are available in the product map column, and pricing unit is available as a column. The standardized fields are available by default, at no additional cost, to Amazon Bedrock customers using AWS Data Exports.

To learn more, visit the Amazon Bedrock product page, and see Product columns in the AWS Data Exports User Guide for the standardized product attributes.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8i and R8i-flex instances are available in the Europe (Stockholm, Zurich) regions. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The R8i and R8i-flex instances offer up to 15% better price-performance, and 2.5x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation Intel-based instances. They deliver 20% higher performance than R7i instances, with even higher gains for specific workloads. They are up to 30% faster for PostgreSQL databases, up to 60% faster for NGINX web applications, and up to 40% faster for AI deep learning recommendation models compared to R7i.

R8i-flex, our first memory-optimized Flex instances, are the easiest way to get price performance benefits for a majority of memory-intensive workloads. They offer the most common sizes, from large to 16xlarge, and are a great first choice for applications that don't fully utilize all compute resources.

R8i instances are a great choice for all memory-intensive workloads, especially for workloads that need the largest instance sizes or continuous high CPU usage. R8i instances offer 13 sizes including 2 bare metal sizes and the new 96xlarge size for the largest applications. R8i instances are SAP-certified and deliver 142,100 aSAPS, delivering exceptional performance for mission-critical SAP workloads.

To get started, sign in to the AWS Management Console. For more information about the R8i and R8i-flex instances visit the AWS News blog.

Today, AWS launches enhanced event filtering for network activity events for VPC end points, a CloudTrail event type that captures actions transmitted through a Virtual Private Cloud Endpoint. Customers can now control which network activity events are logged based on the IAM user identity making the API call. For example, you can configure selectors to log only access denied events when the calling user identity is not on a known safe list. This lets you capture unauthorized access attempts while excluding routine traffic from trusted identities, reducing both logging costs and noise.

With UserIdentity filtering, customers building a data perimeter strategy can focus on network activity event logging for scenarios that matter most in security. You can configure selectors to log only VpceAccessDenied events from identities outside a trusted set of IAM roles. This enables detection of potential data exfiltration attempts through VPC endpoints without the cost of logging every successful API call from approved principals. You can combine UserIdentity conditions with existing fields like eventName or vpcEndpointId for fine-grained control over what gets recorded.

You can use this feature via the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface, and AWS SDKs. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where CloudTrail network activity events are supported. To learn more about Network Activity events, visit the AWS CloudTrail user guide or read AWS Blog on how to enable Network Activity Events.

Amazon Connect customers can now deliver more natural, human-sounding agentic voice experiences with expanded support across 50+ languages including Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Thai, over 100 new voice options, and conversational improvements that make AI interactions sound more fluid and responsive.

Amazon Connect's agentic self-service capabilities enable AI agents to understand, reason, and take action across voice and digital channels, adapting responses to match customer tone and sentiment while maintaining natural conversational pace. With this launch, you can deliver smoother conversations with seamless response pacing that fills natural pauses so interactions feel immediate rather than halting, more accurate turn-taking so agents and customers don't talk over each other, and speech controls that let you adjust speed, volume, and emotion to match your brand's tone.

To learn more about this feature, see the Amazon Connect Customer Administrator Guide. For the full list of supported languages and voices, see Supported Languages. For region availability, please see the availability of Amazon Connect Customer features by Region. To learn more about Amazon Connect Customer, an agentic AI solution that helps enterprises deliver exceptional customer experiences visit the Amazon Connect Customer website.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the availability of Amazon EC2 I8ge instances in AWS GovCloud (US-East, US-West) regions. I8ge instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 60% better compute performance compared to previous generation Graviton2-based storage optimized Amazon EC2 instances. I8ge instances use the third generation AWS Nitro SSDs, local NVMe storage, and deliver up to 55% better real-time storage performance per TB compared to previous generation Amazon EC2 Im4gn instances. They offer up to 60% lower storage I/O latency and up to 75% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to Im4gn instances.

I8ge instances are storage-optimized instances, and offer up to 120TB of local NVMe storage. They are ideal for workloads that demand rapid local storage with high random read/write performance and consistently low latency for accessing large datasets. These versatile instances are offered in eleven different sizes including two metal sizes, providing flexibility to match customers' computational needs. They deliver up to 180 Gbps of network performance bandwidth and 60 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), ensuring fast and efficient data transfer for the most demanding applications.

To begin your Graviton journey, visit the Level up your compute with AWS Graviton page. To get started, see AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the I8ge instances page. 

Amazon Connect Customer dashboards now display real-time and historical metrics for agent queues. Agent queues are used to directly route contacts to a specific agent. Now, supervisors can track how these agents perform in their own queues. For example, a supervisor notices a spike in contacts queued to a specific agent queue following a series of scheduled callbacks, and reassigns them to avoid long wait times.

Agent queue metrics are available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions where Amazon Connect Customer is offered. To learn more about analytics dashboards, see the Amazon Connect Customer Administrator Guide. To learn more about Amazon Connect Customer, the AWS cloud-based contact center, please visit the Amazon Connect Customer website.

Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink now supports Apache Flink version 2.3. This release includes adaptive partition selection for improved backpressure handling, so applications run more smoothly under uneven load. It also introduces better handling of out-of-order updates in change data capture (CDC) pipelines that improves data correctness, and new SQL functions make it easier to convert between changelog and standard streams. For a full list of improvements, see the Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink release notes.

Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink makes it easier to transform and analyze streaming data in real time, by simplifying the setup, operation, and scaling of Apache Flink applications. Developers and data engineers can focus on building and running their streaming applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.

To get started, create a new application on Apache Flink 2.3, or use in-place version upgrades to move compatible applications to the Flink 2.3 runtime for a simpler and faster upgrade. Apache Flink 2.3 is available across all AWS Regions where Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink is offered. To learn more, see the Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink Developer Guide.

Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Google Drive as persistent storage options on multi-session fleets. Users streaming on multi-session fleets can now connect their OneDrive or Google Drive accounts and access, save, and sync their cloud-based files directly within their streaming sessions, in addition to the existing home folder backed by Amazon S3.

Multi-session fleets allow multiple users to share a single fleet instance, enabling organizations to achieve cost efficiencies by increasing session density across their infrastructure. With the addition of OneDrive and Google Drive support, customers can now take full advantage of the cost savings offered by multi-session fleets while providing their users with familiar, enterprise-grade cloud storage experiences. Users can browse, upload, and download files from their connected storage accounts without disruption, enabling seamless collaboration and continuity across streaming sessions.

Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Google Drive support on multi-session fleets is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon WorkSpaces Applications is offered. Standard usage pricing applies for WorkSpaces Applications streaming sessions; there is no additional charge for enabling OneDrive or Google Drive storage connectors.

To enable this feature for your users, you must use a WorkSpaces Applications image that uses a WorkSpaces Applications agent released on or after June 29, 2026 or your image uses Managed WorkSpaces Applications image updates released on or after June 29, 2026. To learn more about WorkSpaces Applications refer to the FAQs.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new Local Zone in Athens, Greece. The Athens Local Zone is the second Local Zone in EMEA with support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Local Snapshots, enabling customers to store and process data within Greece to help meet local data residency requirements.

The Athens Local Zone supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with C7i, M7i, and R7i instances, Amazon S3 with the One Zone-Infrequent Access storage class, Amazon EBS with Local Snapshots and volume types gp3, gp2, io1, sc1, and st1, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Direct Connect, and Application Load Balancer. 

Use cases include public sector services that need to meet strict data residency requirements, financial applications that require in-country data processing, and real-time gaming and interactive experiences that benefit from single-digit millisecond latency. Customers use the same APIs, tools, and security features available in AWS Regions, with no minimum commitment and pay-as-you-go pricing including On-Demand, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances.

The Athens Local Zone is part of AWS Global Infrastructure, with Local Zones now available in more than 30 metropolitan areas worldwide. To get started, enable the Athens Local Zone (eu-central-1-ath-1a) from the Regions and Zones tab in the AWS Global View or by using the ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API. For pricing information, visit the AWS Local Zones pricing page. To learn more, visit the AWS Local Zones overview page.  

Amazon CloudWatch announces the launch of coding agent insights, giving engineering leaders visibility into how AI coding tools are driving value across their organization. Coding Agent Insights integrates with Claude apps gateway for AWS to collect telemetry from Claude Code without additional instrumentation. Other supported coding agents include Codex and GitHub Copilot. 

As organizations scale AI coding agent adoption, they need to understand return on investment. Coding agent insights is built on OpenTelemetry metrics emitted by your coding agents and presents them alongside your existing CloudWatch operational data. This helps you answer questions like which teams would benefit from expanded access, where are agents accelerating delivery, and how can you right-size token budgets across departments. You can track spend trends, set proactive token billing alerts, correlate agent adoption with improvements in commit throughput and pull request velocity, or identify the models delivering the best cost-to-output ratio for your workloads.

CloudWatch coding agent insights is available in all AWS commercial regions except Middle East (UAE), Middle East (Bahrain), and Israel (Tel Aviv). Configure your Claude apps gateway to emit telemetry to CloudWatch using the setup guide and view the Coding Agent Insights dashboard in the CloudWatch console. Standard CloudWatch OpenTelemetry metric ingestion pricing applies — see metrics pricing for details. To learn more, see the documentation.

Today, AWS announces the availability of KNFSD File Cache, an open-source, Apache-2.0 licensed solution for deploying a scalable, high-speed Network File System (NFS) cache on AWS. KNFSD File Cache mounts exports from one or more source NFS servers, whether on-premises, in another AWS Availability Zone or Region, or in another cloud over AWS Interconnect - multicloud, and re-exports them to NFS clients in AWS. You can front multiple on-premises filers, in-cloud file systems such as Amazon FSx for OpenZFS and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, and any other NFS v3, v4.1, or v4.2 compliant filer. Frequently read data is cached in memory and on local NVMe storage, so files cross the high-latency link to the source once and are then served to large compute fleets at local VPC speed. The solution is designed for read-heavy burst compute workloads such as visual effects rendering, simulation, financial services, health and life sciences, microprocessor design, weather forecasting, and energy.

KNFSD File Cache builds on standard Linux kernel technology: nfs-kernel-server provides NFS re-export, and FS-Cache provides the persistent disk cache. Because it uses the native NFS stack, it fully supports the NFS client-server protocol, including byte-range reads and writes, synchronous and asynchronous writes, and both write-through and write-around modes. You build the cache Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with Packer, then deploy the cluster with the included Terraform module. Cache nodes run in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling group on AMD, Intel, or AWS Graviton instances, with client traffic distributed by DNS round-robin or a Network Load Balancer, and optional automatic scaling based on the number of active NFS client connections. An Amazon CloudWatch dashboard provides more than 70 metrics through an OpenTelemetry-based agent, which can also publish to third-party tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.

KNFSD File Cache (preview) is available in all AWS Regions. There are no licensing costs; you pay only for the AWS resources you consume.

To get started, visit the KNFSD File Cache GitHub repository, launch blog, and AWS Solutions Guidance. For detailed deployment and configuration guidance, see the GitHub documentation.

With Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, you can now create, share, and reuse custom visual transforms in visual ETL flows. This capability enables data engineers to build reusable, business-specific transformation logic and make it available to their teams without requiring coding expertise.

With custom visual transforms, you can build your own transforms and publish them to a shared library that other team members can discover and use directly from the visual ETL interface. For example, you can create a transform that standardizes customer phone numbers, masks personally identifiable information, or applies your organization’s standard data-quality checks. Team members can then reuse the same logic across multiple ETL jobs, reducing duplicated effort and helping ensure consistent results.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio is available. 

To learn more, see custom visual tranform in the Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio User Guide. 

Amazon GameLift Streams now supports assigning an IAM role to a stream session, enabling your application to securely access resources in your AWS account, such as Amazon S3 buckets and DynamoDB tables. With this launch, you can pass a RoleArn parameter when starting a stream session, and your application automatically receives short-lived, auto-refreshing AWS credentials through the standard AWS SDK credential resolution chain — no application code changes required.

Previously, customers who needed their streamed applications to access AWS services had to embed long-lived access keys in application bundles or pass them as environment variables, creating security and operational challenges. Now, Amazon GameLift Streams handles credential vending and automatic refresh using the same container credential provider mechanism trusted by Amazon ECS task roles and Amazon EKS Pod Identity. Role misconfigurations are validated at session start, surfacing clear errors immediately rather than during runtime.

You can also configure IAM roles directly in the Amazon GameLift Streams console, which provides a pre-filled trust policy template to simplify role setup.

IAM role support for stream sessions is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon GameLift Streams is available.

To learn more, see Session Credentials Setup in the Amazon GameLift Streams Developer Guide: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gameliftstreams/latest/developerguide/session-credentials-setup.html 

Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports one-click migration from legacy OpenSearch Dashboards to OpenSearch UI, for both OpenSearch domains and serverless collections. OpenSearch UI is the new, zero-downtime, serverless interface for search and unified observability across multiple data sources. With this launch, the multiple tenants and thousands of saved objects you created in legacy OpenSearch Dashboards become reusable in your OpenSearch UI applications, reducing the operational complexity of moving between interfaces.

With one-click migration, you can move your existing tenants and saved objects into OpenSearch UI workspaces without recreating them manually. The mechanism works for OpenSearch Dashboards created under Amazon OpenSearch Service domains and serverless collections. You can migrate everything into a new workspace or into an existing one. If you have created multiple tenants in your OpenSearch Dashboard, you have the option to either convert them into a single workspace or keep them separate for different teams.  

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where OpenSearch UI is available. To get started, see Using OpenSearch UI in the Amazon OpenSearch Service Developer Guide. Visit the OpenSearch UI Help page for detailed feature tutorials. To learn more about the service, see the Amazon OpenSearch Service product page.

Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports network topology configuration at the partition level for Slurm orchestrated clusters. A single cluster can now run tree topology in one partition and block topology in another, with each partition using the topology best suited to its instance types. This improves distributed training performance by keeping job placement aligned with the interconnect characteristics of each instance type, so GPU-to-GPU communication is faster, NCCL collective operations are more efficient, and training throughput improves.

HyperPod determines the topology for each partition based on the instance types of its compute instance groups. Partitions with Amazon EC2 UltraServer instance types such as ml.p6e-gb200.36xlarge use block topology, and those with hierarchical-interconnect instance types such as ml.p5.48xlarge, ml.p5e.48xlarge, and ml.p5en.48xlarge use tree topology, while partitions with instance types that don't provide network topology information remain fully schedulable. HyperPod maintains this configuration automatically as the cluster changes through scale-up, scale-down, and node replacement events, so each partition's topology always reflects the current state of the cluster.

To get started, create or update a SageMaker HyperPod Slurm cluster running Slurm 25.11 or later with supported GPU instance types. Topology-aware scheduling is enabled by default and requires no configuration. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SageMaker HyperPod is supported. To learn more, see Using topology-aware scheduling in Amazon SageMaker HyperPod.