Living in the Netherlands, I spend a fair amount of time on trains, and that is usually where I catch up on what the builder community is writing. Until now, that meant opening a laptop or squinting at a browser tab on my phone. This week I found myself scrolling through trending articles and checking a workshop from the AWS Builder Center mobile app while waiting for a delayed train, and it made those spare twenty minutes very useful. That is why I am glad to open this week with the Builder Center mobile app.

AWS Builder Center is now available as a mobile app on iOS and Android, extending the experience beyond desktop and web. Using your AWS Builder ID, you stay signed in across sessions and can browse trending articles, access 600+ AWS Skill Builder courses, and manage hands-on workshops with free sandbox environments from your mobile device. You can follow AWS Heroes, Community Builders, and User Group Leaders, check Builder Loft event calendars on the go, and receive push notifications for subscribed topics and communities. The app also supports the Wishlist feature for submitting product feedback directly to AWS teams. It is available worldwide on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Builder Center also added two features this week. Polls give you a way to ask the community a question from the Home feed: write a question, add 2 to 5 answer options, set a deadline, and people vote, with results updating live and discussion happening in the comments. Votes are anonymous, and creators see aggregate counts and percentages only. Separately, the Zero to Shipped hackathon is open from September 18 to October 2. You connect your coding agent to AWS, build a real application, and ship it live on AWS for a chance to win a share of a $28,000 prize pool. Five winning projects each receive $5,000 in AWS credits and an AWS Builder swag bundle.

Last week’s launches
Here is what else happened this week.

• Amazon Connect Talent is now generally available – Amazon Connect Talent is an AI-powered hiring solution for talent acquisition teams managing hiring at scale. Informed by decades of Amazon hiring science, it uses AI agents to conduct structured voice interviews, administer evidence-based assessments, and score candidates consistently, so recruiters can focus on final decisions. Candidates interview 24/7 from any device, and recruiters review scores, transcripts, and detailed evaluations the next morning. All candidate data is anonymized during AI evaluation, each competency is scored against a rubric with every score tied to specific evidence from the interview, and recruiters keep final decision authority over every hire. General availability includes competency-based assessments, AI-led voice interviews with adaptive questioning, a brand-customizable mobile-first candidate portal, and admin onboarding tools.
• Amazon Corretto 27 is now generally available – Amazon Corretto 27, a Feature Release version of the no-cost, multi-platform distribution of OpenJDK, is now available for download on Linux, Windows, and macOS, with support through April 2027. Notable features include G1 as the default garbage collector across all environments (JEP 523), post-quantum hybrid key exchange for TLS 1.3 (JEP 527), compact object headers by default for a smaller memory footprint (JEP 534), and JFR in-process data redaction to remove sensitive data from Java Flight Recorder recordings before they leave the JVM (JEP 536). It also continues previews of enhanced pattern matching, structured concurrency, and lazy constants, along with the Vector API incubator.
• Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock – Kimi K3 is now available on Amazon Bedrock for coding and knowledge work. According to Moonshot AI, Kimi K3 is its most capable model and the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters. It combines native vision capabilities with a 1-million-token context window, making it well suited to long-running coding sessions across large repositories, multi-document analysis, and extended agent workflows. Moonshot AI reports an approximate 2.5x improvement in scaling efficiency over Kimi K2. Kimi K3 is the first open-weight model on Amazon Bedrock to support explicit prompt caching, which helps reduce latency and input costs when reusing context across model calls.
• AWS reimagines the getting started experience – We announced a new simplified experience for builders starting a new project. Instead of completing configuration tasks first, you start with sensible defaults: sign up using an existing identity from providers including Google, GitHub, and Apple, and for most new customers no credit card is required, with $100 in free credits as part of the AWS Free Tier. AWS organizes your work in a project, which contains an AWS account and sharing settings, and applies security controls for you. You can invite collaborators by email without setting up IAM users, set a monthly spend limit starting at $20, and activate advanced AWS features later at no additional cost with no migration. The experience is gradually rolling out to new customers.
• New low-cost burstable Amazon EC2 T8i instances are generally available – Amazon EC2 T8i instances, powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Granite Rapids), are among the lowest-cost EC2 instances and deliver up to 30% better price performance over previous-generation T3 instances. They are designed for low-to-moderate CPU utilization workloads such as microservices, low-traffic websites, development and testing environments, and small databases. T8i instances deliver up to 70% higher compute performance, up to 1.25x higher network bandwidth, and up to 2.4x higher Amazon EBS bandwidth compared to T3, and they use the same CPU credit system, so upgrading from T3 is straightforward.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk introduces Cluster Mode – AWS Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode is a new fully managed option for teams running a portfolio of applications on shared infrastructure powered by Amazon EKS. Instead of operating each application in isolation, you run multiple applications through one experience with a single operational baseline, so per-application cost decreases as your portfolio grows. You can upload source code in Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, or Go, and Elastic Beanstalk handles containerization automatically through Cloud Native Buildpacks when needed. Cluster Mode includes production-grade deployment strategies with automatic rollback, event-driven autoscaling, AWS Secrets Manager integration, native OpenTelemetry observability, and AI-powered troubleshooting. Standard and Cluster Mode environments run side by side within the same application, so teams can migrate one environment at a time.

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

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Building in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud – Two new posts cover building on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, an independent cloud for Europe that runs as a distinct partition with its own control plane, IAM, billing, console, and service endpoints, and its first Region in Brandenburg, Germany. The first post walks through architecting a secure landing zone, covering account structure and governance, identity as infrastructure as code, centralized logging, data protection, and partition-aware ARN construction that works across AWS partitions. The second announces the general availability of Gemma 4 open-weight models on the Amazon Bedrock next-generation inference engine in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, with inference staying entirely within eusc-de-east-1 under a zero data retention and zero operator access model.
• The new AgentCore runtime: elastic, optimized, and consistently fast starts – We announced a new version of the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime, the managed compute layer for running agents. The new runtime reclaims memory as a session releases it rather than holding it at the peak, so the bill tracks real usage over the life of a session. It also delivers consistent cold start times regardless of container image size or concurrency by preparing the environment once, snapshotting it, and restoring that snapshot for each new instance. In testing with an empty echo agent, the new runtime delivered a P75 cold start of about 2 seconds from a 200 MB image up to 2 GB, compared to roughly 5.4 to nearly 30 seconds for the original runtime.
• Introducing the updated AWS Well-Architected Streaming Media Lens – We published a revised Streaming Media Lens, which provides architectural best practices for video streaming workloads. The revision expands from the original 2021 version to cover five streaming scenarios, including interactive live streaming with Amazon IVS Real-Time Streaming for up to 25,000 concurrent viewers, low-latency live streaming, and ad-supported content monetization, alongside enhanced video-on-demand and live streaming guidance. It also adds new sustainability best practices focused on reducing carbon footprint, expanded observability and incident-response frameworks, and advanced content protection with multi-layered DRM and forensic watermarking. The lens whitepaper and custom lens are available now.

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

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

• AWS re:Invent – AWS re:Invent returns to Las Vegas from November 30 to December 4. 2, 200+ session times, locations, and speakers are live. Reserved seating for AWS re:Invent opens October 6. Register now and be ready to claim your spot in chalk talks, workshops, and builders’ sessions when reserved seating opens.
• AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free in-person events covering cloud and AI. With re:Invent on the horizon, the Summits are coming to an end for the year. The last Summit is Dubai (September 30) at the Dubai World Trade Center, with 60+ sessions, an AWS Village, and hands-on workshops.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Lebanon (September 26), Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (September 26), Cebu, Philippines (September 26), Davao, Philippines (September 26), ComSum Manchester, UK (October 1), and Italy, Rome (October 2).

Summer has officially given way to September, but the weather where I am has not quite caught up. The days are still unusually warm, and I suspect these are the last mild afternoons before autumn settles in for good. I am making the most of them while they last. Come back next week for more!

— Esra

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

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

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

T8i instances address each of these requests:

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

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

Instance size	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Baseline Performance /vCPU (%)	CPU credits earned / hour	Network burst bandwidth (Gbps)
t8i.nano	2	0.5	5	3	Up to 6.25
t8i.micro	2	1	10	6	Up to 6.25
t8i.small	2	2	20	12	Up to 6.25
t8i.medium	2	4	20	12	Up to 6.25

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

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

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

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

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

— Channy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Channy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instance size	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Instance Storage	Network Bandwidth (Gbps)	EBS Bandwidth (Gbps)
r9g.medium	1	8	EBS-Only	Up to 15	Up to 12
r9g.large	2	16	EBS-Only	Up to 15	Up to 12
r9g.xlarge	4	32	EBS-Only	Up to 15	Up to 12
r9g.2xlarge	8	64	EBS-Only	Up to 17	Up to 12
r9g.4xlarge	16	128	EBS-Only	Up to 17	Up to 12
r9g.8xlarge	32	256	EBS-Only	17	12
r9g.12xlarge	48	384	EBS-Only	25	18
r9g.16xlarge	64	512	EBS-Only	34	24
r9g.24xlarge	96	768	EBS-Only	50	36
r9g.48xlarge	192	1536	EBS-Only	100	72
r9g.metal‑48xl	192	1536	EBS-Only	100	72

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

Instance size	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Instance Storage (NVMe SSD)	Network Bandwidth (Gbps)	EBS Bandwidth (Gbps)
r9gd.medium	1	8	1 x 59 GB	Up to 15	Up to 12
r9gd.large	2	16	1 x 118 GB	Up to 15	Up to 12
r9gd.xlarge	4	32	1 x 237 GB	Up to 15	Up to 12
r9gd.2xlarge	8	64	1 x 474 GB	Up to 17	Up to 12
r9gd.4xlarge	16	128	1 x 950 GB	Up to 17	Up to 12
r9gd.8xlarge	32	256	1 x 1900 GB	17	12
r9gd.12xlarge	48	384	3 x 950 GB	25	18
r9gd.16xlarge	64	512	1 x 3800 GB	34	24
r9gd.24xlarge	96	768	3 x 1900 GB	50	36
r9gd.48xlarge	192	1536	3 x 3800 GB	100	72
r9gd.metal‑48xl	192	1536	3 x 3800 GB	100	72

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Daniel Abib

The news that interested me the most last week was the DuckLabs acquisition. AWS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind DuckDB, the popular open source analytical database that runs in-process and executes SQL directly against files like Parquet, CSV, and JSON. DuckDB stays open source under its independent foundation and the MIT license, and over time AWS plans to combine its speed at everyday queries with the enterprise scale of services like Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena.

Co-founded by Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt, DuckDB runs locally or on Amazon S3, which makes it remarkably fast for the everyday queries (a terabyte or less) that make up the bulk of real-world analytics. It also happens to pair beautifully with AI agents, which “poke” and experiment their way through data much like humans do. The co-founders will continue leading its technical direction while AWS combines DuckDB’s speed with analytics services like Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, and Amazon SageMaker. For the bigger picture on why this matters, Andy Warfield, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer shared his thoughts on the post DuckDB and the changing physics of analytics on All Things Distributed.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

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

• Amazon ECS now automatically detects and recovers container instances that lose agent connectivity – Amazon ECS now continuously monitors agent connectivity to the control plane and surfaces a new AGENT_CONNECTIVITY health event across AWS Fargate, Amazon ECS Managed Instances, and Amazon ECS on EC2. On Fargate and Managed Instances, ECS handles recovery automatically, draining tasks, launching replacements, and deregistering the impaired instance. On EC2, you can wire the event into your own workflow. Available at no additional cost in all AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
• AWS Lambda introduces public preview runtimes, starting with Node.js 26 and Python 3.15 – You can now test upcoming Lambda runtimes before they reach general availability. Preview runtimes use the same identifier as the eventual GA version, so your functions graduate automatically with no action required. Third-party tools and deployment frameworks can also validate compatibility ahead of GA. Not meant for production yet (breaking changes are possible), but a great way to get ahead of your next upgrade. Available in all AWS commercial, AWS GovCloud (US), and China Regions.
• AWS IoT Core adds a native InfluxDB rule action – You can now route time-series data from your IoT devices straight into InfluxDB (Amazon Timestream-managed or self-hosted) without writing custom code or standing up an intermediate service. IoT Core formats data into InfluxDB’s line protocol and supports device-side and server-side batching. Available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB is offered.
• Amazon GameLift Servers now includes enhanced DDoS protection – Your game servers now get automatic protection against network and transport layer (layers 3 and 4) DDoS attacks – UDP reflection, SYN floods, and similar vectors – with nothing to enable or opt into. Built on top of AWS Shield Standard with gaming-optimized traffic shaping, it turns on the moment your servers start running (Server SDK 5) at no extra cost. It’s available in all supported GameLift Servers Regions except China (Beijing) and China (Ningxia).
• Amazon SageMaker HyperPod expands support for Ray – You can now run Ray workloads on SageMaker HyperPod with built-in observability, resilient training, and accelerated inference. Create and manage Ray clusters from Amazon SageMaker Studio, attach JupyterLab or your local IDE so a multi-node cluster behaves like a local dev environment, and get auto-provisioned Grafana dashboards. Node auto recovery, hung job detection, and tiered checkpointing keep large training runs healthy, while Ray Serve adds a tiered KV cache for inference. Your existing open source Ray code runs unchanged. Available for HyperPod clusters orchestrated by Amazon EKS.

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

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

• Happy 20th birthday, Amazon EC2! – Amazon EC2 turns 20. Channy Yun looks back at how EC2 grew from a single m1.small instance type in one Region to more than 1,200 instance types across 39 Regions, along with the custom silicon journey from the first Graviton to Graviton5 and Trainium3. A fun and worthwhile read on the service that still underpins so much of AWS – including Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Bedrock.
• Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD): an open specification for agent discovery – As organizations scale up agents, tools, and MCP servers, those resources end up scattered across clouds, on-premises infrastructure, and SaaS platforms – each with its own registry and metadata. ARD is a new open specification (Apache 2.0) that defines a common way to describe and discover agentic resources, so publishers “describe once” and consumers “discover everywhere” – think DNS, but for agents. AWS contributed feedback but doesn’t own the spec, and it complements the AWS Agent Registry by letting you federate across catalogs without migrating.
• Get started with the Agent Toolkit for AWS in the AWS CLI – A single AWS CLI command (aws configure agent-toolkit) now equips AI coding agents like Kiro, Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor with curated, up-to-date AWS knowledge and a secure connection to thousands of AWS APIs through the AWS MCP Server. If you build with an AI coding assistant, this helps it choose the right services, use modern APIs, and follow security best practices – so it gets AWS code right more often the first time.

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

• AWS Summits – Free in-person events where builders come together to learn, connect, and explore the latest in cloud and AI. Upcoming stops include Zurich (September 2), São Paulo (September 3), Tel Aviv (September 10), and Dubai (September 30). Can’t attend in person? You can stream sessions through the Global Livestream and On-Demand Hub. I’ll be presenting two sessions on generative AI and Amazon Bedrock at the São Paulo Summit – if you’re there, come say hello.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include JAWS SONIC 2026 in Tokyo (September 5) and Warsaw, Poland (September 8).

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

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

— Daniel Abib

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

Twenty years ago today, Jeff Barr wrote a blog post that launched the Amazon EC2 Beta. That single post introduced resizable Linux virtual servers in the cloud, billed by the hour, with one instance type (m1.small) in one Region (US East). It was minimal yet useful, and it changed how the world thinks about computing infrastructure.

In 2021, Jeff covered the fifteen years of EC2 with the backstory and memorable EC2 launches. Over the last five years, AWS has continued to push the boundaries of what cloud computing can deliver, building custom silicon for general-purpose and AI workloads and expanding EC2 into new form factors and deployment models that our customers in 2006 could not have imagined.

The 20 years in brief
In his 15th anniversary post, Jeff chose important milestones of EC2 that established the foundational building blocks that customers still rely on today. Amazon Elastic Block Store (2008) provided persistent block storage. Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch (2009) made applications scalable and highly available. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (2009) gave customers logically isolated networks. AWS Nitro System (2017) enabled faster innovation and enhanced security. AWS Graviton processors (2018) were designed for cost-sensitive scale-out workloads.

Over 20 years, EC2 grew from one to over 1,200 instance types to meet customer needs across general-purpose, compute-, memory-, and storage-optimized, accelerated computing, and high-performance computing families. These instances expanded from one AWS Region to 39 Regions globally. AWS also extended EC2 beyond the Region boundary with AWS Outposts (2018) running EC2 instances locally, AWS Local Zones (2019) place globally, and AWS Wavelength (2019) inside global 5G telecommunications carrier networks.

While I hate to play favorites, I want to choose some of my favorite EC2 launches of the past five years:

• AWS Inferentia for ML inference at scale (2019): We introduced purpose-built ML inference instances (inf1) with AWS Inferentia chips. Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances became generally available in April 2023 for large-scale generative AI inference workloads. Together with the Inferentia family, AWS Trainium instances now give customers a full stack of AWS-designed silicon optimized for every phase of the AI lifecycle both inference and training.
• EC2 Mac instances (2020): The first Mac instances (mac1) were built on Apple Mac mini with Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) on the AWS Nitro System. Mac M1 (mac2) instances launched in July 2022 as the first Arm-based macOS instances on EC2. M2 Pro Mac instances followed in 2023, M4 and M4 Pro Mac instances in 2025, M3 Ultra Mac instances and M4 Max Mac instances in 2026, giving Apple developers a complete range of cloud-based build and test environments for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and visionOS apps.
• AWS Trainium for full-stack AI workloads at scale (2021): In November 2021, we previewed Trn1 instances with AWS Trainium accelerators optimized for high-performance deep learning training. In December 2024, Trn2 instances powered by AWS Trainium2 launched, with Trn2 UltraServers linking 64 Trainium2 accelerators via NeuronLink for training trillion-parameter foundation models. At AWS re:Invent 2025, Trn3 UltraServers powered by AWS Trainium3 deliver the best token economics for next-generation agentic, reasoning, and video generation applications. A single Trn3 UltraServer interconnects up to 144 Trainium3 chips to train and serve the largest frontier models. Now, AWS Trainium3 delivers the leading price-performance for high-performance AI training and inference at scale.
• EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML (2023): This new EC2 usage model further democratizes ML democratizes ML by making it easy to access GPU instances to train and deploy ML and generative AI models. You reserve the GPU capacity you need (initially P5 instances) for a future date and only for the duration you require. In November 2024, EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML added supported for provisioning in a matter of minutes and extending up to six months. Now, EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML supports P6-B300, P6-B200, P5e, P5en, P4d, P4de, Trn1, Trn2, and Trn3 instances in addition to P5.
• AWS Graviton5 (2025): Building on eight years of Graviton innovation since 2018, we previewed Graviton5 chips in AWS re:Invent 2025 and launched M9g and M9gd instances powered by Graviton5 and built on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System. C9g and C9gd followed in June 2026. Now, Graviton5 features 192 cores, a 5x larger cache, and up to 33% lower inter-core latency, making it well suited for the growing demands of agentic AI workloads such as real-time reasoning, code generation, and multi-step task orchestration that require continuous, high-throughput CPU compute at scale.
• AWS Nitro Isolation Engine (2026): Customers wanted to see, not just hear from us, proof of workload isolation in the Nitro Hypervisor. The Nitro Isolation Engine is a purpose-built component inside the Nitro Hypervisor, harnessing formal verification to provide mathematical assurance that customer workloads are isolated from each other and AWS operators, pioneering a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security. This feature is also based on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System which has continued to evolve since our introduction in 2017.

The foundation underneath it all
Despite two decades of innovation, the fundamental value proposition of Amazon EC2 has not changed. Customers use it to get secure, resizable compute capacity in minutes, pay only for what they consume, and scale on demand without long-term commitments. That same flexibility now extends to AI workloads at a scale no one anticipated in 2006.

EC2 remains the foundational compute layer of AWS. Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, Amazon SageMaker AI, and Amazon Bedrock ultimately run on EC2 capacity. Every architectural pattern customers have built over the past twenty years, from simple web servers to trillion-parameter foundation model training clusters, starts with a decision to launch an instance.

We made strong foundational decisions in 2006, and we left room for the service to grow. Twenty years later, that strategy of creating services that are minimal-yet-useful, launching quickly, and iterating rapidly in response to your feedback continues to guide how we build. The next twenty years of cloud computing will demand capabilities we have not yet imagined. Amazon EC2 will continue to be the foundation where your workloads run.

To learn more about Amazon EC2, visit the Amazon EC2 product page or check out what’s new with EC2.

— Channy

During my time at AWS, I have always looked for opportunities to work with students. I have delivered over 50 talks at universities across the region, and watching the potential in the room is always a strong motivator. It reminds me of why I do this work, and that the students I meet today may well become our customers and collaborators tomorrow. That is why I am happy to open this week with Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center.

Rick Suttles published Introducing Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center, a new benefit for verified higher education students. When you verify your enrollment through SheerID and complete your Builder Center profile, you unlock 12 months of premium AWS Skill Builder access (900+ courses, hands-on labs, certification exam prep, and game-based learning). From there, you earn badges through actions on Builder Center: publishing articles, commenting, and maintaining engagement. At 7 badges, you unlock $10 in AWS Credits. At 14 badges, another $20 in credits. At 21 badges, you earn an AWS Foundational Certification exam voucher ($100 value).

This represents a commitment of over $500 million in resources during this back-to-school season, providing students with the training, tools, and certification needed to start building their careers in cloud and AI. Student Rewards is available to students 18 years or older and enrolled at accredited higher education institutions worldwide, subject to verification and applicable terms.

Verify your student status and start learning, earning badges, and unlocking rewards!

Last week’s launches
Here’s what else happened this week.

• A new AWS Local Zone in Las Vegas, Nevada – This new Local Zone supports Amazon EC2 C7i, M7i, R7i, and C8gn instances, Amazon EBS, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Direct Connect. AWS Local Zones are now available in more than 30 metropolitan areas worldwide. In addition, AWS added a fourth Availability Zone to the Europe (London) Region, delivering next-generation AI and ML capacity with Trn3 and P6 accelerated instances alongside general-purpose compute.
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports batch instance termination – You can now pass up to 100 instance IDs to the TerminateInstanceInAutoScalingGroup API to terminate them as a batch, reducing the number of API calls needed to scale down your Auto Scaling groups. Batch termination is designed for workloads that need to rapidly scale down, such as AI/ML training jobs, container orchestrators, or event-driven architectures that spin up large fleets temporarily.
• AWS CloudShell now includes a built-in visual file editor – CloudShell now includes a visual file editor that you can launch directly from your shell session using a single edit command. The editor supports syntax highlighting, find-and-replace, multi-line selection, copy-paste, and undo-redo in a single browser session. Whether you are updating a deployment script, modifying an agent steering file, editing a CloudFormation template, or fixing a Lambda function, the editor provides a seamless edit-and-run experience without leaving CloudShell.
• Amazon Bedrock now supports SpaceXAI Grok 4.6 with cross-Region inference – Grok 4.6, a frontier model built for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, is now available on Amazon Bedrock. The model runs on the bedrock-runtime endpoint with support for the Responses, Chat Completions, and Converse APIs, and works with existing account-level controls including model invocation logging, Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and cost itemization in AWS Cost Explorer.
• Amazon Bedrock expands API support and introduces cross-Region inference for OpenAI models – Amazon Bedrock now supports OpenAI GPT-5.6 models (Sol, Terra, and Luna) with the Responses, Converse, and Chat Completions APIs, and adds cross-Region inference. Geo cross-Region inference routes requests within a predefined geography (including new US Geo support with this launch), while Global cross-Region inference serves requests from any commercial AWS Region at a lower per-token cost.
• AgentCore payments is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore – At general availability, AgentCore payments includes Quick Create for Coinbase credential provisioning directly within the AgentCore console, a curated Coinbase Bazar MCP server of pay-per-use x402 endpoints via AgentCore gateway, support for the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), and the “upto” scheme in the x402 protocol for pay-per-inference and dynamic pricing use cases. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• AWS Glue 6.0 delivers 30% price reduction and Iceberg v3 support – AWS Glue 6.0 is built on a fully modernized runtime, Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.13, and Scala 2.13, delivering 30% lower pricing than previous AWS Glue versions. With Iceberg v3, Glue 6.0 adds the VARIANT data type with automatic shredding for faster reads on semi-structured data, deletion vectors for high-performance row-level updates, geometry and geography data types for spatial processing, and flexible schema evolution.

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

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Updates to your AWS Sign-In experience – AWS is gradually introducing updates to the sign-in and sign-up experience. The redesigned sign-in page introduces a unified email entry point for root users and customers using the new email-based sign-in method, while IAM users continue signing in with their account ID, username, and password. The page also includes sign-in options for customers whose AWS account was created using a supported identity provider (Google, GitHub, Apple, or Amazon.com). A redesigned session selection page simplifies viewing and managing multiple active account and role sessions. If your organization relies on browser automation or scripted workflows that interact with the sign-in page, review the post to understand how these changes might affect your configuration.
• In the works: AWS Builder Lofts in Berlin, Hyderabad, and São Paulo – My colleague Channy announced plans to open new Builder Lofts in three cities. Since the first Builder Loft opened in San Francisco in July 2025, it has welcomed more than 22,500 developers through its doors. Each new location will be a permanent community space offering free workshops, networking events, pitch nights, content creation spaces, and co-working areas. Berlin will focus on digital sovereignty and security-readiness, Hyderabad on AI and cloud-native architecture, and São Paulo on supporting Latin America’s developer ecosystem.
• AWS and Amazon WorkSpaces recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service – AWS has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for the third consecutive year, evaluated on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Gartner noted strengths in operations, geographic strategy, and overall viability. This is also the first year the evaluation includes Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents, a capability that runs AI agents within the same desktop environment, security perimeter, and audit trail as human users.

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

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

• AWS Summits – Free in-person events for builders and innovators to learn, connect, and explore the latest in cloud. Coming up: Zurich (September 2), São Paulo (September 3), Tel Aviv (September 10), and Dubai (September 30). You can also watch keynotes and sessions on the AWS Summits Global Livestream + On-Demand Hub. To access live and on-demand content for a particular Summit, you need to be registered for that event.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Bolivia, Santa Cruz (August 29), Toronto, Canada (August 29), JAWS SONIC, Tokyo (September 5), Warsaw, Poland (September 8).

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building.

Summer is slowly coming to an end, and I am already planning a few days off in the coming months to keep me motivated through the rainy autumn ahead. I hope you are doing the same. Come back next week for more!

— Esra

Last week, AWS contributors joined the OpenSearch and Valkey communities at Open Source Summit Korea 2026 and MCP DevSummit Seoul 2026 to meet open source developers and contributors. At the four-day event, community leaders and users of these Linux Foundation open source projects gathered to share knowledge, collaborate on solutions, and push the projects forward.

Leaders of the Korean OpenSearch communities volunteered to participate in the booth, and also had time to network and interact in the user group meetup.

OpenSearch is an open source, enterprise-grade search and observability suite that brings order to unstructured data at scale. On June 9, 2026, OpenSearch 3.7 introduced new tools designed to query, alert, and track SLOs across logs, traces, and metrics through a single interface and retrieve vectors up to 5.5x faster for improved search performance. Since July 30, 2026, you can run OpenSearch version 3.7 on Amazon OpenSearch Service for improvements in vector search performance, search relevance, and Query Insights.

Valkey is an open source high-performance key/value datastore that supports a variety of workloads such as caching, message queues, and it can act as a primary database. On May 19, 2026, Valkey 9.1 introduced a redesigned I/O threading model that improves throughput by up to 17% and reduces memory usage for strings under 128 bytes by up to 20%. Since June 23, 2026, you can run Valkey 9.1 in Amazon ElastiCache for node-based clusters, delivering higher throughput, improved memory efficiency, and stronger access control for multi-tenant workloads.

You can connect with AWS contributors at upcoming OpenSearch and Valkey community events.

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

• Amazon EC2 application status checks: Amazon EC2 introduces a new status check that helps you detect and respond to application-level issues on your EC2 instances. With application status checks, EC2 monitors applications to detect issues such as a web server that has stopped accepting requests, a Docker daemon that is not running, an incorrect networking configuration, or a network interface that is no longer passing traffic. To learn more, visit the Application status checks documentation.
• AWS IAM role manager to set up IAM roles automatically: You can use a new role manager that automatically sets up the IAM roles your AWS services need. When you set up a supported service in the console, role manager creates a default role on your behalf, or reuses one that already exists in your account if it matches the required permissions. Role manager supports six AWS service consoles at launch. To learn more, read How AWS IAM role manager rethinks the starting point for IAM roles.
• OpenAI Daybreak available to eligible customers on Amazon Bedrock: Daybreak is the cyber defense initiative from OpenAI that gives defenders governed access to frontier AI for cybersecurity work. For most security teams, Daybreak Blue, powered by GPT-5.6 Sol, serves as the starting point across defensive workflows including vulnerability discovery, detection engineering, and incident response. Daybreak Red, powered by a new GPT-5.6 Cyber, is designed for advanced, authorized tasks such as vulnerability research, exploit reproduction, and mitigation development. To enroll, contact OpenAI or reach out to your AWS account team for guidance on eligibility. To learn more, read the AI Blog post.
• New foundation models in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart: We’re expanding the portfolio of foundation models available to AWS customers. These models address different enterprise AI challenges with specialized capabilities:
  • NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model
  • NVIDIA’s Nemotron-Nano-12B-v2, Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 FP8, and GLM-OCR models
  • NVIDIA’s LocateAnything-3B, Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B, and Qwen3.5-122B-A10B models
  • Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.2-small-decoder and Google’s gemma-4-12B-it models
  • Redis’s langcache-embed-v3-small, JetBrains’ Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Thinking, and LightOn’s LightOnOCR-2-1B models

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

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

• The deprecation of email validation in AWS Certificate Manager: ACM will discontinue support for email-validated public certificates by September 30, 2027. If you use email validation for your ACM public certificates, you need to migrate to DNS validation before that date. For Amazon CloudFront distributions, HTTP validation is also available.
• The next-generation AWS VPN Client with CLI support and admin controls: You can use a new AWS VPN Client built on OpenVPN3. With the new client, you get full backward compatibility with existing AWS Client VPN endpoints while delivering the automation capabilities and security posture that enterprise networking teams have been asking for.
• Oracle Exadata on Exascale for Oracle AI Database@AWS: ExaDB-XS brings Exadata-class performance and availability through a consumption-based model. With ExaDB-XS, you can scale compute and storage independently in small increments and pay only for what you consume.

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

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

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

— Channy

A couple of editions ago I wrote about what I find so energizing about working with startups. Last week I got a fresh dose of it: I spent a few days with the AWS Startups team, listening to stories of founders talking about the problems they’re actually solving. One story that stayed with me came from Marco Negreiros, founder of EyeCare Health, a Brazilian healthtech expanding access to eye care. He shared a striking fact: more than 70% of Brazilian municipalities don’t have a single ophthalmologist. His answer was to put a vision test on the one device almost everyone already carries, the smartphone, so a basic eye screening no longer depends on living near a clinic. Watching a founder turn a gap that big into something that concrete is exactly why I love this space.

This week, I’ll take a closer look at some key launches, and then cover the quarterly AWS Service Availability updates.

Last week’s launches
Here are some of the launches covered from this past week in the AWS News Blog:

• Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors: They deliver up to 25% better compute performance than Graviton4-based instances, 5x larger cache, fastest memory of any processor instances in the cloud, and local NVMe storage options (C9gd).
• A new AWS CloudFormation Express mode: You can speed up infrastructure deployment with AWS CloudFormation Express mode, enabling AI agents and developers to receive deployment confirmation in seconds and iterate faster. Available in all commercial Regions at no additional cost.
• Upgrade Amazon EKS clusters with confidence using Kubernetes version rollbacks: Learn how Kubernetes version rollbacks for Amazon EKS let you reverse cluster upgrades within seven days. This new feature provides a safety net for upgrade failures, no cluster rebuilds required, turning Kubernetes version upgrades into a reversible, low-risk operation.
• Automate public TLS certificate issuance with ACME support in AWS Certificate Manager: AWS Certificate Manager now supports the ACME protocol, so you can automate the issuance and renewal of public TLS certificates using standard, widely adopted tooling.

Here are some launches and updates that caught my attention:

• Claude Sonnet 5 is now available on AWS – Anthropic’s most capable Sonnet model brings top-tier intelligence at Sonnet pricing for coding, agents, and everyday professional work at scale. It navigates large codebases, calls tools precisely, and holds state across long agentic tasks. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents is now generally available: AI agents can now securely access and operate desktop applications through managed WorkSpaces environments, without requiring application modernization or custom integrations. To learn more. visit the Desktop and Application Streaming Blog post.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service is now optimized for log analytics: This release introduces a new engine purpose-built for log analytics workloads that delivers up to 4x better price-performance on internal benchmarks, while keeping the full-text search capabilities OpenSearch is known for. Teams can now get aggregations and precise text search in one place. To learn more, visit the Big Data Blog post.
• Amazon SageMaker AI cuts generative AI inference scale-out time by up to half: SageMaker Inference now supports container image caching, enabling up to 2x faster end-to-end scaling for generative AI models during scale-out events. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• Amazon CloudWatch supports creating alarms from log queries : You can now create alarms directly on log query results and set thresholds in a single workflow, eliminating the need to first create metric filters or custom metrics as intermediate steps.

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

AWS Service Availability Updates
When the availability of an AWS service or feature changes, we provide customers guidance in AWS Product Lifecycle Changes on available alternatives and support for migration so that disruptions to your operations are minimized. The following lifecycle changes were updated on June 30, 2026.

Services moving to Maintenance (no longer accessible to new customers starting July 30, 2026):

• Amazon Bedrock Agents (launched November 2023) is now Amazon Bedrock Agents Classic
• Amazon Cognito Sync
• Amazon Kendra
• Amazon Q Business
• AWS Directory Service – Simple AD
• AWS IoT Device Defender – Detect (feature will no longer be accessible to new customers starting August 31, 2026)
• AWS Mainframe Modernization – Self-Managed Experience
• AWS Management Console – myApplications
• AWS Resource Groups – Group Lifecycle Events
• AWS Service Catalog – Application Registry
• AWS Systems Manager – Application Manager
• Amazon SageMaker AI features: A2I, Clarify, Debugger, GeoSpatial, Ground Truth, Mechanical Turk, Model Monitor, Role Manager, and Studio Lab

Services entering Sunset:

• Amazon WorkSpaces – PCoIP
• Amazon WorkSpaces – Pool
• AWS Managed Services (AMS) Advanced
• AWS re:Post Private
• Amazon Sagemaker AI- Profiler

Services reaching End of Support (as of June 30, 2026):

• Amazon Chime SDK – Carrier Voice Focus
• Amazon SageMaker AI – Ground Truth Plus

We understand that changes in availability can impact your operations. For specific guidance, consult the relevant service documentation or contact AWS Support.

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

• AWS Summits – AWS Summits are free events that bring the cloud and AI community together to connect, learn, and explore the latest technologies. Browse the full calendar to find a Summit near you in the second half of 2026.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences where content is planned, sourced, and delivered by community leaders. If you’re in Latin America, don’t miss AWS Community Day Belo Horizonte on August 22. Registration is open at awscommunityday.com.br.

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

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

– Daniel Abib

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

When you run compute-intensive workloads like real-time analytics, batch processing, video encoding, scientific modeling, or CPU-based machine learning inference, every percentage point of performance matters. You need instances that deliver higher throughput per vCPU, faster memory access, and more network bandwidth, all while keeping your costs in check.

Today I am happy to announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C9g and C9gd instances, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. C9g instances are compute-optimized and deliver up to 25% higher performance per vCPU compared to previous-generation C8g instances. They feature the fastest memory of any processor instance in the cloud, with DDR5 8800MT/s DIMMs, 5x more L3 cache, and up to 3x higher packet-processing performance compared to Graviton4-based instances. The faster memory and larger caches mean your workloads spend less time waiting on data, translating into higher throughput for in-memory analytics, faster agentic loops, and more responsive real-time applications.

C9g instances are ideal for batch jobs, video encoding pipelines, or distributed analytics that can utilize Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for storage. It is also a natural fit for agentic AI workloads, where concurrent environments and CPU-bound reasoning steps benefit from Graviton5’s higher core count and larger caches. As AI shifts from answering questions to taking actions, running code, and orchestrating multi-step tasks, the demand for CPU compute is growing, and C9g instances are built for this shift.

Some workloads also need fast local storage alongside that compute power. Choose C9gd when your application benefits from high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage, for example scratch space during HPC simulations, temporary caches for ML inference, or local buffers for ad-serving engines.

Graviton5-based instances with NVMe instance store volumes also support detailed performance statistics, providing high-resolution I/O metrics, including latency histograms broken down by I/O size, up to 1-second granularity and accessible via Amazon CloudWatch or nvme-cli at no additional cost.

C9g and C9gd instances at a glance
C9g and C9gd instances are available in 11 sizes ranging from medium to 48xlarge, plus a bare metal option. They offer up to 15% higher network bandwidth and 20% higher EBS bandwidth on average across sizes compared to the previous generation, with the largest 48xlarge size delivering up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 72 Gbps of EBS bandwidth, a 2x increase.

C9g	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Network Bandwidth (Gbps)	EBS Bandwidth (Gbps)
medium	1	2	Up to 15	Up to 12
large	2	4	Up to 15	Up to 12
xlarge	4	8	Up to 15	Up to 12
2xlarge	8	16	Up to 17	Up to 12
4xlarge	16	32	Up to 17	Up to 12
8xlarge	32	64	17	12
12xlarge	48	96	25	18
16xlarge	64	128	34	24
24xlarge	96	192	50	36
48xlarge	192	384	100	72
metal-48xl	192	384	100	72

C9gd instances add local NVMe SSD storage with up to 30% higher storage performance compared to previous-generation local storage instances.

C9gd	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Instance Storage (GB)	Network Bandwidth (Gbps)	EBS Bandwidth (Gbps)
medium	1	2	1 x 59	Up to 15	Up to 12
large	2	4	1 x 118	Up to 15	Up to 12
xlarge	4	8	1 x 237	Up to 15	Up to 12
2xlarge	8	16	1 x 474	Up to 17	Up to 12
4xlarge	16	32	1 x 950	Up to 17	Up to 12
8xlarge	32	64	1 x 1900	17	12
12xlarge	48	96	3 x 950	25	18
16xlarge	64	128	1 x 3800	34	24
24xlarge	96	192	3 x 1900	50	36
48xlarge	192	384	3 x 3800	100	72
metal-48xl	192	384	3 x 3800	100	72

Both families are well-suited for high-performance computing (HPC), batch processing, gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based machine learning inference, and ad serving.

Here are some additional capabilities:

• Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC) lets you adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networking by up to 25%, helping you optimize performance for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements such as databases and caching.
• ENA Express support for enhanced networking.
• Up to 128 EBS volumes can be attached to virtual instances.
• Support for Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.

Nitro Isolation Engine
Security and isolation are foundational requirements for running workloads in the cloud. Within the Nitro System, the AWS Nitro Hypervisor is designed to isolate instances from each other as well as AWS operators. With C9g and C9gd instances we are raising the bar even further with the Nitro Isolation Engine, an enhancement to the Nitro System, which enforces isolation of instances and harnesses formal verification to provide assurances of isolation with mathematical precision. C9g and C9gd instances are the first set of compute-optimized instance types to feature Nitro Isolation Engine, a purpose built component that is responsible for enforcing isolation between virtual machines, including mediation of all access to virtual machine memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs.

To learn more about the Nitro Isolation Engine, visit the blog post. For details on the formal verification results, including scope and assumptions, see our technical white paper.

Now available
Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances are now available in US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt). Additional regions will follow.

You can launch C9g and C9gd instances today using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs. For pricing information, visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing page.

To learn more, visit the Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances page and send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— seb

Editor’s Note: Updated 7/1/2026- Paragraph about Nitro Isolation Engine rewritten for clarity.

It has been a busy stretch on the AWS Summit circuit. At the New York City Summit, I delivered a workshop called Building AI architectures with AWS Serverless, and it was a lot of fun watching builders wire up agents and serverless services to solve real problems in a single afternoon. This week I am heading down to the Washington, DC Summit, which always puts a spotlight on innovation in the public sector. If you are going to be there, come say hello.

A question I hear a lot at these events is how teams can put AI to work without waiting on a long engineering backlog, and this week’s biggest launch speaks directly to that, with Amazon Connect Customer introducing a no-code way for business teams to design AI powered customer experiences themselves. Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news.

Headlines
Amazon Connect Customer launched the Agentic CX designer (NLX) in preview, a no-code canvas for designing and deploying AI powered self service experiences. Business teams can build and launch voice and digital experiences that bring agentic and deterministic AI together in one governed flow, going from design to testing and simulation to production ready experiences in weeks rather than months. The launch also includes Live Sync in preview, a patented technology that drives a customer’s web or mobile experience in real time as they speak or type. A caller can complete a form or pull up the right product page without ever leaving the conversation. To see how this reshapes who designs customer experience, read the blog post on how the business user is the new architect of customer experience.

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

• AWS Lambda MicroVMs – A new serverless compute primitive that gives each user or job VM level isolation with near instant launch and resume speeds, plus the ability to suspend and resume execution for up to 8 hours. Built on Firecracker, it is made for running user or AI generated code in multi-tenant applications without managing virtualization infrastructure or trading off isolation, speed, and state.
• Amazon EC2 AMI Watermarks – Lets you embed custom identifiers in your private AMIs that automatically carry forward to every derived AMI across copies, Regions, and account shares. You can combine watermarks with Allowed AMIs and Declarative Policies to restrict launches to approved images, available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions.
• AWS Outposts self-service lifecycle management – Adds self service configuration, quoting, ordering, subscription management, renewal, and decommissioning directly from the console, CLI, and API. A new quoting tool generates real time cost estimates in seconds and surfaces account and regional constraints before you submit an order.
• Amazon MSK AI Agent Skills – Gives AI coding assistants like Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor expert, up-to-date guidance for operating Amazon MSK, covering troubleshooting, sizing, configuring, monitoring, and migrating external Kafka clusters to MSK Express. Tasks that once required specialized knowledge become a guided experience developers can complete on their own.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service AI-assisted migrations – Migration Assistant now includes an agent guided experience that helps you move self managed Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch deployments to OpenSearch Serverless or Managed Clusters using tools like Kiro and Claude Code, with new live traffic capture and replay support for Solr.
• Amazon GuardDuty AI-powered investigations (preview) – Automatically analyzes findings and accounts to help you separate true threats from benign activity, examining context and related activity from the last 90 days with knowledge graphs and threat intelligence. Each investigation returns a disposition assessment with confidence scoring, MITRE ATT&CK classification, and actionable recommendations in minutes.

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

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

• Open Governance for MySQL – Oracle announced a community governance model for MySQL that gives organizations outside Oracle a defined role in the project, including four non Oracle seats on a new Steering Committee and a public GitHub presence. AWS holds a seat and shares why it supports the move and how it already contributes fixes upstream for everyone running MySQL.
• A new way to keep your AWS Certification current -You can now maintain an eligible AWS Certification for an additional year by completing curated training and hands on labs on AWS Skill Builder instead of retaking a full exam. The option is available today in open beta for several Associate and Professional certifications, with more coming later this year.
• The All Builders Welcome Grant insider’s guide for 2026 applicants – A community guide on AWS Builder Center that walks early career builders through applying for the grant, which covers a full conference pass, airfare, and hotel for AWS re:Invent 2026. Applications are open now and close on July 14.

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

Looking for ways to connect with builders in person? Check out the AWS Summits coming to a city near you, find a local AWS Community Day led by user groups around the world, and explore tutorials, community content, and ways to grow your skills over at the AWS Builder Center.

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

-Micah

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G7 instances, delivering high performance GPU acceleration for AI inference, graphics, and data analytics workloads.

AWS is the first major cloud provider to support NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs. G7 instances are accelerated by these GPUs with custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, delivering up to 4.6x AI inference performance and up to 2.1x graphics performance compared to G6 instances. G7 instances also deliver faster performance for GPU-accelerated analytics on Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). G7 instances are well suited for a broad range of GPU-enabled workloads including AI inference, graphics rendering, video transcoding and analytics, spatial computing, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and data analytics.

Here are improvements of G7 instances compared to previous generation:

• Faster GPU memory: NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs offer 1.33 times the GPU memory capacity and 2.45 times the GPU memory bandwidth compared to G6 instances. With 32 GB of GPU memory per GPU, 5th Gen Tensor Cores, and 4th Gen RT Cores, G7 instances deliver enhanced AI inference and graphics performance.
• High performance networking and storage: G7 instances come with 700 Gbps of EFA-enabled networking throughput (7x compared to G6) enabling the low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity that AI inference, graphics-intensive applications, and GPU-accelerated data analytics workloads need to perform at their best. G7 instances support up to 7.6 TB local NVMe SSD storage, enabling you to keep large models and datasets close to compute, reduce data transfer overhead, and improve throughput.
• Advanced video encoding and decoding engines: Ninth-generation NVENC and sixth-generation NVDEC engines support 4:2:2 encoding and decoding for high-resolution video workflows, delivering 1.5x concurrent video streams compared to previous-generation G6 instances.

EC2 G7 instance specifications
G7 instances feature up to 8 NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs with up to 256 GB of total GPU memory (32 GB of memory per GPU) and custom Intel Xeon Scalable processors. They also are available in 7 sizes and support up to 192 vCPUs, up to 700 Gbps of network bandwidth, up to 768 GiB of system memory, and up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe SSD storage.

Here are the specs:

Instance name	GPUs	GPU memory (GB)	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Storage	EBS bandwidth (Gbps)	Network bandwidth (Gbps)
g7.2xlarge	1	32	8	32	1 x 600	Up to 8	Up to 60
g7.4xlarge	1	32	16	64	1 x 600	8	Up to 100
g7.8xlarge	1	32	32	128	1 x 950	16	Up to 100
g7.12xlarge	2	64	48	192	1 x 1900	20	175
g7.24xlarge	4	128	96	384	1 x 3800	40	350
g7.48xlarge	8	256	192	768	2 x 3800	80	700
g7.metal*	8	256	192	768	2 x 3800	80	700

* Coming soon

G7 instances support NVIDIA GPUDirect P2P for multi-GPU sizes, NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA with EFA, and GPUDirect RDMA with EFA for Amazon FSx for Lustre, enabling low-latency GPU-to-GPU communication for multi-GPU and multi-node workloads.

To get started with G7 instances, you can use the AWS Deep Learning AMIs (DLAMI) or NVIDIA Workstation AMIs with prepackaged GPU drivers for your AI inference and graphics workloads. To use G7 instances with Amazon EKS, build EKS AMIs with NVIDIA driver version R595 with EKS-provided automation. G7 instances support multiple operating systems including Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, RHEL, and Windows Server, with comprehensive NVIDIA driver integration providing compatibility with industry-standard graphics libraries including DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL.

Get started today
You can start using Amazon EC2 G7 instances today in two AWS regions: US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon). To check future Regional expansion plans, look up the instance type in the CloudFormation resources tab on the AWS Capabilities by Region page.

G7 instances are offered through multiple purchasing options, including On-Demand, Savings Plans, and Spot Instances. Dedicated Instances are also supported for the 12xlarge, 24xlarge, and 48xlarge sizes. For detailed pricing, visit the Amazon EC2 Pricing page.

Ready to get started? Launch G7 instances from the Amazon EC2 console. For more details, head over to the Amazon EC2 G7 instances page. We’d love to hear your feedback. Share it on AWS re:Post for EC2 or reach out through your usual AWS Support contacts.

– Daniel Abib

This week, New York City is hosting AWS Summit, bringing together builders, customers, and AWS teams for a full day of announcements, demos, and technical sessions at the Javits Center. I wrote blog posts for some of the Summit launches, so I am excited to see them go live this week. I just won’t be watching from the Javits Center. I’ll be at a four-day music festival, following the launches on my phone while trying to figure out how to put up a tent. If you weren’t able to attend in person like me, the keynote livestream is available on June 17, with Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI, and Chet Kapoor, VP of Security Services and Observability, covering new capabilities across developer tools, AI infrastructure, and security.

Here’s what happened this week.

Headlines
How frontier teams are reinventing AI-native development – Swami published a detailed post this week drawing on data from experiments across hundreds of Amazon engineering teams. The findings are worth reading carefully if you are thinking about how to structure AI adoption on your own team.

A six-engineer team rebuilt the Amazon Bedrock inference engine in 76 days, a project originally scoped for 30 developers over 12 to 18 months. The median productivity gain across structured pilots with Amazon Stores teams was 4.5x in normalized deployment velocity, with some teams exceeding 10x. Perfect Order Experience went from a two-week feature cycle to shipping in an afternoon. WW Grocery cut design document creation from five days to a few hours.

The post distills these results into five practices for becoming a frontier team. First, invest in agent context: build steering files, coding standards, and structured repositories before writing production code. Second, expect an initial slowdown while workflows are restructured, and push through it. Third, maintain a steady backlog of well-scoped tasks so agents can run in parallel without constant supervision. Fourth, make intent explicit through structured specifications before code generation begins. Fifth, shift testing left so agents can self-correct before code reaches the pipeline.

The post closes with a note that commit velocity is only part of the picture, and that a follow-up will cover release management, operations, security operations, and EOL upgrades.

AWS FinOps Agent is now available in preview – AWS FinOps Agent is a new agent for FinOps practitioners and engineering teams that answers cost questions, surfaces optimization opportunities, investigates cost anomalies, and runs recurring FinOps workflows on a defined schedule. You can use it to query your AWS costs, generate cost reports for finance and engineering teams, and surface rightsizing, idle resource, and Savings Plans recommendations from AWS Cost Optimization Hub and AWS Compute Optimizer. The agent can open Jira tickets on your behalf based on those recommendations. When a cost anomaly is detected, FinOps Agent can automatically investigate the root cause and post findings to a Slack channel.

Last week’s launches
I’ll start with one I wrote this week, then cover the other launches that caught my attention:

• Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances are now generally available – Powered by AWS Graviton5 processors and built on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System, M9g instances deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based instances, with up to 35% faster performance for web applications, up to 35% for machine learning inference, and up to 30% for databases. Graviton5 is the first processor in the AWS fleet to support PCIe Gen6 and DDR5-8800 memory, and includes a 5x larger L3 cache compared to the previous generation. M9g and M9gd instances offer up to 15% higher network bandwidth and 20% higher Amazon EBS bandwidth on average across sizes compared to M8g. This release also introduces the Nitro Isolation Engine, an enhancement to the Nitro System that uses formal verification to provide mathematically proven isolation between virtual machines — establishing Nitro as the first formally verified cloud hypervisor. M9gd instances add up to 11.4 TB of NVMe SSD local storage with 30% higher IOPS compared to M8gd. Both instance types support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC) for adjusting bandwidth allocation between EBS and VPC networking by up to 25%.
• Anthropic Claude Fable 5 on Amazon Bedrock – Claude Fable 5 launched on Amazon Bedrock on June 9, bringing extended asynchronous task execution, advanced vision capabilities across diagrams, charts, and PDFs, and proactive self-verification. Access requires opting into data sharing via the Data Retention API before invoking the model; Anthropic requires 30-day retention of inputs and outputs for Mythos-class models. Important note on availability: On June 12, Anthropic asked AWS to revoke access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 for all users to support compliance with a US Government export control directive. All other models, including Opus 4.8, are unaffected. Read the Anthropic statement for details. AWS will share further updates as they become available.
• Gemma 4 models are now available on Amazon Bedrock – The Gemma 4 family from Google DeepMind is now available on Amazon Bedrock across three variants: Gemma 4 31B (dense, 256K-token context window, suited for reasoning and coding workloads), Gemma 4 26B-A4B (mixture-of-experts architecture, targeting cost- and latency-sensitive workloads), and Gemma 4 E2B (smallest variant, designed for low-latency interactive use cases). All three support native function calling, structured output, reasoning, response streaming, multimodal input across text, image, video, and audio, and more than 35 languages.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service launches MCP Apps for agentic observability – Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports MCP Apps, enabling observability workflows inside compatible agentic IDEs including Claude Desktop and VS Code. An AI agent in your local environment can investigate incidents using logs, traces, metrics, and alerts stored in OpenSearch domains, collections, and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. Each MCP App tool call returns a dual response: a text summary for the agent to reason over and an interactive visualization rendered in the same conversation thread. Available MCP App tools cover log, metrics, and trace investigation; service performance; topology; dynamic visualizations; agent health; cluster health; and instrumentation scoring.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and updates you may find useful:

• AWS CLI v1 enters maintenance mode – When CLI v1 enters maintenance mode, the botocore and s3transfer dependencies will be vendored directly into the CLI v1 codebase rather than installed as separate packages. This means upgrading CLI v1 will no longer update the standalone botocore or s3transfer packages, and installing those packages independently will have no effect on the versions used by CLI v1. Environments with both CLI v1 and boto3 installed will contain separate copies of these libraries. New CLI v1 releases will be limited to critical bug fixes and security issues. The recommended path is to migrate to AWS CLI v2.
• AWS Workload Credentials Provider is now available – AWS Workload Credentials Provider is a lightweight client-side provider that automates deployment of exported certificates from AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) and local caching of secrets from AWS Secrets Manager across AWS and non-AWS workloads. Previously, customers had to build custom EventBridge automation to detect certificate renewals and deploy updates, which becomes harder to maintain as public certificate lifetimes decrease per the CA/Browser Forum mandate. The provider handles this automatically, runs on Windows and Linux, and supports Apache and NGINX. For secrets, it maintains full backwards compatibility with the AWS Secrets Manager Agent.
• Kiro Pro Max is now available – Kiro has introduced a new Pro Max tier, adding higher usage limits, access to the latest frontier models, and additional agentic capabilities for development teams. Kiro Pro Max is designed for professional developers who need sustained, high-volume use across coding, specification generation, and agent-driven tasks.

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

• AWS Summits: AWS Summits are free in-person events covering cloud and AI. Coming up: New York City (June 17), Hong Kong (June 17), Shanghai (June 23-24), Japan (June 25), Washington, D.C. (June 30 – July 1), Taipei (July 15), and Bogotá (July 30).
• AWS Community Days: Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Montreal, Canada (June 20), Indianapolis, USA (June 24), Hangzhou, China (June 28), Bengaluru, India (July 11), and Yaoundé, Cameroon (July 25).

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building. You can also browse upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, plus developer-focused sessions.

— Esra

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

AWS Graviton processors have improved steadily across generations, with each iteration delivering advances in compute performance, price-performance, and energy efficiency. At re:Invent 2025, we announced Amazon EC2 M9g, the first Graviton5-powered instances, in preview. Since then, customers have tested M9g across a wide range of workloads and shared their results. ClickHouse saw a 36% performance boost compared to M8g, with zero code changes. Honeycomb achieved 36% better throughput per core compared to Graviton4, across a 6-month A/B test of production observability workloads. HubSpot deployed M9g for MySQL databases and saw query duration drop by up to 60%.

Today, M9g instances are generally available, alongside the new M9gd instances for customers who need high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage. Both are powered by Graviton5, the most powerful and most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built.

While many Arm-based instances have been introduced across the industry, no one comes close to the breadth and depth of the AWS Graviton footprint. After five generations of custom silicon and eight years of continuous investment, Graviton powers over 350 instance types serving more than 120,000 customers, from startups to large enterprises, a robust ISV partner ecosystem, and a broad set of managed services.

You can use Graviton for a broad variety of workloads, including web applications, microservices, analytics, databases, machine learning (ML) inference, electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, and video encoding. As workloads grow more compute-intensive and data-driven, many have asked for more processing power, along with greater network and storage bandwidth to move more data and complete workloads faster. We’ve also designed these instances to efficiently package compute, memory, and I/O to maximize energy utilization.

As AI shifts from answering questions to taking actions, running code, using tools, evaluating results, and orchestrating multi-step tasks, the demand for CPU compute is growing rapidly. Graviton5 is built for this shift. With 192 cores, a 5x larger L3 cache, up to 33% lower inter-core latency, and DDR5 memory delivering high bandwidth, Graviton5 helps agents spend less time waiting on CPU-bound steps, processing more instructions, handling large numbers of concurrent environments, and keeping accelerators moving.

Meta is deploying Graviton at scale starting with tens of millions of cores to support its agentic AI efforts, making Meta one of the largest Graviton customers in the world. Agentic AI workloads, including real-time reasoning, code generation, and the orchestration of multi-step tasks, are CPU-intensive and benefit from the higher compute performance, larger caches, higher memory bandwidth, and core density in Graviton5.

What’s new in M9g and M9gd
Built on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System, M9g instances are powered by AWS Graviton5 processors that deliver higher compute performance, larger caches, and improved memory and I/O scalability compared to Graviton4 processors. Graviton5 offers up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based instances, with up to 35% faster performance for web applications, up to 35% for machine learning inference, and up to 30% for databases. As the first CPU in the AWS fleet to support the latest generation of PCIe Gen6 and DDR5-8800 memory, AWS Graviton5 instances deliver the fastest memory of any processor instances in the cloud, and 5 times more L3 cache compared to the previous generation. These improvements also come with better energy efficiency, helping you meet sustainability targets without compromising capability.

Networking and storage bandwidth have been expanded to keep pace with compute growth. M9g and M9gd instances offer up to 15% higher network bandwidth and 20% higher Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) bandwidth on average across sizes, with up to twice the network bandwidth for the largest instance size. M9g and M9gd instances also support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC), a feature that helps you adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) networking for an Amazon EC2 instance by up to 25%. IBC can help optimize performance for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements, such as database read and write performance, query processing, and logging. These enhancements support faster data movement and improved throughput for workloads that rely on high I/O performance.

Security and isolation are foundational requirements for running workloads in the cloud. Within the Nitro System, the AWS Nitro Hypervisor is designed to isolate instances from each other as well as AWS operators. With M9g and M9gd instances we are raising the bar on security even further with the introduction of Nitro Isolation Engine. Nitro Isolation Engine is an enhancement to the Nitro System, which enforces isolation of instances and harnesses formal verification to provide assurances of isolation with mathematical precision. Nitro Isolation Engine is a purpose-built component that is responsible for enforcing isolation between virtual machines, including mediation of all access to virtual machine memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs. Nitro Isolation Engine leverages formal verification, a technique to mathematically demonstrate that the hardware or software behaves as intended, and not just in specific test cases. This intensive verification technique establishes Nitro as the first formally verified cloud hypervisor, pioneering a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security. To learn more about the Nitro Isolation Engine, visit the blog post here. For details on the formal verification results, including scope and assumptions, see our technical white paper.

M9g instances provide one vCPU for every four GiB of memory and are well suited for a broad range of general-purpose workloads, including application servers, microservices, midsize data stores, gaming servers, caching fleets, containerized applications, large-scale Java applications, code repositories, web applications, and agentic AI.

For workloads that need high-speed, low-latency local storage, M9gd instances provide up to 11.4 TB of NVMe SSD storage and 30% higher IOPS and storage performance compared to Graviton4-based M8gd instances. M9gd instances are well suited for general-purpose workloads that require a balance of compute and memory with high-speed, low-latency local storage, including application servers, microservices, gaming servers, midsize key-value data stores, caching fleets, data logging, media processing, batch and log processing, and applications that need temporary storage such as caches and scratch files.

Here are the key specifications across the family:

M9g	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Network bandwidth (Gbps)	EBS bandwidth (Gbps)
medium	1	4	Up to 15	Up to 12
large	2	8	Up to 15	Up to 12
xlarge	4	16	Up to 15	Up to 12
2xlarge	8	32	Up to 17	Up to 12
4xlarge	16	64	Up to 17	Up to 12
8xlarge	32	128	17	12
12xlarge	48	192	25	18
16xlarge	64	256	34	24
24xlarge	96	384	50	36
48xlarge	192	768	100	72
metal-48xl	192	768	100	72

M9gd instances include local NVMe SSD storage. The table below shows the instance storage for each size. Compute, memory, network, and EBS bandwidth specifications are the same as M9g.

M9gd	vCPUs	Memory (GiB)	Instance storage (GB)	Network bandwidth (Gbps)	EBS bandwidth (Gbps)
medium	1	4	1 x 59 NVMe SSD	Up to 15	Up to 12
large	2	8	1 x 118 NVMe SSD	Up to 15	Up to 12
xlarge	4	16	1 x 237 NVMe SSD	Up to 15	Up to 12
2xlarge	8	32	1 x 475 NVMe SSD	Up to 17	Up to 12
4xlarge	16	64	1 x 950 NVMe SSD	Up to 17	Up to 12
8xlarge	32	128	1 x 1900 NVMe SSD	17	12
12xlarge	48	192	3 x 950 NVMe SSD	25	18
16xlarge	64	256	1 x 3800 NVMe SSD	34	24
24xlarge	96	384	3 x 1900 NVMe SSD	50	36
48xlarge	192	768	3 x 3800 NVMe SSD	100	72
metal-48xl	192	768	3 x 3800 NVMe SSD	100	72

Now available
M9g and M9gd instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions. M9g and M9gd instances are available for purchase through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts. For more information, visit Amazon EC2 pricing.

To get started with M9g and M9gd instances, several resources are available. The AWS Graviton Getting Started Guide is a technical guide covering how to build, run, and optimize workloads on Graviton-based instances. The Graviton Savings Dashboard helps you track and measure the cost savings from running workloads on Graviton-based instances. AWS Transform is an AI-powered service that automates code transformations for migrating Java applications from x86 to Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances, handling compatibility analysis, automated recompilation, dependency updates, and validation.

To learn more about Graviton-based instances, visit AWS Graviton Processors or Level up your compute with AWS Graviton.

— Esra

Editor’s Note 6/12/26: Added information about Nitro Isolation Engine