This week: AWS slashes Payment Cryptography pricing by up to 63 percent, EKS adds cluster-wide network policies with DNS-based egress filtering, and Aurora PostgreSQL 18.1 hits preview with skip scan and parallel index builds. Plus new Graviton 4 M8gn instances deliver 600 Gbps networking, Certificate Manager automates Kubernetes certificate lifecycle, and Direct Connect expands to Vietnam.

Compute

• EC2 M8gn/M8gb: Graviton4, 30% better perf, up to 600Gbps network
• EC2 AZ IDs: APIs accept physical zone IDs directly
• EC2 Auto Scaling: Sync Launch Instances API with instant feedback
• ECS Managed Instances: Now supports Spot (up to 90% discount)
• ECS Fargate: Weekly event windows for task retirement

Containers & Kubernetes

• EKS: Cluster-wide network filters + DNS-based egress policies
• ECR: Auto-creates repos on push; Public now supports PrivateLink
• ACM for K8s: Full cert lifecycle automation via ACK controller

Database

• Aurora PostgreSQL 18.1: Skip scan, parallel GIN builds (preview)
• Aurora PostgreSQL: 5 new versions, faster Blue/Green switchovers
• OpenSearch OI2: 9% higher indexing, multi-tier S3 storage with writes
• Timestream InfluxDB: Restart API for v2 and v3

Analytics & ML

• Redshift Serverless: Dual-stack IPv6 support
• QuickSight: Persistent memory across chats; browser extension runs Flows
• Bedrock Data Automation: Auto-optimizes blueprints from 10 examples
• SageMaker Studio: SOCI indexing cuts container startup 30-50%

Networking

• Direct Connect: Vietnam location; FIS integration for BGP failover testing
• Route 53 Resolver: Detailed CloudWatch metrics (latency, errors)

Security & Compliance

• Control Tower: 176 new Security Hub controls
• Artifact: Self-service access to historical compliance reports
• Security Incident Response: Slack integration (bidirectional sync)
• SES: Email validation API + Auto Validation for bounce reduction

Cost & Management

• Cost Allocation Tags: Works with Organizations account tags
• Billing Dashboards: PDF/CSV export
• Payment Cryptography: Up to 63% price cut + tiered pricing
• Carbon Footprint: 21-day lag (was 3 months)

Messaging & IoT

• MSK: Kafka 3.9 with KRaft (no ZooKeeper); Connect dual-stack
• IoT Core: HTTP batch actions; event-based log levels
• IoT Device Mgmt: Dynamic command payloads with validation

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