AWS News Jan 19 - Jan 25

This week: EC2 G7e instances bring NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs for 2.3x better AI inference, RDS Blue Green Deployments now complete switchovers in under 5 seconds, and QuickSight doubles SPICE capacity to 2TB. Plus Graviton 4 instances expand across Aurora and RDS, ECR adds cross-repo layer sharing, and Route 53 picks up .AI domains.

Compute

• EC2 G7e: GA with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, 2.3x inference vs G6e
• EC2 M4 Max Mac: GA with M4 Max (16-core CPU, 40-core GPU), 25% faster builds
• EC2 C8gb/M8gb/R8gb: 48xlarge+metal sizes, 30% better than Graviton3, 300Gbps EBS
• Auto Scaling: Layered deletion protection via IAM condition keys + group safeguards

Database

• Aurora/RDS R8g: Graviton4, 40% better perf, 29% better price-perf
• RDS Blue/Green: Switchovers under 5s (2s with Advanced JDBC Driver)
• RDS Oracle: Bare metal for SE2 BYOL (25% cheaper), Multi-AZ replicas for multi-tenant
• RDS SQL Server: Differential/log restores directly on Multi-AZ

Storage & Containers

• ECR: Cross-repo blob mounting reuses layers, faster pushes, lower storage

Analytics & AI/ML

• QuickSight: Reader table customization; SPICE now 2TB, 64K string length
• SageMaker Unified Studio: Cross-region Glue/Redshift table subscriptions
• SageMaker HyperPod: CloudWatch log links for lifecycle debugging
• Bedrock AgentCore Browser: Custom Chrome extension support
• Bedrock Reserved: Claude Sonnet 4.5 in GovCloud

Security & IAM

• Access Denied Errors: Now include specific policy ARN that blocked request
• Resource Control Policies: Support for Cognito and CloudWatch Logs
• Config: 13 new rules (Cognito MFA, EBS snapshot access, ECS non-root)
• Security Agent: GitHub Enterprise Cloud integration for AI code review

Hybrid & Edge

• Outposts Gen2: 20 new countries, C7i/M7i/R7i with 40% better perf
• Elastic VMware Service: VCF/ESX version selection; multiple NSX Tier-0 Gateways

Developer & Operations

• Corretto: Q1 security updates for JDK 8-25
• Transfer Family Terraform: Web apps module with IAM Identity Center auth
• Instance Scheduler: Smarter orchestration, auto-retry alternate instance types
• EMR Serverless: Customer-managed KMS for local disk encryption
• Clean Rooms: Join/partition hints for query optimization
• MQ RabbitMQ: JMS support via topic exchange plugin

AWS News Feed: Whats new at AWS

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