May 18, 2026

AWS News May 11 - May 17

Show Notes

This week: AWS Transform adds containerized migration and an agentic AI assistant for .NET developers, Claude Platform launches as GA making AWS the first cloud to offer Anthropic's native experience, and EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances bring Mac Studio hardware to the cloud. Plus CloudFormation's new cross-account output references, major SageMaker GPU instance expansions, and Organizations doubles SCP limits.

Migration & Modernization

Transform: Containerizes apps, generates Dockerfiles, Terraform, Helm charts
Transform: Agentic AI assistant for .NET modernization in VS Toolkit
Transform: Agent builder toolkit for custom modernization agents
Transform: BYOB S3 storage with KMS encryption

AI/ML

Claude Platform: GA on AWS - first cloud with native Anthropic experience via IAM
SageMaker: P6b200 instances (8 Blackwell GPUs, 1400GB HBM), 2x perf vs P5en
SageMaker: Serverless fine-tuning for Qwen 3.6 (27B params)
SageMaker Data Agent: IAM Identity Center support, generates Python/SQL from English
SageMaker Feature Store: Python SDK v3 with Lake Formation access controls
Bedrock: Advanced Prompt Optimization - compare across 5 models, multimodal support
Security Agent: Full repo code review, reasons about architecture and trust boundaries

Compute & Networking

EC2 M3 Ultra Mac: GA - M3 Ultra chip, 28-core CPU, 256GB unified memory
ENA Express: 25Gbps cross-AZ (was 5Gbps)
Karpenter: ARC zonal shift integration for EKS
Redshift RG: Graviton-powered, 2.4x faster, 30% lower cost, built-in data lake engine

Database & Storage