Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2025

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2025. Published context: July 21, 2026. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2025 for Enterprise, Standard, and Developer editions. SQL Server 2025 brings AI integration directly into the database engine, enabling customers to invoke external REST endpoints from T-SQL without additional middleware. Customers running RDS for SQL Server can ...

July 22, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Announcing the general availability of a new AWS Local Zone in Athens, Greece

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Announcing the general availability of a new AWS Local Zone in Athens, Greece. Published context: July 20, 2026. Today, AWS announces the general availability of a new Local Zone in Athens, Greece. The Athens Local Zone is the second Local Zone in EMEA with support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Local Snapshots, enabling customers to store and process data within Greece to help meet local data residency require ...

July 21, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Amazon RDS and Aurora now support R8g and M8g database instances in additional AWS Regions

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Amazon RDS and Aurora now support R8g and M8g database instances in additional AWS Regions. Published context: July 15, 2026. AWS Graviton4-based R8g database instances are now generally available for Amazon Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility) and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad, Melbourne, Malaysia), Europe (London, Paris, Zurich), AWS GovCloud (US-East), South America (Sao Paulo), and Mexico (Central) regions. Additionally, M8g ins ...

July 20, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Amazon Aurora DSQL is now in scope for FedRAMP Moderate

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Amazon Aurora DSQL is now in scope for FedRAMP Moderate. Published context: July 16, 2026. Amazon Aurora DSQL is now in scope for FedRAMP Moderate in the US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. You can now use Aurora DSQL to build applications and run workloads that are subject to FedRAMP Moderate compliance requirements. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a US government-wide program th ...

July 19, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Amazon S3 Event Notifications now include system-generated tags

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Amazon S3 Event Notifications now include system-generated tags. Published context: July 16, 2026. Amazon S3 Event Notifications now include system-generated tags in events delivered to all destinations including Amazon EventBridge, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and AWS Lambda. System-generated tags are metadata labels attached to your bucket by AWS services. You can use these tags to filter events from thousands of buckets with a single EventBridge rule, inste ...

July 18, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Amazon EC2 now surfaces the public SSM parameters associated with public AMIs

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Amazon EC2 now surfaces the public SSM parameters associated with public AMIs. Published context: July 16, 2026. Amazon EC2 now surfaces the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store parameters associated with public AMIs directly in the AMI metadata. When you describe a public AMI, the response includes the associated public SSM parameter, making it easy to discover and reference in your configurations. Previously, finding the SSM parameter associated with a public AM ...

July 17, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Amazon EC2 M8in, M8idn, M8ib, M8idb instances are now available in additional regions

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Amazon EC2 M8in, M8idn, M8ib, M8idb instances are now available in additional regions. Published context: July 14, 2026. Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M8in, M8idn network optimized, and M8ib, M8idb EBS optimized instances are available in the AWS US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. The new instances are powered by custom sixth generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors available only on AWS and deliver up to 43% higher ...

July 16, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Introducing Amazon GuardDuty AI Protection for AWS AI workloads

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Introducing Amazon GuardDuty AI Protection for AWS AI workloads. Published context: July 14, 2026. Amazon GuardDuty now offers AI Protection, expanding threat detection to AWS AI services including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker. As organizations rapidly adopt AI, security teams may lack visibility into threats specifically targeting AI workloads, such as anomalous model invocations, cost harvesting attacks, and prompt injection attempts. GuardDuty A The reason this matters is simple: buyers are paying attention to speed, operational resilience, and credible technical execution. A trending story can create awareness, but the business question is what a team should do with that attention. ...

July 15, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna now generally available on Amazon Bedrock

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna now generally available on Amazon Bedrock. Published context: July 13, 2026. GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, bringing the smartest family of models from OpenAI yet to Bedrock’s next-generation inference engine built for high-performance, security and reliability. GPT-5.6 sets a new standard for intelligence and efficiency, allowing you to solve harder problems in less time and with more int ...

July 14, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

AWS Organizations now applies account departure security controls by default for new organiz...

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported AWS Organizations now applies account departure security controls by default for new organizations created via AWS Organizations console. Published context: July 10, 2026. AWS Organizations now automatically applies security controls by default when you create a new organization via AWS Organizations console, simplifying initial security configuration by automatically applying core security controls. This approach safeguards multi-account environments by protecting against unintended member account departures from your organiz ...

July 13, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Amazon EC2 I8g instances now available in AWS GovCloud (US) regions

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Amazon EC2 I8g instances now available in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. Published context: July 9, 2026. AWS is announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 Storage Optimized I8g instances in AWS GovCloud (US East, US West) regions. I8g instances offer the best performance in Amazon EC2 for storage-intensive workloads. I8g instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors that deliver up to 60% better compute performance compared to previous generation I4g ...

July 12, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez

Amazon EC2 network/EBS instances now available in additional regions

Today’s signal AWS What’s New recently reported Amazon EC2 network/EBS instances now available in additional regions. Published context: July 10, 2026. Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8in, R8ib, R8idn, and R8idb instances are available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) regions. These instances are powered by custom sixth generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, available only on AWS and feature the latest sixth generation AWS Nitro cards. These inst ...

July 11, 2026 · 3 min · David Gomez