AWS News Dec 15 - Dec 21

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 AWS News Feed: Whats new at AWS For Expert Support with your AWS Infrastructure check out theserverlessway.com For detailed show notes check out awsnewsweekly.com