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Winter holds sway over where I live in the Netherlands, rare moments of sunlight become rare gifts. This weekend offered one such treasure – while cycling along a quiet canal, golden rays pierced the typically gray Dutch sky, creating a perfect moment of calm. These flashes of brightness are especially special during January when daylight can be scarce in our corner of Europe. As we move deeper into 2025, the third week of the new year brings both reflection and forward momentum. As the global conversation swirls around technological advancements, it’s these small, personal moments that remind us to stop and appreciate the simple pleasures in our fast-paced world.
Let’s take a look at the new announcements from last week.
Last week’s launch
Here are the launches that caught my eye.
AWS Mexico (Central) Region – In February 2024, we announced plans to expand our infrastructure in Mexico and now we’ve launched the AWS Mexico (Central) Region with three Availability Zones and API code mx-central-1. This is the first AWS infrastructure region in Mexico and contributes to our growing presence in Latin America. The new realm gives you local workload management, storage capabilities, increased performance with lower latency, and robust security standards. It features advanced cloud technologies, including cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities with purpose-built processors, comprehensive security capabilities with support for 143 security standards, and compliance certification. With this launch, AWS now covers 114 Availability Zones across 36 geographies.
AWS Management Console now supports simultaneous login for multiple AWS accounts – Using the multi-session feature in the AWS Management Console, you can now log in to multiple AWS accounts and manage your resources in a single browser. You can log in to up to 5 sessions and can be any combination of root, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), or federated roles in different accounts or within the same account. You can scale your applications using multiple accounts following AWS best practices. You can use accounts for different environments, such as development, test, and production, and compare configurations and resource health across multiple accounts for troubleshooting applications and other application-related tasks.
Introducing New Larger Sizes on Amazon EC2 Flex Instances – Announcing the general availability of two new larger sizes (12xlarge and 16xlarge) on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Flex instances (C7i-flex and M7i-flex). The new sizes expand the EC2 Flex portfolio and provide additional compute capabilities for scaling existing workloads or running larger applications that need additional memory. Powered by proprietary 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors available only on AWS, these instances offer up to 15% better performance than comparable x86-based Intel processors used by other cloud providers. Flex Instances are the easiest way to get the benefits of price, performance and lower cost for most compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads. They provide up to 19% better price performance than comparable previous generation instances and are a great first choice for applications that do not fully utilize compute resources. Flex instances are ideal for web and application servers, batch processing, enterprise applications, databases and more. For compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads that require even larger instance sizes (up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB memory) or consistently high CPU utilization, you can use Amazon EC2 C7i and M7i instances.
Announcing the general availability of AWS User Notifications in AWS CloudFormation – You can use AWS User Notifications to configure notifications to be sent using the AWS Management Console Notification Center, email, AWS Chatbot, or mobile push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile App to keep you informed of important events such as Amazon CloudWatch alarms. With this capability, you can define notification configurations as part of your infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices and specify notification configurations for specific resource types within AWS CloudFormation templates. For example, you can set notifications to be triggered when an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group scales, an Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is provisioned, or an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database is modified. You have detailed control over which events will trigger notifications and who should receive them.
See the What’s New on AWS page for a full list of AWS announcements.
We have launched existing services and instance types in additional regions:
- Amazon EC2 M8g instances are now available in AWS Europe (Stockholm) – These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to three times more vCPUs and memory compared to Graviton3-based Amazon M7g instances. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 40% faster for databases, 30% faster for web applications, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors.
- AWS Announces New Location and Expansion of AWS Direct Connect in Querétaro, Mexico – Direct Connect helps you create a private, physical network connection between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment. These private connections can provide a more consistent network experience than connecting over the public Internet.
- Amazon EC2 C7i-flex instances are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) region – These instances expand the EC2 Flex instance portfolio and give you the easiest way to get price and performance benefits for most compute-intensive workloads.
- AWS Backup now supports enterprise-wide reports across AWS GovCloud (US) regions – You can use AWS Backup Audit Manager to generate cross-account and cross-region aggregated reports about your data protection policies and retrieve operational data about your backup and recovery activities.
- Amazon OpenSearch Serverless Now Available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) – OpenSearch Serverless is a serverless deployment option for the Amazon OpenSearch Service that makes it easy to run search and analytics jobs without the complexity of infrastructure management.
- AWS Backup is now available in Asia Pacific (Thailand) – With AWS Backup, you can centrally create and manage backups of your application data, protect your data from accidental or malicious actions with immutable recovery points and vaults, and restore your data in case of data loss .
- Amazon GuardDuty is now available in the Asia Pacific (Malaysia) region – you can now use this additional region to continuously monitor and detect anomalous behavior, security threats, and sophisticated multi-stage attack sequences targeting your AWS accounts to help protect your AWS accounts, work load and data.
- Amazon EC2 R8g instances are now available in additional regions – Amazon EC2 R8g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads such as databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics.
- Amazon EC2 I8g instances are now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) region – I8g instances offer the best performance in Amazon EC2 for storage-intensive workloads.
- Amazon S3 Tables Now Available in Five Additional AWS Regions – Amazon S3 Tables provides the first cloud-based object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. S3 tables are specifically optimized for analytical workloads, resulting in up to three times faster query performance due to continuous table optimization compared to unmanaged Iceberg tables, and up to ten times the number of transactions per second compared to Iceberg tables stored in general-purpose S3 buckets.
More AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events.
AWS Summits are free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Stay informed on the official AWS Summit website and sign up for alerts to know when registration opens for events in your area.
AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS’ cloud computing and artificial intelligence expertise. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive meetings with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.
View all upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events here.
That’s it for this week. Check back next Monday for another weekly recap!
-Esra
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of exciting news and announcements from AWS!
