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Can you believe it? We are almost at the end of 2025. And what a year it has been! From re:Invent recap events, to AWS Summits, AWS Innovate, AWS re:Inforce, Community Days and DevDays, and most recently, the icing on the cake, re:Invent 2025, we’ve had a year full of exciting moments and technological advances that continue to shape our new modern world.
Speaking of re:Invent, if you haven’t caught up on all the new releases and announcements yet (and there were plenty of exciting launches across the board), be sure to check out our curated post highlighting the best announcements from AWS re:Invent 2025. We’ve organized all the key releases into easy-to-navigate categories and added links so you can dive deeper into whatever piques your interest.
While the year may be coming to an end, our teams are still busy working on things that you as customers have either requested or that we’re proactively creating to make your life easier. Last week had some interesting releases as usual, so let’s take a look at a few that I think many of you might find useful.
Last week’s launch
Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser Introduces Web Content Filtering – Organizations can now control web access through category-based filtering over 25 predefined categories, granular URL policies, and integrated compliance logging. This feature works alongside existing Chrome policies and integrates with Session Logger for better monitoring and is available at no additional cost in 10 AWS regions with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Amazon Aurora DSQL now supports clustering in seconds—developers can now instantly provision Aurora DSQL databases with setup times reduced from minutes to seconds, enabling rapid prototyping through the AWS console’s integrated query editor or AI-powered development through the Aurora DSQL Model Context Protocol server. Available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions where Aurora DSQL is offered, with AWS Free Tier access.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports integration with Kiro powers – Developers can now accelerate Aurora PostgreSQL application development using AI-powered coding through Kiro powers, a repository of prepackaged Model Context Protocol servers. Aurora PostgreSQL integration provides direct database connectivity for queries, schema management, and cluster operations, dynamically loading relevant context as developers work. Available for one-click installation in Kiro IDE in all AWS regions.
Amazon ECS now supports custom stop signals for containers on AWS Fargate – Fargate jobs now respect the stop signal configured in container images, enabling graceful shutdown for containers that rely on signals like SIGQUIT or SIGINT instead of the default SIGTERM. The ECS container agent reads the STOPSIGNAL instruction from OCI-compliant images and sends the appropriate signal during job termination. Available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions.
Amazon CloudWatch SDK Supports Optimized JSON, CBOR Protocols – The CloudWatch SDK now uses JSON and CBOR protocols by default, resulting in lower latency, smaller payload size, and reduced client-side CPU and memory usage compared to the traditional AWS Query protocol. Available at no additional cost in all AWS regions and SDK language variants.
Amazon Cognito identity pools now support private connectivity with AWS PrivateLink – organizations can now securely exchange federated identities for temporary AWS credentials via private VPC connections, eliminating the need to route authentication traffic over the public Internet. Available in all AWS regions where Cognito identity pools are supported, except AWS China (Beijing) and AWS GovCloud (US) regions.
AWS Application Migration Service Supports IPv6 – Organizations can now migrate applications using IPv6 addressing through dual-stack service endpoints that support both IPv4 and IPv6 communications. During the replication, testing, and failover phases, you can use IPv4, IPv6, or dual-stack configurations to run servers in your target environment. Available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions that support dual-tank MGN and EC2 endpoints.
And that’s it for the weekly AWS News blog roundup… not just for this week, but for 2025! We’ll take a break and come back in January to continue bringing you the latest AWS releases and updates.
As we close out 2025, it’s remarkable to look back at how much has changed since the year began. From ground-breaking AI capabilities to transformative infrastructure innovations, AWS delivered an incredible year of releases that changed what’s possible in the cloud. Through it all, the AWS News Blog has been here with you every week with our Weekly Roundup series to help you stay informed and ready to take advantage of every new opportunity as it comes. We’re grateful you’ve joined us on this journey, and we can’t wait to continue bringing you the latest AWS innovations when we return in January 2026.
Until then, happy building and an exciting year ahead!
Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus