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Happy New Year! I hope the holidays give you time to recharge and spend time with your loved ones.
Like every year, I took a few weeks off after AWS re:Invent to relax and plan ahead. I used some of this downtime to plan the next cohort for Become a Solutions Architect (BeSA). BeSA is a free mentorship program that I volunteer with a few other Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees as a way to help people excel in their cloud and AI careers. Starting February 21, 2026, we are starting a 6-week cohort on “Agentic AI on AWS”. More information can be found on the BeSA website.
There’s still time to submit your idea to the Global 10,000 AIdeas Competition to compete for $250,000 in cash prizes, AWS credits, and recognition, including a potential placement at AWS re:Invent 2026 and across AWS channels.
You’ll get hands-on experience with next-generation AI development tools, connect with innovators around the world, and gain access to technical capabilities through bi-weekly workshops, AWS User Groups, and AWS Builder Center resources.
The deadline is January 21, 2026 and no code is required yet. If you are selected as a semi-finalist, you will then create your application. Your completed application must use Kiro for at least part of the development, stay within the AWS Free Tier limits, and be completely original and unpublished.
If you haven’t yet caught up on all the new releases and announcements from AWS re:Invent 2025, check out our main announcements post or check out the on-demand keynotes, innovation talks, and breakout sessions.
It starts in the last weeks
I’d like to highlight some news that caught my eye since our last weekly review on December 15, 2025:
- Amazon EC2 M8gn and M8gb Instances – The new M8gn and M8gb instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors, which provide up to 30% better computing performance than AWS Graviton3 processors. M8gn instances feature the latest 6th generation AWS Nitro Cards and offer network bandwidth of up to 600 Gbps, the highest network bandwidth among network-optimized EC2 instances. The M8gb offers up to 150 Gbps of Amazon EBS bandwidth to provide higher EBS performance compared to equivalent Graviton4-based instances of the same size.
- AWS Direct Connect Supports Resilience Testing with AWS Fault Injection Service – You can now use AWS Fault Injection Service to test how your applications handle Direct Connect Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) failover in a controlled environment. For example, you can verify that traffic is going to redundant virtual interfaces when the primary virtual interface’s BGP session is down and your applications continue to function as expected.
- New AWS Security Hub controls in AWS Control Tower – AWS Control Tower now supports 176 additional Security Hub controls in the Control catalog, covering use cases including security, cost, lifetime, and operations. With this launch, you can search, discover, enable, and manage these controls directly from AWS Control Tower to manage additional use cases in a multi-account environment.
- AWS Transform Supports Network Conversion for Hybrid Data Center Migrations – You can now use AWS Transform for VMware to automatically convert networks from hybrid data centers. This eliminates manual network mapping for VMware environments as well as other workloads. The service analyzes VLAN and IP ranges across all exported source networks and maps them to AWS constructs such as virtual private clouds (VPCs), subnets, and security groups.
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano Available on Amazon Bedrock – Amazon Bedrock now supports the NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B model, NVIDIA’s latest breakthrough in efficient language modeling that provides high reasoning performance, built-in support for tool calls, and enhanced context processing with a 256K token context window.
- Amazon EC2 supports Availability Zone IDs across its APIs – You can specify the Availability Zone ID (AZ ID) parameter directly in your Amazon EC2 APIs to guarantee consistent resource placement. AZ IDs are consistent and static identifiers that represent the same physical location across all AWS accounts and help you optimize resource placement. Prior to this launch, you had to use the AZ name when creating a resource, but those names could map to different physical locations. This mapping made it difficult to ensure resources were always co-located, especially when operating with multiple accounts.
- Amazon ECS Managed Instances Support Amazon EC2 Spot Instances – Amazon ECS Managed Instances now support Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, expanding the range of options available with AWS managed infrastructure. You can use free EC2 capacity at up to 90% discount compared to on-demand pricing for fault-tolerant workloads on Amazon ECS managed instances.
Check out AWS What’s New for other launch news that I haven’t covered here. That’s it for this week. Check back next Monday for another weekly recap!
Here’s to a fantastic start to 2026. Happy building!
– Prasad