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As winter maintains its hold over where I live in the Netherlands, rare moments of sunlight become precious gifts. This weekend offered one such treasure—while cycling along a quiet canal, golden rays broke through the typically gray Dutch sky, creating a perfect moment of serenity. These glimpses of brightness feel particularly 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. While global conversations swirl around technological advancements, it’s these small, personal moments that remind us to pause and appreciate the simple pleasures among our rapidly evolving world.
Let’s look at the last week’s new announcements.
Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention.
AWS Mexico (Central) Region – In February 2024, we announced plans to expand infrastructure in Mexico, and we’ve now launched the AWS Mexico (Central) Region with three Availability Zones and API code mx-central-1. This marks the first AWS infrastructure Region in Mexico and adds to our growing presence in Latin America. The new Region provides you with local workload management, data storage capabilities, enhanced 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 certifications. With this launch, AWS now spans 114 Availability Zones within 36 geographic Regions.
AWS Management Console now supports simultaneous sign-in for multiple AWS accounts – Using multi-session capability in the AWS Management Console, you can now sign-in to multiple AWS accounts and manage your resources in a single browser. You can sign in to up to 5 sessions and this can be any combination of root, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), or federated roles in different accounts or in the same account. You can scale your applications using multiple accounts following AWS best-practice guidelines. You can use accounts for different environments, such as development, testing, and production, and compare resource configurations and status across multiple accounts for troubleshooting application issues and other application related jobs.
Introducing new larger sizes on Amazon EC2 Flex instances – We’re announcing the general availability of two new larger sizes (12xlarge and 16xlarge) on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Flex (C7i-flex and M7i-flex) instances. The new sizes expand the EC2 Flex portfolio, providing additional compute options to scale up existing workloads or run larger-sized applications that need additional memory. These instances are powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which are available only on AWS, and offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors used by other cloud providers. Flex instances are the easiest way to get price performance benefits and lower prices for a majority of compute-intensive and general-purpose workloads. They deliver up to 19% better price performance than comparable previous generation instances and are a great first choice for applications that don’t fully utilize the 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 need even larger instance sizes (up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB memory) or continuous high CPU usage, you can use Amazon EC2 C7i and M7i instances.
Announcing AWS User Notifications general availability on AWS CloudFormation – You can use AWS User Notifications to configure notifications to be sent using the AWS Management Console Notifications Center, email, AWS Chatbot, or mobile push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile App to keep you informed about 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 your AWS CloudFormation templates. For example, you can set up notifications to trigger when an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group scales out, an Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) load balancer is provisioned, or an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database is modified. You have granular control over which events will trigger notifications and who should receive them.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.
We 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 AWS Direct Connect location and expansion in Querétaro, Mexico – The Direct Connect service helps you establish 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 those made over the public internet.
- Amazon EC2 C7i-flex instances are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region – These instances expand the EC2 Flex instances portfolio to provide the easiest way for you to get price performance benefits for a majority of compute intensive workloads.
- AWS Backup now supports organization-wide reports in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – You can use AWS Backup Audit Manager to generate aggregated cross-account and cross-Region reports on your data protection policies and retrieve operational data about your backup and recovery activities.
- Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now available in Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region – OpenSearch Serverless is a serverless deployment option for Amazon OpenSearch Service that makes it simple to run search and analytics workloads without the complexities of infrastructure management.
- AWS Backup is now available in Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region – Using AWS Backup, you can centrally create and manage backups of your application data, protect your data from inadvertent or malicious actions with immutable recovery points and vaults, and restore your data in the event of a data loss incident.
- Amazon GuardDuty is now available in Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region – You can now use this additional Region to continually monitor and detect anomalous behavior, security threats, and sophisticated multistage attack sequences targeting your AWS accounts to help protect your AWS accounts, workloads, 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 Europe (Frankfurt) Region – I8g instances offer the best performance in Amazon EC2 for storage-intensive workloads.
- Amazon S3 Tables are now available in five additional AWS Regions – Amazon S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. S3 Tables are specifically optimized for analytics workloads, resulting in up to three times faster query performance through continual table optimization compared to unmanaged Iceberg tables, and up to ten times higher transactions per second compared to Iceberg tables stored in general purpose S3 buckets.
Other 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 updated by visiting the official AWS Summit website and sign up for notifications to learn when registration opens for events in your area.
AWS GenAI Lofts are collaborative spaces and immersive experiences that showcase AWS expertise in cloud computing and AI. They provide startups and developers with hands-on access to AI products and services, exclusive sessions with industry leaders, and valuable networking opportunities with investors and peers. Find a GenAI Loft location near you and don’t forget to register.
Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events here.
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
— Esra
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!
