AWS

AWS has made the Advanced Ruby Driver Wrapper generally available for Amazon RDS and Aurora PostgreSQL and MySQL. This tool sits atop the standard pg and mysql2 gems to accelerate Blue/Green, Global, and failover switchover times. It also introduces native support for AWS Secrets Manager and IAM token-based authentication mechanisms.

• Reduces database switchover and failover latency for RDS and Aurora workloads.
• Supports AWS Secrets Manager and IAM token-based authentication natively.
• Builds on existing community pg and mysql2 drivers for easier adoption.
• Enhances application availability during planned and unplanned maintenance events.

Amazon S3 Tables has increased the default limit from 10 to 100 table buckets per AWS Region per account. This change allows for up to 1 million tables per region, facilitating better isolation for datasets, workloads, or teams. The expanded quota supports granular application of encryption, access policies, and replication settings at the bucket level.

• S3 Tables quota increased from 10 to 100 buckets per region per account.
• Maximum table count per region now scales to 1 million tables.
• Enables distinct bucket isolation for individual teams or workloads.
• Allows bucket-level application of encryption, policies, and replication.
• Quota applies by default to all accounts at no additional cost.

Amazon Redshift introduces the ability to create and refresh materialized views backed by Apache Iceberg tables in S3. These views pre-compute heavy joins and aggregations using standard SQL, with results registered in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. The output is immediately queryable by any Iceberg-compatible engine, including Athena, EMR, Trino, and Snowflake, while Redshift handles incremental refreshes of only changed data.

• Use CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW ... USING ICEBERG to offload expensive pre-computations to S3.
• Results are instantly accessible to Athena, EMR, Trino, and Snowflake via Iceberg compatibility.
• Redshift manages incremental refreshes, recomputing only delta changes for efficiency.
• Governance and discovery are handled through the standard AWS Glue Data Catalog.

AWS Health now includes a version catalog that centralizes lifecycle data for software versions across AWS services. This feature shifts management from reactive to proactive, helping teams mitigate end-of-support risks. It is accessible via the AWS Health Dashboard and the API for supported support tiers.

• Centralizes version lifecycle info across AWS services in one place.
• Enables proactive planning to reduce end-of-support security risks.
• Available in AWS Health Dashboard and via API for automation.
• API access requires Business Support Plus, Enterprise, or Unified Ops.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway now accepts TLS certificates signed by private CAs for MCP, OpenAPI, and HTTP proxy targets. This allows secure connections to private VPC endpoints without deploying an intermediate Application Load Balancer. The service retrieves PEM-encoded CA certificates from S3 or Secrets Manager to establish trust for outbound connections.

• Eliminates need for intermediate ALB when connecting to private VPC endpoints
• Supports private CA trust anchors for MCP, OpenAPI, and HTTP proxy targets
• Fetches CA certificates directly from S3 or AWS Secrets Manager
• Enables native secure connections via Amazon VPC Lattice

AWS Glue Data Catalog now supports table optimization, statistics generation, and crawler discovery for Apache Iceberg Version 3. Users can automatically compact tables using binpack, sort, or z-order strategies to boost query performance while removing expired snapshots and orphan files to cut storage costs. The update also enables NDV statistics for better query planning and supports V3-specific data types like variant, geospatial, and nanosecond timestamps.

• Glue crawlers can now discover and register Iceberg V3 tables in S3.
• Supports V3 data types including variant, geospatial, and nanosecond timestamps.
• Optimize tables via binpack, sort, or z-order to improve query performance.
• Generate NDV statistics to help analytics engines plan queries more efficiently.
• Automate cleanup of expired snapshots and orphan files to reduce storage costs.

Amazon Redshift now allows direct queries against S3 data lake tables hosted in different AWS Regions. The integrated engine leverages enhanced VPC routing to ensure all query traffic remains within the customer's VPC boundaries. This capability eliminates the need to copy or replicate data, enabling global analytics and consolidated reporting while supporting data residency requirements.

• Query S3 tables in other Regions directly without data movement or replication copies
• Traffic stays within your VPC using enhanced routing for better security and control
• Integrated engine runs on both Provisioned and Serverless cluster compute
• Simplifies global analytics and regulatory compliance for data residency needs