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AWS for the Real World

11 AWS releases from the last 12 months (non-AI edition)

Published 20 days ago • 2 min read
AWS FOR THE REAL WORLD
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Reading time: 12 minutes
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Main Learning: The 11 most impactful AWS releases from the past 12 months that have nothing to do with AI.
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Hey Reader 👋

Every re:Invent recap, every AWS blog, every newsletter from the past year has been dominated by one topic. You know which one.

But while everyone was writing about agents and foundation models, the core infrastructure layer kept moving. Quiet releases. No keynote fanfare. Things that actually affect your architecture, your bills, and your day-to-day work.

In this issue, we went through the past 12 months and picked the releases that matter most to developers; no AI announcements included!

  • 11 releases
  • All production-relevant
  • Ordered by impact
  • Bonus: a quick hits section with small wins.
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📚 This Week's Deep Dive

While everyone was covering AI, AWS quietly shipped 11 infrastructure releases worth knowing about. Here are the highlights — the full breakdown with details, gotchas, and cost numbers is in the article.

  • Lambda Durable Functions — multi-step workflows with checkpointing, directly in Lambda. No Step Functions needed.
  • ECS Express Mode — container image in, HTTPS endpoint out. Canary deploys included. Built on plain ECS so you're never locked in.
  • Database Savings Plans — one commitment across RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and more. Up to 35% off.
  • CloudFront Flat-Rate Plans — fixed monthly price, no overages, even during DDoS. Plans from $0 to $1,000/month.
  • CloudWatch Log Centralization — aggregate logs across all accounts and regions natively. First copy is free.
  • CloudFormation Stack Refactoring — finally move resources between stacks without deleting them.
  • EventBridge Cross-Account Delivery — send events directly to another account's SQS, Lambda, or SNS. One hop instead of two.
  • S3 Vectors — native vector storage at up to 90% less than dedicated vector databases.
  • Free Tier Overhaul — $200 in credits, 6-month free plan. There's a gotcha if you're using AWS Organizations.
  • SQS Fair Queues — one noisy tenant can no longer starve the rest of the queue.
  • Lambda SnapStart for Python & .NET — cold start elimination, no longer Java-only.

Plus six quick hits: Lambda streaming at 200MB, SQS messages up to 1MB, ALB JWT verification, API Gateway Developer Portal, S3 ABAC, and the NAT Gateway killer hiding in Lambda's networking settings.

That's it for this issue.

Eleven releases, most of them from 2025, all of them production-ready and available right now.
The AI wave isn't going anywhere, but neither is the infra underneath it 👀
​

See you soon!
​Sandro & Tobi

AWS for the Real World

by Tobi & Sandro

We teach AWS for the real world - not for certifications. Join more than 10,500 developers learning how to build real-world applications on AWS.

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