Space X had Q2 revenues of  $7.8 billion up from $4.1 billion in Q2 2025 in its first quarterly results announcement since its IPO. Losses narrowed to $143 million from […]

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Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now supports Bring Your Own Media (BYOM) in 10 additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Taipei, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Malaysia, Melbourne, New Zealand, Thailand), Europe (Milan, Spain), and Mexico (Central).

With BYOM, you can adopt Amazon RDS as a managed database service and reuse your existing Microsoft SQL Server licenses with active Software Assurance, through Microsoft’s License Mobility program. BYOM is supported on SQL Server 2019, 2022, and 2025. Amazon RDS for SQL Server BYOM is integrated with AWS License Manager so you can track license usage across your AWS environment for compliance.

To learn more, see Bring Your Own Media (BYOM) for RDS for SQL Server. For pricing and regional availability, see Amazon RDS for SQL Server Pricing .

AWS announces the general availability of Amazon EC2 Storage Optimized I8g instances in AWS Europe (Paris) and Asia Pacific (Jakarta) regions. I8g instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and offer the best compute performance in Amazon EC2 for storage-intensive workloads. I8g instances use the third generation AWS Nitro SSDs, local NVMe storage that deliver up to 65% better real-time storage performance per TB while offering up to 50% lower storage I/O latency and up to 60% lower storage I/O latency variability compared to I4g instances. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System , which offloads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software enhancing the performance and security for your workloads.

Amazon EC2 I8g instances are designed for I/O intensive workloads that require rapid data access and real-time latency from storage. These instances excel at handling transactional, real-time, distributed databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Hbase and NoSQL solutions like Aerospike, MongoDB, ClickHouse, and Apache Druid. They’re also optimized for real-time analytics platforms such as Apache Spark, data lakehouse and AI LLM pre-processing for training. I8g instances are available in eleven different sizes including two metal sizes, 1.5 TiB of memory, and 45 TB local instance storage. They deliver up to 100 Gbps of network performance bandwidth, and 60 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

To learn more, visit Amazon EC2 I8g instances. To begin your Graviton journey, visit the Level up your compute with AWS Graviton page . To get started, see AWS Management Console , AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) , and AWS SDKs .

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now supports publishing SQL Server Audit logs to CloudWatch. SQL Server Audit is a native SQL Server feature that allows tracking and logging events that occur on the Database Engine. On Amazon RDS, you can create audits and audit specifications in the same way that you create them for on-premises SQL Server database servers.

Now you can publish the audit logs to S3, CloudWatch, or both. If you enable both S3 and CloudWatch options, the audit log publication will be marked as “completed” only after the audit log files are uploaded to both S3 and CloudWatch. Once the audit logs are in CloudWatch, you can perform real-time analysis of the log data. If you enable retention, RDS keeps your audit logs on your DB instance for the configured period of time.

For more information, see SQL Server Audit (database engine) in the SQL Server documentation. For detailed configuration instructions, see the Amazon RDS for SQL Server User Guide . This feature is available in all AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where Amazon RDS for SQL Server is available.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server Developer Edition is now available in 13 additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Taipei, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Malaysia, Melbourne, New Zealand, Thailand), Canada West (Calgary), Europe (Milan, Spain), Israel (Tel Aviv), and Mexico (Central).

SQL Server Developer Edition includes all the functionality of Enterprise Edition and is free of license charges for use as a development and test system. With this expansion, you can build and test applications in more regions closer to your data and end users, reducing latency and simplifying your development workflows.

For more information about these features and region availability, see Working with SQL Server Developer Edition on RDS for SQL Server . For pricing details, see Amazon RDS for SQL Server Pricing . 

Amazon S3 Vectors is now available in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) Region. Amazon S3 Vectors is purpose-built vector storage for AI agents, inference, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and semantic search at billion-vector scale. S3 Vectors is designed to provide the same elasticity, durability, and availability as Amazon S3, with a dedicated set of APIs that let you store, access, and query vectors without provisioning any infrastructure.

For a full list of AWS Regions where Amazon S3 Vectors is available, see AWS Regions and endpoints . To learn more, visit the product and documentation pages.

Amazon Connect Customer now lets you generate capacity plans at the interval level (15-minute or 30-minute intervals), giving workforce planners visibility into more granular staffing requirements across Voice, Chat, Task, and Email channels. Interval-level plans capture how demand shifts throughout the day — such as a lunchtime surge in chat contacts or an end-of-day change in call volume — so you can align agent capacity with demand as it changes and staff precisely for each part of the day. You can also provide shrinkage assumptions and available headcount at the interval level for more accurate plans. Together, these capabilities improve planning accuracy and help you reduce over- and under-staffing, improving service levels and operational efficiency.

This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect Customer agent scheduling is available. To learn more about Amazon Connect Customer agent scheduling, click here .

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8g instances are available in AWS Europe (Paris), AWS Africa (Cape Town), AWS Israel (Tel Aviv), and AWS Canada West (Calgary) regions. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 30% better performance compared to AWS Graviton3-based instances. Amazon EC2 C8g instances are built for compute-intensive workloads, such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based machine learning (ML) inference, and ad serving. These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System , which offloads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software to enhance the performance and security of your workloads.

AWS Graviton4-based Amazon EC2 instances deliver the best performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2. These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs and memory compared to Graviton3-based Amazon C7g 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. C8g instances are available in 12 different instance sizes, including two bare metal sizes. They offer up to 50 Gbps enhanced networking bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

To learn more, see Amazon EC2 C8g Instances . To get started, see the AWS Management Console .

AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Network Load Balancer (NLB) now support new TLS-based security policies that comply with RFC 9151 TLS server requirements for Commercial National Security Algorithm (CNSA) 1.0 suite requirements. These policies implement the cryptographic requirements defined by the US National Security Agency (NSA) for secure communications using TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 protocols.

Customers who are required to meet CNSA 1.0 TLS security requirements can now use ALB and NLB with RFC 9151 compliant security policies. Broader interoperability policies are also supported, allowing you to implement CNSA by default while maintaining compatibility with non-CNSA clients during their transition to RFC 9151 compliance, minimizing service disruption.

This feature is available for ALB and NLB in all AWS Commercial Regions, the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, and the China region at no additional cost. To use this capability, update your existing ALB HTTPS listeners or NLB TLS listeners to a RFC 9151 compliant security policy, or select a compliant policy when creating new listeners through the AWS Management Console, CLI, API, or SDK.

To learn more, visit the ALB User Guide and NLB User Guide documentation. Get started with Elastic Load Balancing .

Amazon EMR on EC2 now supports interactive Apache Spark sessions with Spark Connect. Data engineers and data scientists can develop and debug Apache Spark applications interactively from managed notebooks in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio and their own IDEs, such as Jupyter and Visual Studio Code, with each session running on dedicated EMR on EC2 clusters. You can also monitor and debug active and completed sessions in the EMR console.

 

An interactive session provides a persistent Spark context that spans across cells and scripts, letting you blend local Python code execution with remote Spark operations. Spark Connect’s client-server architecture decouples your application client from the Spark driver and allows you to maintain your preferred development environment and tooling while Spark infrastructure runs on the cluster. This architecture supports workflows including ad hoc data exploration, iterative step-by-step debugging, and incremental PySpark job development before deploying to production. For observability, you get real-time session monitoring via the Spark UI, history tracking through the Spark History Server, and session management from the EMR console or API/CLI/SDK.

 

Interactive Sessions is available on Amazon EMR on EC2 with AWS runtime for Apache Spark (emr-spark-8.0) and later, in all AWS Regions where Amazon EMR is available, except the AWS GovCloud Regions and the China Regions. The Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio experience is available in supported regions . To get started, visit the Interactive sessions with Spark Connect guide or the Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio Getting Started guide .