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CloudFormation Hooks adds Managed Controls and Hook Activity Summary

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AWS CloudFormation Hooks now supports managed proactive controls, enabling customers to validate resource configurations against AWS best practices without writing custom Hooks logic. Customers can select controls from the AWS Control Tower Controls Catalog and apply them during CloudFormation operations. When using CloudFormation, customers can configure these controls to run in warn mode, allowing teams to test controls without blocking deployments and giving them the flexibility to evaluate control behavior before enforcing policies in production. This significantly reduces setup time, eliminates manual errors, and ensures comprehensive governance coverage across your infrastructure.

AWS also introduced a new Hooks Invocation Summary page in the CloudFormation console. This centralized view provides a complete historical record of Hooks activity, showing which controls were invoked, their execution details, and outcomes such as pass, warn, or fail. This simplifies compliance reporting issues faster.

With this launch, customers can now leverage AWS-managed controls as part of their provisioning workflows, eliminating the overhead of writing and maintaining custom logic. These controls are curated by AWS and aligned with industry best practices, helping teams enforce consistent policies across all environments. The new summary page delivers essential visibility into Hook invocation history, enabling faster issue resolution and streamlined compliance reporting.

The Hook invocation summary page is available in all commercial and GovCloud (US) regions, and control selection is available in all in all commercials regions. To learn more, visit the AWS CloudFormation Proactive Control Hooks and AWS CloudFormation Hooks View Invocations documentations.

ECS Exec is now available in the AWS Management Console

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The Amazon ECS console now supports ECS Exec, enabling you to open secure, interactive shell access directly from the AWS Management Console to any running container.

ECS customers often need to access running containers to debug applications and examine running processes. ECS Exec provides easy and secure access to running containers without requiring inbound ports or SSH key management. Previously, ECS Exec was only accessible through the AWS API, CLI, or SDKs, requiring customers to switch interfaces when troubleshooting in the console. With this new feature, customers can now connect to running containers directly from the AWS Management Console, streamlining troubleshooting workflows.

To get started, you can turn on ECS Exec directly in the console when creating or updating services and standalone tasks. Additional settings like encryption and logging can also be configured at the cluster level through the console. Once enabled, simply navigate to a task details page, select a container, and click “Connect” to open an interactive session through CloudShell. The console also displays the underlying AWS CLI command, which you can customize or copy to use in your local terminal.

ECS Exec console support is now available in all AWS commercial regions. To learn more, visit the ECS developer guide .

PostgreSQL 18 Beta RC1 is now available in Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment

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Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 18 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to evaluate the pre-release of PostgreSQL 18 on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. You can deploy PostgreSQL 18 RC1 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment that has the benefits of a fully managed database.

PostgreSQL 18 includes “skip scan” support for multicolumn B-tree indexes and improves WHERE clause handling for OR and IN conditions. It introduces parallel GIN (Generalized Inverted) Index builds and updates join operations. Observability improvements show buffer usage counts and index lookups during query execution, along with per-connection I/O utilization metric. Please refer the RDS PostgreSQL release documentation for more details.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. Amazon RDS database snapshots that are created in the preview environment can only be used to create or restore database instances within the preview environment. You can use the PostgreSQL dump and load functionality to import or export your databases from the preview environment.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced as per the pricing in the US East (Ohio) Region.

AWS Clean Rooms supports configurable compute size for PySpark jobs

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AWS Clean Rooms now supports configurable compute size for PySpark, offering customers the flexibility to customize and allocate resources to run PySpark jobs based on their performance, scale, and cost requirements. With this launch, customers can specify the instance type and cluster size at job runtime for each analysis that uses PySpark, the Python API for Apache Spark . For example, customers can use large instance configurations to achieve the performance needed for their complex data sets and analyses, or smaller instances to optimize costs.

AWS Clean Rooms helps companies and their partners easily analyze and collaborate on their collective datasets without revealing or copying one another’s underlying data. For more information about the AWS Regions where AWS Clean Rooms is available, see the AWS Regions table. To learn more about collaborating with AWS Clean Rooms, visit AWS Clean Rooms .

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