AWS Podcast #736: AWS News - New Bedrock APIs, New EC2 Instance Types, and More

Release Date: September 8, 2025
Host: Simon Elisha

Overview

This episode of the AWS Podcast is a fast-paced roundup of the latest AWS service updates, feature launches, and enhancements across AI, compute, storage, security, database, developer tools, and more. Host Simon Elisha presents new capabilities for developers, IT pros, and data teams—from the release of Amazon Bedrock APIs and new generative AI features to major advances in storage, connectivity, application integration, and beyond.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

Data & Analytics

• Amazon EMR on EC2: Fine-Grained Access and Performance Enhancements
  • Native support for Apache Spark fine-grained access control via AWS Lake Formation and AWS Glue Data Catalog views.
  • S3A is now the default connector, improving performance for Spark, Hadoop, and Hive workloads.

    "This enhances the open source S3A architecture with AWS specific optimizations to help organizations process large scale data more efficiently." (01:15)

• Amazon OpenSearch Serverless
  • Attribute-based access control (ABAC) now available for data plane APIs.
• AWS Clean Rooms
  • Error message configurations for PySpark analytics, enabling more secure and customizable logging.
• Amazon SageMaker Lakehouse Architecture
  • Tag-based access control for federated catalogs simplifies permissions and fosters cross-account data sharing.
• Amazon QuickSight
  • Now connects directly to Google Sheets and increases limits on calculated fields in analyses and datasets.

Application Integration

• AWS End User Messaging
  • US toll-free SMS numbers can now send internationally—over 150 countries supported.
• Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
  • Direct integration with PagerDuty for alerting, removing the need for custom Lambda connectors.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

• Amazon Bedrock
  • Count Tokens API: Predict model inference costs by surfacing input token counts pre-inference (supports Claude models, more coming).

    "The Count Tokens API allows you to more accurately project your costs and gives you better transparency and control over your AI model usage." (13:44)

  • Access to OpenAI open-weight models: Use GPT OSS120B and GPT OSS20B without manual activation.
  • Batch Inference: Supports Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI GPT OSS models. Batch jobs now run at half the on-demand inference pricing.
• Amazon Polly
  • Launches more synthetic generative voices in multiple languages: English, French, Polish, and Dutch.
• Amazon SageMaker
  • Account-Agnostic Reusable Project Profiles: Define and use project setups across different accounts and regions.
  • HyperPod & Unified Studio Upgrades:
    • EBS CSI driver support for persistent storage in HyperPod.
    • S3 file sharing in Unified Studio (beyond Git).
    • Customer managed KMS keys for EBS volumes in HyperPod.
• Amazon Q Developer
  • Now supports MCP Admin control for fine-grained external resource management.
• Bedrock Data Automation (BDA)
  • Supports document processing and custom prompts in five new languages (Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, German).

Health AI and Containerization

• AWS Healthomics
  • Task-level timeout controls for Nextflow workloads.
  • Supports third-party container registries in private workloads—translates URIs automatically for seamless container access.

Business Applications

• Amazon Connect Updates
  • Generative TTS Voices: "Deliver natural human-like and expressive conversations" in five major languages.
  • Embeddable Communications Widget: For callbacks and emails directly in web applications.
  • Multiuser Web, In-App, and Video Calling: Supports joint sessions (family meetings, financial planning, etc.).
  • Recurring Activities in Agent Schedules: "You can now schedule activities like a daily standup at 8am or a team meeting every Monday at 9." (34:50)
• AWS B2B Data Interchange
  • Custom validation rules for X12 EDI documents to align with partner agreements.

Compute and Rendering

• AWS Batch

  • Default instance family type options: x86_64 or arm64.

• AWS Deadline Cloud

  • Now supports Cinema 4D and Redshift rendering on Linux managed fleets.

• AWS App Runner

  • Expanded support for IPv6.

• Amazon EKS and EC2 Mac Dedicated Hosts

  • Namespace config for add-ons, host maintenance automation, and on-demand insights refresh.

• New EC2 Instance Launches

  • M8i and M8i Flex: Highest-performing general-purpose, Intel Xeon 6-based.
  • R8i and R8i Flex: New memory-optimized instance types.
  • OpenSearch on I8G instances:

    "Graviton 4 processors... up to 65% better real time storage performance per terabyte, whilst up to 50% lower storage IO latency." (05:25)

Databases

• RDS and Aurora Updates
  • RDS for MariaDB: Now supports MariaDB 11.8 with vector support.
  • RDS for SQL Server: Kerberos authentication via self-managed AD.
  • Aurora MySQL 3.10: Now an LTS version.
  • RDS for PostgreSQL: Delayed read replicas—create time buffer to mitigate risk of human error.

    "This feature creates a time buffer that helps protect against data loss from human errors like accidental table drops or unintended data modifications." (47:38)

  • RDS for Oracle: Enhanced SSL support and redo transport compression.
  • RDS for DB2: Now supports read replicas (up to three).
• Amazon Neptune
  • Stop/start analytics to save costs for periodic workloads.
  • Bring Your Own Knowledge Graph to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for enhanced LLM results.

IoT and Quantum Tech

• AWS IoT Core

  • Bring-your-own customer managed KMS keys.

• IoT ExpressLink

  • Spec v1.3 with expanded Bluetooth LE, enabling new device-to-device connectivity features.

• Amazon Braket Quantum

  • Local device emulator for verbatim circuits simulates hardware noise for algorithm validation.

Management, Security & Governance

• VPC IPAM
  • In-console CloudWatch alarm management.
• CloudWatch
  • 15 new regions for natural language log query summarization and generation.
• AWS Console
  • Account Color feature: Assign color labels for easier account identification.
• Billing & Cost Management
  • Customizable dashboards now consolidate spending, cost explorer, and coverage/utilization visualizations.
• IAM and Networking
  • New VPC endpoint condition keys for perimeter controls.
  • Traffic mirroring now supports Nitro v4 instances.

Security, Identity & Compliance

• AWS Network Firewall
  • New metric to monitor all received bytes per firewall.
• AWS Security Incident Response
  • Native ITSM integration (Jira, ServiceNow) for faster, synchronized incident handling.
  • Attains HITRUST certification.
• Amazon Verified Permissions
  • Supports Cedar 4.5 with the IS operator for more flexible, type-safe authorization.

Storage

• Amazon EBS and S3
  • EBS: Snapshot copy support for AWS Local Zones.
  • S3:
    • Improved CDK and CloudFormation support for S3 tables.
    • New dataset integrity verification across billions of S3 objects using batch operations.

      "You can efficiently verify billions of objects and automatically generate integrity reports to prove that your datasets remain intact over time using S3 batch operations." (58:35)

    • S3 Express One Zone: Now supports resilience testing.
• Other
  • S3 batch compute checksum now available for data validation without restoring or downloading objects.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On testing new instance types:

  "I always recommend that when a new instance type is supported you run some tests, check your configuration, and in most cases you’re going to want to swap." (06:40)

• On batch and real-time workflows:

  "Some things work better in batch and if you’ve got batch stuff, this is the way to do it." (26:20)

• On S3 data integrity:

  "You can efficiently verify billions of objects and automatically generate integrity reports to prove that your datasets remain intact over time using S3 batch operations." (58:35)

• On delayed read replicas for PostgreSQL:

  "This feature creates a time buffer that helps protect against data loss from human errors like accidental table drops or unintended data modifications. Not that you would ever do such a thing, but it's nice to know it's there." (47:38)

Timestamps of Important Segments

• 00:33 – 07:53: Data & Analytics (EMR, OpenSearch, Clean Rooms, SageMaker, QuickSight)
• 08:00 – 14:22: Application Integration & Messaging (Prometheus, End User Messaging, AI/ML Bedrock, Polly)
• 14:30 – 24:05: SageMaker, BDA, Healthomics, Quantum, Developer & Storage Tools
• 24:12 – 36:10: Business Apps, Compute, Rendering, EKS, App Runner, EC2/New Instances
• 36:30 – 53:12: Databases (RDS, Aurora, Neptune), Gaming, IoT, Quantum
• 53:25 – 55:55: Management, Security, IAM, Networking, Cost Management & Console
• 56:01 – 59:04: Storage (EBS, S3, Batch Operations, Resilience)
• 59:05 – End: Closing remarks (non-content)

Closing Note

This episode is densely packed with AWS product enhancements and industry-focused tools, all covered succinctly and with actionable insights for architects, devs, and IT leaders. If you’re designing on AWS, these updates expand your toolkit, offer greater control, and can directly impact performance, cost, and ease of management.

“Lots of cool and interesting updates there. I hope there was something for you.” — Simon Elisha (59:02)

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