What's New with AWS — January 2026: The Month in Review
AWS opened 2026 by shipping the year's first wave of launches — new Blackwell and Intel Xeon 6 EC2 families, the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, .NET 10 on Lambda, and a batch of container, database, and agentic-AI updates. Here's the themed roundup, with every item linked back to source.
After the firehose of re:Invent 2025, January is usually AWS's chance to catch its breath — but "quieter" here still means a steady stream of new instance families, region expansions, and developer-facing improvements. The headline was the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, alongside two brand-new EC2 GA families (Blackwell-powered G7e and Intel Xeon 6 X8i) and .NET 10 support on Lambda.
Below is a roundup of the month's most notable launches, grouped by theme. Every item links straight to its AWS source.
Regions & Sovereignty
AWS European Sovereign Cloud is now generally available regions
First announced back in 2023, the independent European cloud infrastructure reached general availability for all customers this month — built to meet the most stringent sovereignty requirements of European customers, with a comprehensive set of AWS services.
Compute
Amazon EC2 G7e instances (GA) ec2
Accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs — up to 2.3× better inference performance than G6e, double the GPU memory, and up to 8 GPUs for 768 GB total, enough to run 70B-parameter models at FP8 on a single GPU. Ideal for generative AI inference, spatial computing, and scientific workloads.
Amazon EC2 X8i instances (GA) ec2
Memory-optimized instances on custom Intel Xeon 6 processors with a 3.9 GHz sustained all-core turbo (available only on AWS). SAP-certified, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.
AWS Lambda now supports .NET 10 lambda
Build serverless apps on .NET 10 as both a managed runtime and a container base image, with AWS automatically applying runtime and base-image updates as they become available.
Amazon ECS adds tmpfs mounts on Fargate & Managed Instances ecs
Create memory-backed file systems for Linux containers without writing data to task storage — previously only available on the EC2 launch type.
EC2 M8i, C8i/C8i-flex, R8i/R8i-flex, and I7ie — additional Regions ec2
A batch of current-gen instance families expanded into more AWS Regions this month, widening availability for compute-, general-purpose-, memory-, and storage-optimized workloads.
Containers & Registry
Amazon ECR now supports cross-repository layer sharing ecr
Share common image layers across repositories via blob mounting — faster image pushes by reusing existing layers, and lower storage costs by storing common layers once and referencing them everywhere.
Networking
AWS Client VPN onboarding quickstart vpn
A new quickstart cuts the number of steps required to set up a Client VPN endpoint — a small but welcome reduction in onboarding friction.
Databases, Analytics & Integration
Amazon MQ — HTTP-based authentication for RabbitMQ amazon-mq
Configure HTTP-based auth on RabbitMQ brokers through the associated configuration file, giving you more flexible authentication options.
Amazon MQ — mutual TLS certificate auth for RabbitMQ amazon-mq
RabbitMQ brokers now also support certificate-based authentication with mutual TLS, strengthening broker-level security.
Amazon MWAA supports Apache Airflow 2.11 mwaa
Create Airflow 2.11 environments in Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow — a version that introduces changes to help you prepare for the eventual upgrade to Airflow 3.
Management & Operations
AWS Config adds new resource types config
Discover, assess, audit, and remediate additional resource types across key services including Amazon EC2, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon S3 Tables.
CloudWatch Database Insights expands to four more Regions cloudwatch
On-demand analysis is now available in Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Thailand), and Mexico (Central) — using ML to surface performance bottlenecks and specific remediation advice.
Amazon Corretto January 2026 quarterly updates corretto
Quarterly security and critical patches for the LTS OpenJDK builds — Corretto 25.0.2, 21.0.10, 17.0.18, 11.0.30, and 8u482 are now available.
AI, Agents & Customer Experience
Kiro CLI — new features (v1.24) kiro
Granular controls for web-fetch URLs (allowlists/blocklists to restrict which URLs the agent can access), keyboard shortcuts for custom agents, enhanced diff views, and smoother multi-agent sessions.
Amazon Quick Suite — new AI-agent integrations quick-suite
New integrations added to the AI-agent and built-in actions library, including GitHub, Notion, Canva, Box, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, and Intercom.
Amazon Connect — conditional logic & real-time updates in Step-by-Step Guides connect
Managers can build dynamic guided experiences that adapt to user input — conditional UIs with dropdowns that show/hide fields, change defaults, or adjust required fields — plus automatic data refresh so agents always work with current information.
Carried Over From Late December
The year's first roundup (January 5) recapped a set of launches that actually shipped in the closing weeks of December 2025. Worth a quick mention since many teams were on break when they landed:
The Month in a Paragraph
January 2026 was AWS's post-re:Invent breather, but it still shipped a meaningful opening wave for the year. The headline was the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud — the independent, EU-operated infrastructure first announced in 2023, now live for customers with the strictest data-sovereignty requirements. Around that landmark came fresh silicon in two new GA EC2 families (NVIDIA Blackwell-powered G7e for generative-AI inference and Intel Xeon 6 X8i for memory-heavy and SAP workloads), plus a steady stream of developer quality-of-life wins: .NET 10 on Lambda, ECS tmpfs mounts on Fargate, ECR cross-repository layer sharing, an AWS Client VPN quickstart, and new Kiro CLI controls. Nothing re:Invent-sized — but a solid, practical start to the year that set the stage for a busier February.