What's New with AWS — March 2026: The Month in Review
A themed roundup of every headline launch AWS shipped in March 2026 — Amazon S3's 20th birthday, the general availability of Route 53 Global Resolver, a deep wave of agentic-AI and Bedrock releases, faster Aurora and Lambda serverless, and the return of the AWS AI & ML Scholars program. Every item links back to the original announcement.
After a blockbuster February, March 2026 kept up a steady pace — and opened with a moment worth pausing on: Amazon S3 turned 20. Around that milestone, AWS shipped the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver, a dense run of agentic-AI and Amazon Bedrock releases, meaningful Aurora and AWS Lambda serverless improvements, and closed the month by reopening the AWS AI & ML Scholars program to 100,000 learners.
Below is a roundup of the month's most notable launches, grouped by theme. Every item links straight to its original announcement.
Milestone: Amazon S3 Turns 20
Twenty years of Amazon S3 s3
Amazon S3 launched publicly on March 14, 2006. Two decades on, it stores more than 500 trillion objects, serves over 200 million requests per second across hundreds of exabytes, and has dropped to just over 2 cents per GB — roughly an 85% price reduction since launch.
Account regional namespaces for S3 general purpose buckets s3
Create general purpose buckets in your own account regional namespace by appending your account's unique suffix, so your desired names are always reserved for your account. Enforce adoption org-wide with IAM and SCPs via the new s3:x-amz-bucket-namespace condition key.
Networking & DNS
Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver is now generally available route-53
An internet-reachable anycast DNS resolver that gives authorized clients DNS resolution of public and Route 53 private-hosted-zone domains from any location — not just inside a specific VPC or Region. GA across 30 Regions with IPv4/IPv6 support, DNS query filtering (including DNS tunneling, DGA, and now Dictionary DGA threats), and centralized query logging.
AI, Agents & Bedrock
Policy in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (GA) agentcore
Centralized, fine-grained controls for agent-tool interactions that operate outside your agent code. Security and compliance teams define tool access and input-validation rules in natural language that automatically converts to Cedar, the AWS open-source policy language.
AgentCore Runtime adds stateful MCP server support agentcore
Build MCP servers that use elicitation, sampling, and progress notifications. Each user session runs in a dedicated microVM with isolated resources and maintains context across interactions via an Mcp-Session-Id header.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super on Amazon Bedrock bedrock
A high-performance model optimized for text generation, complex reasoning, summarization, and code — now invokable alongside other foundation models through the unified Bedrock API, with no infrastructure to manage.
Nova Forge SDK nova
A streamlined way to fine-tune and customize Amazon Nova models for enterprise use cases, then deploy them directly within Amazon Bedrock — handling the heavy lifting of model customization so you focus on business logic.
OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail lightsail
Deploy a private AI assistant on your own cloud infrastructure with sandboxed agent sessions, one-click HTTPS, and device-pairing auth. Amazon Bedrock is the default model provider, with connectors for Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord.
Agent Plugin for AWS Serverless serverless
Build, deploy, troubleshoot, and manage serverless apps using AI coding assistants like Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor. The plugin packages skills, sub-agents, and MCP servers into one modular unit that auto-loads guidance for production-ready serverless apps.
SageMaker Studio supports Kiro and Cursor as remote IDEs sagemaker
Remotely connect from Kiro and Cursor to SageMaker Studio — keep your existing setup, spec-driven development, and conversational coding while tapping Studio's scalable compute.
Kiro power for Lambda durable functions lambda
AI agent-assisted development for resilient, long-running multi-step apps and AI workflows — dynamically loading guidance on replay models, step/wait operations, concurrency, error handling, and deployment best practices.
Compute & Serverless
AWS Lambda — up to 32 GB memory and 16 vCPUs on Managed Instances lambda
Run compute-intensive workloads like data processing, media transcoding, and scientific simulations without managing infrastructure — and tune the memory-to-vCPU ratio (2:1, 4:1, or 8:1) to fit the workload.
Lambda raises the file-descriptor limit to 4,096 lambda
A 4× increase (from 1,024) for functions on Lambda Managed Instances — enabling high-concurrency web services and file-heavy data pipelines without hitting descriptor limits.
AWS Lambda now exposes Availability Zone metadata lambda
Identify which AZ your function is running in for better observability, more informed architecture choices, and simpler troubleshooting of latency-sensitive, multi-AZ workloads.
Amazon EKS — 99.99% SLA and new 8XL scaling tier eks
A 99.99% SLA for clusters on Provisioned Control Plane (up from 99.95%), plus an 8XL tier that doubles API-server request capacity over 4XL — ideal for AI/ML training, HPC, and large-scale data processing.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk — AI-powered environment analysis beanstalk
When environment health degrades, Beanstalk can collect recent events, instance health, and logs, send them to Amazon Bedrock, and return step-by-step troubleshooting recommendations tailored to the current state.
Databases & Analytics
Aurora PostgreSQL serverless creation in seconds aurora
New express configuration ships preconfigured defaults so you can launch and connect to an Aurora PostgreSQL serverless database in just two clicks — with settings adjustable during or after creation.
Aurora PostgreSQL now on the AWS Free Tier aurora
New AWS customers get $100 in credits at sign-up and can earn another $100 by using services like Amazon RDS — a much lower barrier to trying Aurora.
Aurora DSQL connector for Ruby dsql
The Ruby connector (pg gem) simplifies auth by automatically generating a token per connection — removing traditional password risk while staying fully compatible with existing pg gem features.
Amazon Redshift — up to 7× faster first-run queries redshift
Queries run for the first time (without cached results) now execute significantly faster, cutting wait times for interactive dashboards and accelerating ETL — especially for high-variability workloads where cache hits are rare.
Amazon Redshift — reusable COPY templates redshift
Store and reuse frequently used COPY parameters for consistent data ingestion, less repetitive effort, and simpler maintenance — available in all Regions including GovCloud (US).
Industry & Customer Experience
Amazon Connect Health (GA) connect
Agentic AI built for healthcare, GA with five purpose-built agents: patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding. All features are HIPAA-eligible and deployable within existing clinical workflows in days.
Security, Identity & Management
VPC Encryption Controls pricing announced vpc
Starting March 1, VPC Encryption Controls moved from free preview to a paid feature. Audit and enforce encryption-in-transit for all traffic within and across VPCs in a Region — monitor mode detects unencrypted traffic, enforce mode prevents it.
AWS Builder ID — Sign in with GitHub and Amazon builder-id
Two new social login options join Google and Apple, letting developers reach Builder Center, Training and Certification, and Kiro with existing GitHub or Amazon credentials.
Simplified IAM role creation inside service workflows iam
Create and configure IAM roles directly within service workflows through a new in-console panel — no switching to the IAM console. Supports EC2, Lambda, EKS, ECS, Glue, CloudFormation, and more.
Visual customization for the AWS Management Console console
Set an account color and control which Regions and services you see. Hiding unused Regions and services reduces cognitive load and scrolling — handy for telling accounts apart and working faster.
Database Savings Plans add OpenSearch Service and Neptune Analytics savings-plans
Save up to 35% on eligible serverless and provisioned usage with a one-year commitment that applies automatically regardless of engine, instance family, size, or Region.
Developer Tools, Media & Operations
Amazon Corretto 26 (GA) corretto
The latest LTS release of the no-cost, production-ready OpenJDK distribution — newest Java language features, performance improvements, and security patches, backed by long-term AWS support across Linux, Windows, macOS, and Docker.
CloudWatch Logs — HTTP-based log ingestion cloudwatch
Send logs to CloudWatch Logs over a standard HTTP protocol — no custom agents or extra SDK integrations required — lowering the barrier to centralized log management.
Amazon Polly — Bidirectional Streaming API polly
Built for conversational AI: instead of request-response, you can start synthesizing audio before the full text is available — ideal for incrementally generated LLM responses.
Amazon GameLift Servers — DDoS Protection gamelift
Protect session-based multiplayer games with a co-located relay network that authenticates client traffic via access tokens and enforces per-player traffic limits — at no additional cost to GameLift Servers customers.
Amazon WorkSpaces supports Windows Server 2025 workspaces
New Personal and Core bundles on Windows Server 2025 with TPM 2.0, UEFI Secure Boot, Secured-core server, Credential Guard, HVCI, and DNS-over-HTTPS. Existing 2016/2019/2022 bundles remain available.
Learning & Community
2026 AWS AI & ML Scholars program training
Free AI education for up to 100,000 learners worldwide: a Challenge phase teaching foundational generative-AI skills, then a fully funded three-month Udacity Nanodegree for the top 4,500. Open to anyone 18+ with no prior AI/ML experience; applications close June 24, 2026.
Kiro for students kiro
Kiro's AI-powered, spec-driven development tools are now available to students at no cost — hands-on experience building with AI from day one.
The Month in a Paragraph
March 2026 opened on a milestone: Amazon S3 turned 20, having grown from a simple object store in 2006 into infrastructure holding 500+ trillion objects at roughly an 85% lower price per gigabyte. The month's marquee technical launch was the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Global Resolver, bringing anycast DNS resolution and query filtering to authorized clients anywhere. Beyond that, the theme was agentic AI maturing — AgentCore Policy and stateful MCP going GA, Nemotron 3 Super and the Nova Forge SDK landing in Bedrock, and an Agent Plugin for Serverless plus Kiro/Cursor support in SageMaker Studio wiring AI assistants deeper into the build loop. Serverless got faster and bigger (Aurora PostgreSQL creation in seconds and on the Free Tier, larger Lambda Managed Instances, a 99.99% EKS SLA), and AWS closed the month by reopening the AWS AI & ML Scholars program to 100,000 learners. A milestone month with a clear through-line: making agents, and the people who build them, first-class citizens on AWS.