January 5 – January 12, 2026

AWS Secrets Manager now supports flexible sorting in the console and ListSecrets API (by name, creation date, last changed, or last accessed), reducing friction in large-scale secret inventories. This is particularly useful for audit preparation, stale-secret detection, and access-pattern reviews in multi-account environments without relying on external inventory scripts.

CloudTrail Lake data can now be imported into CloudWatch by date range, simplifying historical log centralization for investigations and compliance reviews. This lowers the barrier to correlating long-term audit trails with near-real-time metrics and alarms, without additional infrastructure or cost beyond standard CloudWatch ingestion.

Amazon CloudWatch automatically enabled telemetry for six additional core services as part of a late-December rollout. This continues the move toward default-on observability, reducing blind spots in hybrid and multi-account setups and shortening time-to-detection for teams already operating with limited operational headcount.

EC2 Capacity Manager introduced new Spot metrics, including total usage count, interruption count, and interruption rate, aggregated across regions and Availability Zones. This makes Spot reliability quantifiable rather than anecdotal, enabling more precise diversification strategies across instance families, sizes, and placement scores while preserving cost savings. Available at no additional charge in all commercial Regions.

AWS End User Messaging SMS introduced a Generative AI Registration Reviewer (preview) that pre-validates phone number registrations, opt-in language, message samples, and use-case descriptions before carrier submission. This shifts a traditionally manual, error-prone compliance step left, reducing rejection loops and accelerating time-to-production for regulated customer messaging.

AWS accelerated its dual-stack and IPv6 push across multiple services. Amazon Kinesis Video Streams added IPv6 support for WebRTC, enabling end-to-end dual-stack media pipelines without translation layers. Amazon WorkSpaces now supports IPv6 for directories and external endpoints, removing the need for NAT or address translation appliances. Amazon Redshift Serverless reached general availability with dual-stack networking, and AWS Application Migration Service added IPv6 support, easing migrations of IPv6-addressed applications and signaling steady progress toward IPv6-ready enterprise architectures.