AWS News - 2026-05-13

Amazon Redshift announces the general availability of RG instances, a new generation of provisioned cluster nodes powered by AWS Graviton processors that deliver better performance, running data warehouse and data lake workloads up to 2.4x as fast as previous generation RA3 instances, at 30% lower price per vCPU. RG instances include Redshift's custom-built vectorized data lake query engine that processes Apache Iceberg and Parquet data on your cluster nodes — enabling you to run SQL analytics across your data warehouse and data lake using a single engine. This eliminates the need for Redshift Spectrum's separate scanning fleet and its associated per-terabyte charges.

Whether you're running structured data warehouse workloads on Redshift Managed Storage or querying open-format data lake tables in Amazon S3, RG instances deliver significant performance improvements — up to 2.2x as fast as RA3 instances for data warehouse workloads, up to 2.4x as fast for Apache Iceberg queries, and up to 1.5x as fast for Parquet workloads. The natively built data lake engine features a purpose-built I/O subsystem with smart prefetch, NVMe caching, vectorized Parquet scans, and advanced file and partition-level pruning. Just-in-Time (JIT) Analyze delivers consistently fast queries without manual tuning — automatically collecting and updating table statistics as your data and workload patterns evolve. Intelligent NVMe caching keeps frequently accessed datasets close to compute, reducing round-trips to your data lake for faster response times on repeated queries. RG instances are available at launch in two instance sizes — rg.xlarge and rg.4xlarge. Existing RA3 clusters can migrate using Snapshot & Restore, Elastic Resize, or Classic Resize. RG instances are available with flexible pricing options, including On-Demand, and 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances with No Upfront payment. For pricing details, visit the Amazon Redshift pricing page.

Amazon Redshift RG instances are now available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Milan), Europe (Spain), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Taiwan), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), and Middle East (UAE).

To get started, refer to the following resources:

• Amazon Redshift RG Instance Documentation
• RA3 to RG Upgrade Guide
• Amazon Redshift Pricing

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) zonal shift and zonal autoshift when using the open source Karpenter project for compute provisioning. ARC helps you manage and coordinate recovery for your applications across AWS Regions and Availability Zones (AZs). With this launch, you can better maintain Kubernetes application availability by automating the process of shifting in-cluster network traffic away from an impaired AZ.

Customers increasingly deploy highly available applications in Amazon EKS across multiple AZs to eliminate a single point of failure. With ARC zonal shift, you can temporarily mitigate an AZ impairment by redirecting in-cluster network traffic away from the impacted AZ. For a fully automated experience, authorize AWS to manage this on your behalf using ARC zonal autoshift, which includes practice runs to verify your cluster functions as expected with one less AZ. When a zonal shift is activated for your EKS cluster, Karpenter stops provisioning new capacity in the impaired AZ, halts voluntary disruptions such as consolidation and drift for nodes in that AZ, and prevents voluntary disruptions in healthy zones if they depend on scheduling pods to the impaired zone. Pods with strict scheduling requirements such as volume affinities that require the impaired zone will not trigger launch attempts. When the zonal shift expires or is canceled, Karpenter resumes normal operations.

This Karpenter feature works with both manual zonal shifts and zonal autoshifts. No custom ARC resources are required as Karpenter integrates directly with the existing EKS cluster ARC resource. To enable zonal shift support, set the ENABLE_ZONAL_SHIFT setting in your Karpenter settings. To learn more, visit the Karpenter documentation and the ARC zonal shift documentation.

AWS Lambda now supports scheduled scaling for functions running on Lambda Managed Instances, using Amazon EventBridge Scheduler. This capability allows you to define one-time or recurring schedules that proactively adjust your function's capacity limits ahead of expected traffic, to meet your performance targets during peak periods and avoid costs during idle periods.

Lambda Managed Instances lets you run Lambda functions on managed Amazon EC2 instances with built-in routing, load balancing, and autoscaling. Capacity scales between your configured minimum and maximum execution environment limits based on traffic. Previously, customers with predictable traffic patterns, such as business-hours applications or marketing events, were required to manually adjust capacity limits ahead of known demand changes or build custom automation to manage scaling on a schedule. With scheduled scaling, you can now define schedules that proactively adjust your function’s capacity limits ahead of expected traffic. For example, you can schedule capacity limits to increase before business hours so execution environments are ready when the first requests arrive. You can also define a schedule that scales capacity to zero during idle periods (so you only pay when the function is actively serving traffic), and schedule it to scale back up before traffic returns.

Scheduled scaling for functions running on Lambda Managed Instances is available in all AWS Regions where Lambda Managed Instances is supported. You can create schedules using the Amazon EventBridge Scheduler console, AWS CLI, AWS SDK, AWS CDK, or AWS CloudFormation. To learn more, visit the AWS Lambda Managed Instances documentation, Amazon EventBridge Scheduler documentation, AWS Lambda pricing, and Amazon EventBridge pricing.

Amazon RDS for Oracle now offers M8i and R8i instances with Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) with the License Included (LI). M8i and R8i instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The new instances offer up to 15% better price-performance, and 2.5x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation Intel-based instances.

With RDS for Oracle SE2 LI, customers don’t have to separately purchase Oracle license and support. Amazon RDS for Oracle SE2 LI offers subscription based pay-per-use pricing inclusive of software license, support, compute resources, and a managed database service. To use RDS for Oracle SE2 LI, customers can create database instances from the AWS Management Console or using the AWS CLI. and specify the LI option. For more details about how you can lower cost and simplify operations of running Oracle databases, refer to the AWS blog Rethink Oracle Standard Edition Two on Amazon RDS for Oracle.

Configuration details for available instance types can be found on the Amazon RDS for Oracle Instance Types page. Review the AWS blog Rethink Oracle Standard Edition Two on Amazon RDS for Oracle to explore how you can lower cost and simplify operations by using Amazon RDS Oracle SE2 License Included instances for your Oracle databases.

For pricing and AWS Region availability, see Amazon RDS for Oracle Pricing.