AWS News - 2026-08-08

Today, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore introduces new capabilities in AWS GovCloud (US-West). AgentCore is the platform to build, connect, and optimize agents. With these capabilities, teams operating in regulated environments can build context-aware agents and take them from prototype to production faster, with the controls needed to scale across their organization. 

AgentCore memory gives agents short-term memory for immediate conversation context and long-term memory that extracts persistent insights and preferences across sessions. Agents deliver more intelligent, personalized experiences without teams needing to manage complex memory infrastructure.

Policy in AgentCore provides centralized, fine-grained controls for agent-tool interactions that operate outside agent code. Teams author policies in natural language that automatically convert to Cedar, the AWS open-source policy language. Policies attach them to an AgentCore gateway that evaluates each request before allowing or denying tool access. 

The managed harness lets developers declare an agent's model, tools, and instructions through configuration and run it in just a few API calls without writing orchestration code, while AgentCore handles the environment, compute, memory, identity, and observability. 
 
To learn more about AgentCore capabilities, visit the AgentCore product page. For a deeper walkthrough of AgentCore concepts and best practices, see the AgentCore Documentation to get started.

AWS IAM Identity Center now makes it easier to enable multi-Region support when creating a new organization instance. Previously, enabling multi-Region support required multiple steps including creating a customer managed KMS key, configuring key policies, and manually adding Regions. Now, customers creating a new IAM Identity Center instance in supported Regions can enable multi-Region in one click.

When enabling a new organization instance, you can choose from three instance configuration options: single-Region instance, multi-Region instance, or custom instance. The multi-Region instance option automatically creates a customer managed multi-Region KMS key in your account and replicates your instance to an additional Region. This enables resilient AWS account and application access — your workforce can continue to access their AWS accounts even if IAM Identity Center experiences a disruption in the primary Region. The custom instance option lets you configure your Region settings individually, including the ability to use an existing customer managed KMS key from your account.

Instance configuration options are available in 17 enabled-by-default commercial AWS Regions for organization instances of IAM Identity Center. Standard AWS KMS charges apply for the customer managed key created with the multi-Region instance option. IAM Identity Center is provided at no additional cost.

To get started, see the IAM Identity Center User Guide. To learn more about multi-Region support, see Using IAM Identity Center across multiple AWS Regions. To learn more about IAM Identity Center, visit the product detail page.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) IP Address Manager (IPAM) now supports BGP route protection monitoring and delegated Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) management for Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) prefixes. Network administrators can centrally monitor BGP route protection and automate Route Origin Authorization (ROA) management across their organization.

Using BGP route monitoring, you can view RPKI validity status, ROA strength, and route overlap detection for all BYOIP prefixes across accounts and regions from a single dashboard. Administrators can identify prefixes with invalid or missing ROAs, detect route overlaps that may indicate hijacking, and distinguish between strict and permissive ROA configurations. With Delegated RPKI, administrators perform a one-time setup with their Regional Internet Registry (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, or LACNIC), after which IPAM automatically creates ROAs during BYOIP provisioning, renews them before expiration, and manages ROAs for on-premises prefixes. Before this feature, customers had to manually create and renew ROAs at their Regional Internet Registry (RIR), validate ownership through WHOIS or DNS records, and rely on third-party tools to monitor route security.

The feature is available within Amazon VPC IPAM in all commercial AWS Regions, excluding the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, and China (Beijing, operated by Sinnet) and China (Ningxia, operated by NWCD). To get started, please see the BGP route protection documentation. To learn more about IPAM, view the  IPAM documentation . For details on pricing, refer to the IPAM tab on the  Amazon VPC Pricing Page .

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8i and R8i-flex instances are available in the Europe (Milan) region. These 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 R8i and R8i-flex instances offer up to 15% better price-performance, and 2.5x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation Intel-based instances. They deliver 20% higher performance than R7i instances, with even higher gains for specific workloads. They are up to 30% faster for PostgreSQL databases, up to 60% faster for NGINX web applications, and up to 40% faster for AI deep learning recommendation models compared to R7i.

R8i-flex, our first memory-optimized Flex instances, are the easiest way to get price performance benefits for a majority of memory-intensive workloads. They offer the most common sizes, from large to 16xlarge, and are a great first choice for applications that don't fully utilize all compute resources.

R8i instances are a great choice for all memory-intensive workloads, especially for workloads that need the largest instance sizes or continuous high CPU usage. R8i instances offer 13 sizes including 2 bare metal sizes and the new 96xlarge size for the largest applications. R8i instances are SAP-certified and deliver 142,100 aSAPS, the highest among all comparable machines in on-premises and cloud environments, delivering exceptional performance for mission-critical SAP workloads.

To get started, sign in to the AWS Management Console. Customers can purchase these instances via Savings Plans, On-Demand instances, and Spot instances. For more information about the new R8i and R8i-flex instances visit the AWS News blog.