AWS News - 2026-08-22

AWS Glue 6.0 is now generally available, delivering a 30% price reduction and introducing full support for Apache Iceberg v3, newer versions of Apache Hudi and Delta Lake, and new capabilities to improve developer productivity. AWS Glue 6.0 also upgrades runtime to Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.13, and Scala 2.13.

With Apache Iceberg v3, AWS Glue 6.0 adds the VARIANT data type with automatic shredding for faster reads on semi-structured data, deletion vectors for high-performance row-level updates, geometry and geography data types for spatial processing, and flexible schema evolution through UNKNOWN data type and DEFAULT column values. Glue 6.0 also introduces features that boost developer productivity and performance, such as Spark Declarative Pipelines that eliminate repetitive orchestration code, Real-Time Mode streaming for sub-second latencies, and Arrow-native Python UDFs for improved PySpark performance. These capabilities help you implement large-scale ETL, recurring batch workloads, streaming analytics, and AI application development using AWS Glue.

AWS Glue 6.0 is available in all AWS Commercial, AWS GovCloud (US), and AWS China regions.

To get started, select Glue 6.0 from the version dropdown in the AWS Glue console or SageMaker Unified Studio when creating a new job, or migrate existing jobs using the Spark Upgrade Agent. To learn more, visit the AWS Glue documentation and AWS Glue pricing.

The Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Capability for Argo CD now supports custom configuration through a standard argocd-cm ConfigMap in your cluster. This capability gives you a fully managed GitOps continuous delivery experience, and you can now tune it to fit how your teams work. You can define custom health checks for your Custom Resources, customize the Argo CD UI banner content, adjust how the capability watches and compares the resources it manages, and more. You configure these settings the same way you do in upstream Argo CD, and AWS applies them to your managed capability.

With this launch, cluster administrators now have more control over how Argo CD reports application health. By default, Argo CD has no built-in health logic for Custom Resources, so an Application can report as healthy while its resources are still provisioning, and sync waves can advance before those resources are ready. With a custom health check, you define this logic yourself. For example, a health check for a database resource can hold an Application at progressing until the database is ready. The capability also includes built-in health checks for AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) and kro (Kube Resource Orchestrator) resources, so these report accurate health with no additional configuration.

You can configure the EKS Capability for Argo CD in all AWS Regions where the capability is available. To learn more, see Amazon EKS and Configure Argo CD settings in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

 

The AWS Deadline Cloud monitor now shows the progress, status, and health of your automatic file downlaods from jobs running in the cloud. Deadline Cloud is a fully managed service that helps teams run compute-intensive workloads in the cloud for visual effects, animation, product design, simulation, and gaming. The Deadline Cloud Monitor (DCM) desktop app provides customers with visibility into their render environments, jobs, resources, and costs. Now, customers can also use the monitor to confirm that automatically configured job outputs successfully downloaded to their destination drive.

With this update, the monitor app introduces a new Download status column at both the job and task level, showing download progress and confirming when all output files are available on your drive. An indicator displays how current that status is. If files are unavailable for any reason, the app surfaces clear guidance on next steps. This eliminates manual drive verification and helps teams confidently confirm output availability before downstream tasks begin, particularly valuable in large-scale render pipelines where manual file checking is impractical.

To learn more about AWS Deadline Cloud and the new automatic download status feature in the Deadline Cloud Monitor desktop app, visit https://aws.amazon.com/deadline-cloud/.

Amazon Connect Customer now lets managers chat with their data in plain language and get back the answer, the evidence behind it, and the fix, in seconds. Managers have always had the data. What they haven’t had is the time to dig through dashboards, find what’s driving performance, and decide what to do next. Now Amazon Connect Customer does that work for them. It searches across more than 150 metrics spanning self-service, agent performance, and queue performance to find what matters, explain why, and recommend the best next step. 
 
Managers can start broad and go deep in the same conversation. For example, a manager can ask which queues are the best candidates for automation, and Amazon Connect Customer reviews where handle time and after-contact work run highest, then returns a prioritized list with confidence scores and projected impact. What once required analysts, dashboards, and weeks of investigation now becomes a prioritized action plan in seconds. 
 
This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect Customer AI Agents are supported. To learn more, visit our product documentation. 

Today, OpenAI announced that they are lowering API prices for GPT-5.6 Sol. Following the recent Terra and Luna price reductions, Sol now costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens—20% lower input pricing and 33.3% lower output pricing. This promotional pricing is available at least through November 21, 2026.

Whether you're building autonomous coding agents, running complex multi-step analyses, or performing advanced research workflows, the reduced pricing gives you more room to experiment and scale what's already working. GPT-5.6 Sol delivers state-of-the-art results on agentic coding benchmarks, and the lower price point makes it more accessible for sustained, high-volume workloads.

For latest Regional availability of GPT-5.6 Sol, check the AWS Regions page. To learn more and view the pricing visit the Amazon Bedrock documentation on GPT-5.6 Sol.

AWS Glue 6.0 is built on a fully modernized runtime, Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.12, and Scala 2.13, delivering 30% lower pricing than previous AWS Glue versions.

Bulletin ID: 2026-086-AWS
Scope: AWS
Content Type: Important (requires attention)
Publication Date: 08/21/2026 10:30 AM PDT

Description:

FreeRTOS-Kernel is a real-time operating system kernel for microcontrollers and small microprocessors. AWS identified four issues with FreeRTOS-Kernel, affecting multiple versions.
- CVE-2026-77234: This issue affects configurations that use the FreeRTOS MPU together with software timers; applications that do not use the FreeRTOS MPU are not affected.
- CVE-2026-77235: This issue affects ARM TrustZone (ARMv8-M) configurations; applications that do not use ARM TrustZone secure contexts are not affected.
- CVE-2026-77236: This issue affects ARM TrustZone (ARMv8-M) configurations; applications that do not use ARM TrustZone secure contexts are not affected.
- CVE-2026-77237: This issue affects builds with queue sets enabled; applications built without queue sets are not affected.

Impacted versions:
- CVE-2026-77234: >=7.0.0 AND <=11.3.0 (MPU-enabled ports)
- CVE-2026-77235: >=10.2.0 AND <=11.3.0 (ARMv8-M ports with TrustZone + MPU)
- CVE-2026-77236: >=10.2.0 AND <=11.3.0 (ARMv8-M ports with TrustZone)
- CVE-2026-77237: >=7.4.0 AND <=11.3.0 (MPU-enabled ports with configUSE_QUEUE_SETS=1)

Please refer to the article below for the most up-to-date and complete information related to this AWS Security Bulletin.

Bulletin ID: 2026-087-AWS
Scope: AWS
Content Type: Important (requires attention)
Publication Date: 08/21/2026 12:30 PM PDT

Description:

Amazon Athena is a serverless, interactive query service that lets you analyze data directly in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena Query Federation is a feature that allows you to connect to data sources outside of Amazon S3 like DynamoDB, Azure Synapse, and custom connectors using standard SQL syntax. These connectors are open source and deployed to the Athena service on a regular basis.

We identified CVE-2026-77810, in the Neptune connector where a user with access to Neptune through Athena Federated Query could gain access to properties in the Lambda supplying the compute for the connector.

Impacted versions: <=v2026.28.1 AND >=v2024.15.1

Please refer to the article below for the most up-to-date and complete information related to this AWS Security Bulletin.

Bulletin ID: 2026-088-AWS
Scope: AWS
Content Type: Important (requires attention)
Publication Date: 08/21/2026 13:00 PM PDT

Description:

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch clusters. We identified CVE-2026-77811, a stored cross-site scripting issue in the dashboards-observability plugin in OpenSearch Dashboards. Improper input validation in the integrations static file endpoint allows a remote authenticated actor with write permissions to OpenSearch Dashboards saved objects to upload a custom integration containing arbitrary JavaScript. When another user accesses the static file endpoint directly, the script executes in their browser session and can perform actions on their behalf, including making API calls to OpenSearch with their privileges.

Affected products & versions:

OpenSearch Dashboards dashboards-observability plugin (open-source, self-managed):
- Affected: versions before 3.4 and versions before 2.19.6
- Fixed: versions 3.4 and 2.19.6

Amazon OpenSearch Service (AWS Managed):
- Affected: versions before 3.3
- Fixed: fixed in all affected versions (via service software update)

Please refer to the article below for the most up-to-date and complete information related to this AWS Security Bulletin.

With native vector search in Amazon DynamoDB, you can store vector embeddings alongside your operational data in a single table. This post shows how to build a unified AI agent architecture where an Amazon Bedrock agent uses one DynamoDB table for both structured lookups and semantic search, with a DynamoDB Streams pipeline that keeps embeddings in sync.

Panasonic Avionics worked with AWS and the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to build an agentic AI system on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS Glue that diagnoses in-flight entertainment and connectivity (IFEC) issues across a global fleet, reducing diagnosis time from hours to minutes while maintaining accuracy.

Input tokens are often a meaningful part of the cost of running Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) at scale. This post describes a query-aware context compression pattern on Amazon Bedrock: after retrieval, a smaller model filters retrieved chunks against the query before the primary model answers, reducing input tokens and cost while preserving answer quality.

Give your AI agents governed, auditable access to enterprise tools without consolidating infrastructure. This post walks through a four-scope maturity model (Connect, Control, Catalog, and Harden) for building a governed tool gateway with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, advancing only when real governance pain demands it.

The Agentic Data Operations Platform (ADOP) is a reference architecture on Amazon Bedrock that uses specialized AI agents to automate the full Bronze-to-Silver-to-Gold data pipeline lifecycle, compressing new-source onboarding from weeks to hours while keeping data governance and compliance controls inline.