AWS News - 2026-08-24

Starting today, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL supports MySQL minor version 8.4.11, the latest minor released by community MySQL. In addition to operational improvements, MySQL 8.4.11 introduces support for post-quantum TLS (PQ-TLS) key exchange, providing you with post-quantum cryptography options for encrypting your data in-transit. We recommend upgrading to the newer minor versions to accept fixes for CVEs in prior versions of MySQL and to benefit from bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MySQL community. Learn more about the enhancements in RDS for MySQL 8.4.11 in the Amazon RDS user guide and MySQL 8.4.11 release notes.

You can leverage automatic minor version upgrades to automatically upgrade your databases to more recent minor versions during scheduled maintenance windows. You can also use Amazon RDS Managed Blue/Green deployments for safer and simpler updates to your MySQL instances. Learn more about upgrading your database instances, including automatic minor version upgrades and Blue/Green Deployments, in the Amazon RDS User Guide.

Amazon RDS for MySQL makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale MySQL deployments in the cloud. Learn more about pricing details and regional availability at Amazon RDS for MySQL. Create or update a fully managed Amazon RDS for MySQL database in the Amazon RDS Management Console.

GPT-5.6 Terra and Luna are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock in AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East), bringing the smartest family of models from OpenAI yet to Bedrock's next-generation inference engine built for high-performance, security and reliability. GPT-5.6 sets a new standard for intelligence and efficiency, allowing you to solve harder problems in less time and with more intelligence per token. The two models span capability tiers from balanced performance (Terra) to fast, cost-efficient inference (Luna).

With GPT-5.6, you can build autonomous coding agents, run long-horizon genomics and biology analyses, and perform advanced cybersecurity research. Terra provides GPT-5.5-level performance at half the cost and Luna brings fast, affordable inference at the lowest price point. GPT-5.6 also supports prompt caching with explicit cache breakpoints, so repeated context across agentic workflows is billed at a 90% discount and doesn't compound cost as you scale. 

GPT-5.6 Terra and Luna support 1 million token context windows on Amazon Bedrock, enabling you to process full codebases, lengthy documents, and multi-turn agent histories in a single request. Models reason over broader context and return more accurate, coherent responses without chunking or information loss.

For regional availability, please see the Amazon Bedrock regional availability page.  Get started with Terra and Luna using the Amazon Bedrock Console or the Responses API on the bedrock-mantle endpoint. To learn more, see the Amazon Bedrock documentation and read the launch blog post. 

AWS ParallelCluster 3.16 is now generally available with a new on-node diagnostics tool, cluster stability improvements, and an updated HPC and AI/ML software stack.

pcluster-diag is a diagnostics tool built into the ParallelCluster AMIs that lets you run diagnostic checks on any cluster node with a single command, and get a structured report that makes it easier to identify issues. This release also hardens the cluster lifecycle with more resilient cluster creation, updates, and image builds. The software stack is refreshed, with updated NVIDIA driver, CUDA, EFA installer, and Slurm versions. To get started with pcluster-diag, see Troubleshooting with pcluster-diag. For more details, review the AWS ParallelCluster 3.16.0 release notes.

AWS ParallelCluster is an open-source cluster management tool that makes it possible for R&D customers and IT administrators to operate high-performance computing (HPC) clusters on AWS. ParallelCluster is designed to automatically and securely provision cloud resources into elastically-scaling HPC clusters capable of running scientific and engineering workloads at scale on AWS. ParallelCluster is available at no additional charge in the AWS Regions listed here, and you pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications.

To learn more about launching HPC clusters on AWS, visit the ParallelCluster User Guide. To start using ParallelCluster, see the installation instructions for ParallelCluster UI and CLI.