Amazon EC2 T8i instances, powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Granite Rapids) processors and the Nitro System, became generally available on September 17, 2026 with up to 30% better price performance than T3. Low-CPU workloads should move from T3 to T8i without changing their credit model.
On September 9, 2026, AWS raised the Lambda function timeout to 90 minutes on Lambda Managed Instances and added Graviton5 instances, up to 25% faster than Graviton4. Teams that were working around the 15-minute cap or torn between serverless and EC2 now have a single bridge.
On August 28 2026 AWS made EC2 C8gn instances, powered by Graviton4 and capable of 600 Gbps of network bandwidth, available in the Europe (Paris) region. For teams running virtual network appliances or high-throughput analytics, this European expansion reshapes the cost-performance case for arm64.
AWS announced general availability of a Las Vegas Local Zone (us-west-2-las-2a) on August 20, 2026, with EC2 C7i/M7i/R7i/C8gn, ECS, EKS, the Application Load Balancer, and Direct Connect. Teams under latency or data-residency pressure should weigh it against a full region before committing.
Amazon EC2 introduces application status checks that probe your HTTP or HTTPS endpoints every 60 seconds and flag an impaired application even when the instance itself is healthy. Wired into Auto Scaling, they trigger automatic instance replacement the moment the application stops responding.
In July 2026, an 8 vCPU/16 GB server costs €15.99/month on Hetzner versus $248/month on AWS on-demand. The gap isn’t a promotion — it’s a cost structure hyperscalers cannot replicate.
