Dated, sourced reports on what is changing in AWS and software: retirements, deadlines, regulation, monthly changes and how large companies modernized.
Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender XDR went down worldwide on the afternoon of November 12. Microsoft says servers are failing health checks and overloading the rest. What we know, what happens to email sent to you in the meantime, and what to check once it is back.
November 12, 2026
6 min read
AWS now has a hard spending cap. A project in the new AWS experience pauses when it reaches its monthly limit instead of billing past it: every resource stops, S3 included, and data is kept for 90 days. It covers all of the project's charges, egress too, but only for projects created through the new signup experience. Not existing accounts, and not Organizations, yet.
November 9, 2026
7 min read
We wrote to Postgres every 50 ms and forced failovers. RDS Multi-AZ lost writes for 13.0 and 14.8 seconds; in one trial the switch began three minutes after the reboot was requested. Aurora PostgreSQL lost writes for 2.0 and 0.5 seconds, one failed write each time. The full timelines, the errors your application will see, and what to set so it recovers on its own.
November 9, 2026
7 min read
With auto-pause at 0 ACUs, the first query after a pause took 21.4 and 13.6 seconds to answer. Under sustained CPU load, the cluster went from 2 ACUs to its 16-ACU maximum in about two minutes, and tail latency fell from 24 seconds to 5. What that means for scale-to-zero databases behind real users.
November 9, 2026
6 min read
Node.js 22 functions on arm64 took 570–650 ms end to end on a cold start, whether they talked to Postgres directly, through RDS Proxy, or to DynamoDB, and a function in a VPC was no slower than one outside it. Bursts of 200 simultaneous cold starts all succeeded. Warm, RDS Proxy added about 3 ms per query.
November 9, 2026
7 min read
We ran 53 workloads against RDS Postgres 17 and DynamoDB from one Fargate task in the same Availability Zone, at 100,000, 1 million and 5 million orders. Key lookups took 0.35 ms in Postgres and 2.7 ms in DynamoDB; a two-item transaction 1.75 ms against 20 ms; a question nobody designed for, 0.08–2.7 s against a full table scan. The full results, with the method and every caveat.
November 9, 2026
12 min read
Every question across customers is a full table scan in DynamoDB: 217,000 read units at 5 million orders, whether it returns 10 rows or all of them. Postgres answered the same 16 questions in 0.08 to 2.7 seconds without a single index added for them, and an index built in 2.7 seconds took one from 148 ms to 44 ms. Measured in AWS.
November 9, 2026
9 min read
db.m7g.large allows 832 connections. When 1,600 clients connected at once, 916 were refused; through RDS Proxy all 1,600 succeeded, with the slowest waiting 12 seconds. The measurements at 100, 400, 800 and 1,600, the errors you'll see, and what a fresh AWS SDK client per request does under the same burst.
November 9, 2026
7 min read
Moving money between 10 accounts with 64 concurrent workers, Postgres committed 5 transfers a second when rows were locked in random order (50 deadlocks, median wait 24 s) and 1,185 a second when locked in a fixed order. DynamoDB committed 228 a second and cancelled 14,344. Also: hot counters, sharding, and serializable isolation.
November 9, 2026
8 min read
On a million documents, an expression index took a JSONB field lookup from 75 ms to 0.17 ms. On line items, jsonb_path_ops beat the default GIN operator class on every count: 1.3 ms against 4.1 ms per query, a 10% smaller index and a build 2.5 times faster. Plus what 256 KB documents cost to read and update.
November 9, 2026
8 min read
A plain table with FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED processed 6,570 jobs a second with 32 workers on a 2-vCPU RDS instance; adding workers past that made it slower. LISTEN/NOTIFY delivered 16,000 notifications a second with a median delivery time of 0.57 ms. When that is enough, and when to reach for SQS.
November 9, 2026
6 min read
With a common multi-tenant policy (customer_id = current_setting('app.customer_id')::int), the same "latest 20 orders" query took 58 ms instead of 0.31 ms with an explicit WHERE clause, on a million rows with the right index in place. What we measured, why it happens, and how to write policies that keep their indexes.
November 9, 2026
6 min read
Inserting 20,000 rows one statement at a time ran at 775 rows a second; 1,000 rows per statement ran at 156,789, two hundred times faster on the same connection. Prepared statements nearly doubled read throughput. Each extra index cost about 3–4% of insert throughput, and a foreign key about 8%.
November 9, 2026
7 min read
Right after writing an item, a query on a global secondary index didn't find it in 269 of 300 tries. Secondary indexes are eventually consistent, and "eventually" was longer than one request. What that means for "save, then show the list" screens, what strong consistency costs, and how long adding a new index took.
November 9, 2026
6 min read
Page 45,000 of a table with OFFSET took 134 ms; the same page by keyset took 0.27 ms. An exact count of a million rows took 103 ms against 0.12 ms for the planner's estimate. Five full-table updates grew a table from 15 MB to 92 MB, and VACUUM didn't give any of it back.
November 9, 2026
6 min read
A trigram index took an address search on 5 million rows from 2.7 s to 95 ms. On a million documents of common words, the same kind of index made a phrase search slower than no index at all (1.8 s against 1.2 s), while full-text search answered in 263 ms. When each one works, with build times and sizes.
November 9, 2026
7 min read
On 50,000 vectors of 768 dimensions on a 2-vCPU RDS instance, an exact nearest-neighbour search took 133 ms. HNSW cut it to 1.9 ms after a 47-second build; IVFFlat to 1.8 ms after 2.4 seconds. What recall looked like, why our numbers are a floor, and how to size this for real embeddings.
November 9, 2026
6 min read
Key lookups in Postgres went from 0.16 ms to 9.75 ms, about 60 times slower, while four reporting queries ran on the same 2-vCPU instance. In DynamoDB, lookups stayed at 2.5 ms during a parallel scan of the same table. And what a jump from 10 to 1,000 concurrent clients did to each.
November 9, 2026
6 min read
Since November 5, 2026, DynamoDB can write data from files in S3 into a table that already exists, with a condition per item, billed by the gigabyte written rather than by write requests. How it compares with Import from S3 (new tables only) and with BatchWriteItem from your own code, what AWS has and hasn't said about capacity, and what to test before a production backfill.
November 9, 2026
5 min read
Pinpoint's engagement features (campaigns, journeys, segments and the analytics behind them) reached end of support on October 30, 2026. If messages stopped going out, a dashboard went flat or your app's analytics calls started failing, this is the triage: how to find every place you used Pinpoint, what still works under AWS End User Messaging, and what to put in place today, this week and this month.
November 7, 2026
6 min read
We loaded the same orders into Postgres 17 and DynamoDB and asked seven questions at 100,000, 1 million and 5 million orders. Lookups by key stayed under 2 ms in Postgres at every size and cost half a read unit in DynamoDB. Every question across customers needed a full Scan in DynamoDB (about 40,000 read units per million orders), and took 0.02 to 1.6 seconds in Postgres. The numbers, and what they mean for choosing.
November 4, 2026
8 min read
Among the three backend-as-a-service SDKs (aws-amplify, firebase and supabase-js), Amplify went from 21.4% of monthly npm downloads in November 2024 to 3.5% in October 2026, while Supabase went from 15% to 75%. Inside Amplify, the Gen 1 CLI is still downloaded more than twice as often as the Gen 2 backend package. The data, and what it does and doesn't tell you.
November 4, 2026
5 min read
Over two years, @trpc/server went from 4.6% of graphql's npm downloads to 10.2%, growing 8.2 times against graphql's 3.5, while @apollo/client grew 1.8 times. What the trend says about how teams build APIs now, and the cases where GraphQL is still the right call.
November 4, 2026
5 min read
Since October 20, 2026, Vercel Functions serve WebSocket connections on every plan, with Express, Hono, Socket.IO, Bun, FastAPI and Next.js. Connections close at the function's maximum duration (300 seconds on Hobby, up to 800 on Pro), each is pinned to one instance, and memory is billed while any connection is open. What that means for your design and your bill.
November 2, 2026
6 min read
Kubernetes 1.31 on EKS reaches the end of extended support on November 26, 2026; after that AWS upgrades the control plane on its own schedule, with no notice and no rollback. Version 1.34 leaves standard support on December 2, when the control plane goes from $0.10 to $0.60 an hour. What happens, what doesn't, and what to do this month.
November 2, 2026
5 min read
Larger broker-dealers, investment advisers, investment companies and transfer agents had to comply with the amended Regulation S-P from December 3, 2025; smaller ones from June 3, 2026. Every covered firm now needs a written incident response program, notice to affected individuals within 30 days, and oversight of service providers. What changed and how to make it work on AWS.
October 26, 2026
5 min read
The FTC's amended COPPA Rule, published April 22, 2025, required compliance with most provisions by April 22, 2026. Sharing children's data with third parties, including for targeted advertising, now needs separate parental consent; data may be kept only as long as reasonably necessary; and biometric identifiers count as personal information. What changed and what to check in your app.
October 26, 2026
5 min read
Requirements 6.4.3 (authorize and inventory every script on payment pages) and 11.6.1 (detect changes to them) took effect on March 31, 2025, aimed at card-skimming attacks. In January 2025 the PCI Council removed them from SAQ A and added an eligibility check instead. What applies to your checkout, depending on how card data is captured, and how to meet it.
October 26, 2026
6 min read
A 2024 court decision vacated part of HHS's guidance on online tracking, the part about public, unauthenticated pages. Tracking on patient portals and in apps that handle PHI is still covered, most ad and analytics vendors will not sign a BAA, and the FTC brings its own cases. What is still risky and the setup we would use instead.
October 26, 2026
5 min read
Medicare Advantage plans, Medicaid and CHIP programs and their managed care plans, and QHP issuers on the federal exchanges must have Patient Access, Provider Access, Payer-to-Payer and Prior Authorization APIs live by January 1, 2027. The 2026 operational requirements are already in force. What each API does, the standards behind them, and how we would build on AWS.
October 26, 2026
7 min read
Since November 10, 2026, DoD solicitations can require a Level 2 certification from a C3PAO, not a self-assessment. For engineering, design and manufacturing firms that handle CUI as subcontractors, that is the line between bidding and not. The levels, the phase dates through 2028, the contract clauses behind them, and the enclave approach that keeps the scope small.
October 26, 2026
7 min read
The amended Part 500 finished phasing in on November 1, 2025 with MFA for every user of every information system and a full asset inventory that records owner, location, classification, support end date and recovery time. What licensees must now have, the reporting clocks, and how each requirement maps to AWS services.
October 26, 2026
6 min read
Lambda's update block, EKS versions, RDS Extended Support price steps, Bedrock model retirements, the end of Python 3.11, Node.js 22 and PHP 8.3, and the EU's Cyber Resilience Act and AI Act dates: every 2027 deadline we could verify, month by month, with what each costs if missed.
October 26, 2026
10 min read
The 2026-07-28 MCP revision made the protocol stateless, deprecated Dynamic Client Registration in favour of Client ID Metadata Documents, required issuer validation and bound client credentials to their authorization server. What each change means for MCP servers and clients you have already built.
October 26, 2026
7 min read
Amazon Pinpoint ended on October 30, 2026, and App Mesh, Proton, WAF Classic and Greengrass V1 before it. Q Developer's IDE plugins, WorkMail, DevOps Guru and Infrastructure Composer end in 2027, and App Runner, Audit Manager, CloudTrail Lake, Kendra, Q Business and the original Bedrock Agents are closed to new customers. The full list from AWS's lifecycle pages, with the replacements AWS names.
October 26, 2026
9 min read
Pinpoint's engagement features (endpoints, segments, campaigns, journeys and analytics) stopped on October 30, 2026. SMS, voice, push and OTP sending keep working as AWS End User Messaging; email belongs on SES. What broke, what to check in your apps now, and the migration paths AWS recommends.
October 26, 2026
6 min read
AWS announced the end of the AWS IQ expert marketplace in May 2025 and shut it down completely on May 20, 2026. What that means for companies that relied on it, and how to find the same caliber of AWS expertise now.
October 26, 2026
7 min read
Amplify is not one product. It is Hosting, a TypeScript backend framework (Gen 2), client libraries, UI components and an AI kit, plus a Gen 1 CLI, Studio and DataStore that reach end of life on May 1, 2027, and Pinpoint-backed analytics and push that lost their backend on October 30, 2026. What each piece is, what it costs and whether to use it.
October 25, 2026
8 min read
Gen 1 backends have received only critical fixes since May 1, 2026, and reach end of life on May 1, 2027. Gen 2 covers most of Gen 1 and adds OIDC and SAML, SQL databases and TypeScript functions, but it drops DataStore, many-to-many relationships, @searchable, Studio's visual configuration and Pinpoint analytics. The parity table and a migration order.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
Amplify's Analytics, Push Notifications and In-App Messaging categories were built on Amazon Pinpoint, which ended on October 30, 2026. Pinpoint endpoints, segments, campaigns, journeys and analytics are gone, and in-app messaging has no AWS replacement. What still works, what to move to (Kinesis, End User Messaging, Connect) and what to build.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Ten public modernization stories, side by side: where each started, how long it took, how much was rebuilt rather than moved, and what changed. Six patterns repeat in almost all of them, and each one applies to a company far smaller than these.
October 25, 2026
8 min read
Graviton5 arrived in R9g instances, Lambda SnapStart reached container images, Lambda Managed Instances got 90-minute timeouts, Amazon Linux 2027 entered preview, CloudWatch Omni went GA, Aurora learned to query Iceberg, and Bedrock added Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1 and the GPT-6 family. Filtered for small and mid-sized teams, with an action for each.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Lambda Web Functions, ECS Gateway, the Well-Architected Agent, Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, Claude Haiku 5.5, GuardDuty spotting database exfiltration, Redshift Iceberg materialized views, and the services moving to maintenance or sunset. The month's launches filtered for small and mid-sized teams, with an action for each.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
DynamoDB peaked at 192 million requests a second, Lambda ran 2.3 trillion invocations a day, ECS and Fargate ran 158 million tasks a day, Graviton powered 49% of Amazon.com's EC2 compute and Amazon ran more than 44,000 fault-injection experiments beforehand. What those numbers say for teams a millionth of the size.
October 25, 2026
4 min read
In October 2019 Amazon's consumer business finished moving about 7,500 Oracle databases and 75 PB of data to DynamoDB, Aurora, RDS and Redshift, with little or no downtime. It cut costs by more than 60% and consumer-facing latency by 40%. How the work was split, why each workload went where it did, and what applies to a company with ten databases.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
AWS now charges for running old versions on five managed services, each with its own formula: per vCPU for RDS and Aurora, six times the control plane rate for EKS, an 80–160% premium for ElastiCache, and up to the full instance price for old OpenSearch domains. The rates, the dates, and how to find every charge on your bill.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Elasticsearch 1.5 to 7.8 and OpenSearch 1.0–1.2 and 2.3–2.9 on Amazon OpenSearch Service left standard support in November 2025. From November 7, 2026, their Extended Support surcharge equals the instance price, and support ends November 7, 2027. Elasticsearch 6.8 and 7.10 get longer at $0.0065 per normalized instance hour. What to upgrade, in what order.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Standard support for ElastiCache Redis OSS versions 4 and 5 ended January 31, 2026, and those caches were enrolled in paid Extended Support: an 80% premium in years one and two and 160% in year three, ending January 31, 2029. Why upgrading to Valkey is usually the cheapest fix, and how to do it with little or no downtime.
October 25, 2026
5 min read
Windows 10 left support in October 2025. Business Extended Security Updates cost $61 a device in year one, $122 in year two (starting now) and $244 in year three, and they are cumulative. What to do with the PCs that still cannot move: replace, upgrade, virtualize, or put them behind a Cloud PC.
October 25, 2026
5 min read
January 2027 alone ends Windows Server 2016, .NET Framework 4.6.2, BizTalk 2016, System Center 2016 and TFS 2017. Then PostgreSQL 14 on RDS, Node.js 22, Ubuntu 22.04, Python 3.11, SQL Server 2017, PostgreSQL 15, PHP 8.3 and the EU's CRA and AI Act. The whole year, month by month, for planning budgets now.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
Lowe's left a packaged, monolithic e-commerce system from late 2018, invested more than $500 million a year and hired up to 2,000 engineers. Its internal platform, Carbon, now runs more than 1,000 workloads across cloud, data center and stores, and carried 111% e-commerce growth in 2020. What they built and how it compares with Home Depot's path.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
AD FS farms are some of the oldest, most fragile and most attacked servers in many companies. Microsoft recommends moving applications to Entra ID and authentication to password hash sync or cloud methods. How to inventory relying parties, move them in stages, replace AD FS-based AWS role federation with IAM Identity Center, and decommission the farm.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
On August 6, 2026 Elastic Beanstalk retired all remaining Amazon Linux 2 platform branches (Docker, Go, Corretto 8, 11 and 17, Tomcat 9, .NET Core), following AL2's end of life. Node.js 20, Python 3.9 and Ruby 3.2 on AL2023 went a week later. How to move to an AL2023 branch with a blue/green swap, and when to leave Beanstalk for ECS.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Liberty Mutual told its engineers to try serverless first, then cloud-native, then containers. It built a library of CDK patterns in TypeScript, deployed 3,500 of them in a year, cut build times from a year to three months and runs a global ledger at $60 per million transactions. What made it work.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
FINRA processes about 37 billion market records on an average day and more than 75 billion on busy ones. It moved surveillance to AWS because fixed capacity was getting in the way of analysis, put S3 at the center, and separated storage from compute. The architecture, the outcomes and what it means for smaller data platforms.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Target wanted deploying to a store to feel the same as deploying to the cloud or its data centers. It put Kubernetes in every store and built Unimatrix, a central system that captures an application's intended state and distributes it to the store clusters. What that design solves, and when a retailer needs it.
October 25, 2026
5 min read
The third and final year of Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 ended on October 13, 2026. There is nothing left to buy. How to contain the servers still running it, and the fastest ways off: in-place upgrade, rebuild, AWS's End-of-Support Migration Program, or retirement.
October 25, 2026
5 min read
Salesforce ended support for Workflow Rules and Process Builder on December 31, 2025. Existing automation still runs, but bugs will not be fixed and support will not help. How to inventory, migrate with the Migrate to Flow tool, and consolidate overlapping automation as you go.
October 25, 2026
5 min read
Atlassian will end Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence and Crowd Data Center on March 28, 2029. New Data Center sales ended March 30, 2026, and existing customers can expand only until March 30, 2028. Bitbucket and Bamboo Data Center continue. The timeline, the options and the parts that make migrations slow.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Each Power BI Premium capacity subscription retires at the end of its current agreement, and there is no automatic migration. P1 maps to F64, but F SKUs bill through Azure, can pause, and only F64 and above let free users view reports. The mapping, the 30/90-day cliff, the cost math and the right-sizing most teams skip.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
The operating systems, runtimes, frameworks and databases that have reached end of life or will by the end of 2027: CentOS 7, Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04, Debian 11, Python 3.10, Node.js 20 and 22, PHP 8.1 and 8.2, PostgreSQL 13 and 14, MySQL 8.0, AngularJS and more. Dates, and what to move to.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
The Home Depot moved a 450 TB on-premises warehouse to a cloud warehouse that now holds more than 15 PB, moved its SAP estate to the cloud from 2017, and funded it as part of an $11.1 billion three-year plan. What they did, in what order, and the lessons that apply on any cloud.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
Capital One was the first US bank to announce going all in on the cloud, closing eight data centers by 2020 and rebuilding 80% of about 2,000 applications as cloud native. What changed in delivery speed and reliability, and the security lesson from 2019 that changed EC2 for every customer.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
A three-day database outage in 2008 started Netflix's move to AWS. It finished in January 2016, after rebuilding a monolith into hundreds of microservices, with billing and customer data moved last. What they chose and why, and which of those choices a normal company should copy.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Chick-fil-A runs a Kubernetes cluster in every restaurant, managed by GitOps. Walmart runs regional clouds plus edge clouds in stores and clubs. McDonald's is putting Google Distributed Cloud into thousands of restaurants. Why retailers put compute in stores, how they manage thousands of tiny sites, and the AWS equivalents.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
Windows Server 2016, .NET Framework 4.6.2, IIS 10 on 2016, BizTalk 2016, System Center 2016 and TFS 2017 all end support in January 2027. SQL Server 2017 follows in October, after SQL Server 2016, SharePoint 2016 and 2019 and .NET 8 in 2026. The full list for server teams, and what each ending actually means.
October 25, 2026
8 min read
Windows Server 2016 stops receiving security updates on January 12, 2027, and IIS 10 and .NET Framework 4.6.2 on it go with it. In-place upgrade, ESUs through Azure Arc, AWS's End-of-Support Migration Program, containers or Linux: the cost, effort and licensing traps of each on EC2.
October 25, 2026
7 min read
SQL Server 2016 reached end of support on July 14, 2026; SQL Server 2017 follows on October 12, 2027, and SQL Server 2014's last ESUs end in July 2027. The three realistic paths on AWS (a newer SQL Server on EC2 or RDS, Aurora PostgreSQL with Babelfish, or a full conversion with AWS Transform) and what each costs in licences and effort.
October 25, 2026
8 min read
.NET 8 and .NET 9 both lost support on November 10, 2026. .NET Framework 4.6.2 ends with Windows Server 2016 on January 12, 2027. What to do with each, what ports cleanly to .NET 10 and what does not (Web Forms, WCF, Workflow Foundation), and how AWS Transform changes the cost.
October 25, 2026
8 min read
Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 and Skype for Business Server ended support on October 14, 2025; SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 followed on July 14, 2026. The on-premises successors (Subscription Editions), Microsoft 365, and what to do with the custom applications built on SharePoint.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Microsoft will end Dynamics GP support on December 31, 2029, with security updates until April 30, 2031, and GP 2016 already lost support in July 2026. The replacement options, the integrations that make ERP moves slow, and how to use the time well.
October 25, 2026
5 min read
The community Ingress-NGINX controller stopped receiving releases and security fixes in March 2026. Your cluster still works; it just will not be patched. The replacements on EKS (the AWS Load Balancer Controller with Gateway API, Envoy-based gateways, F5's NGINX) and the routing quirks that cause outages when you translate rules literally.
October 25, 2026
8 min read
HashiCorp archived CDK for Terraform on December 10, 2025. Existing stacks still deploy, but nothing will be fixed. Export to HCL, move to Pulumi, move to AWS CDK, or adopt the community fork: the effort and risk of each.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
AWS closed App Runner to new customers and ended support for the Copilot CLI on June 12, 2026, pointing both at ECS Express Mode. What Express Mode builds, how to migrate with no downtime, and when you'd outgrow it.
October 25, 2026
6 min read
Every RDS for MySQL 8.0 database has been paying Extended Support since August 1, 2026, PostgreSQL 13 since March, and Aurora MySQL version 2 doubles its rate on December 1. What it costs, how to find it on your bill, the restore that quietly enrols you, and how to upgrade out.
October 25, 2026
8 min read
Amazon Linux 2 stopped receiving standard security updates on June 30, 2026, but it is still inside EC2 fleets, ECS and Batch compute environments, old EKS node groups, retired Elastic Beanstalk platforms, Lambda runtimes and container base images. Where to look, the Lambda dates that matter (Python 3.10 deprecates on October 31), and what changes moving to AL2023.
October 25, 2026
8 min read
Claude Sonnet 4 reached end of life on Amazon Bedrock on October 14, 2026, and requests to it now fail. Claude 3.x ends in more Regions on November 13, Opus 4.1 on January 8, the Llama, Mistral and DeepSeek batch on March 30, and Sonnet 4.5 on April 8. How to find what you call, the gotchas that bite, and how to move without a regression.
October 24, 2026
8 min read
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