AWS Weekly Roundup: Kiro Waitlist, EBS Volume Clones, EC2 Capacity Manager, and More – October 20, 2025
This Week in AWS: Unpacking EBS Clones, EC2 Capacity Manager, and Key Service Updates
Staying ahead of the curve in the world of Amazon Web Services isn’t just an advantage; it’s a necessity. Each week brings a new wave of updates that can redefine how you manage infrastructure, optimize costs, and secure your applications. This week is no exception, with several significant announcements that promise to streamline operations and enhance performance.
Here’s a breakdown of the major AWS updates you need to know about.
A Game-Changer for Data Replication: Introducing EBS Volume Clones
Managing data across development, testing, and production environments often involves cumbersome processes centered around snapshots. AWS has just released a powerful new feature to simplify this workflow: direct EBS Volume Clones.
Previously, duplicating a volume required creating a snapshot first and then creating a new volume from that snapshot—a multi-step, time-consuming process. Now, you can create a full, point-in-time copy of an existing EBS volume in a single step.
Key benefits of this feature include:
- Drastically Reduced Replication Time: Creating a clone is significantly faster than the snapshot-and-restore method, allowing you to provision new environments or test databases in minutes, not hours.
- Simplified Workflows: This eliminates intermediate steps, making your infrastructure-as-code scripts and CI/CD pipelines cleaner and more efficient.
- Cost-Effective Data Management: By creating near-instantaneous copies without the initial performance impact of restoring from a snapshot, you can accelerate development cycles and disaster recovery drills more efficiently.
This is an essential update for any team that frequently needs to duplicate datasets for testing, analysis, or development purposes.
Optimize Your Compute Spend with the New EC2 Capacity Manager
Controlling cloud costs is a top priority for every organization, but navigating the complexities of EC2 pricing models can be challenging. To address this, AWS has introduced the EC2 Capacity Manager, a new tool designed to provide greater visibility and control over your compute resources.
The EC2 Capacity Manager acts as a centralized dashboard that helps you analyze your instance usage and provides intelligent recommendations for cost optimization. It integrates insights across On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans.
Here’s what you can achieve with the EC2 Capacity Manager:
- Centralized Visibility: Get a comprehensive view of your entire EC2 fleet, including capacity utilization and coverage by cost-saving plans.
- Cost-Saving Recommendations: The tool uses machine learning to analyze your usage patterns and recommends specific actions, such as purchasing the right Savings Plans or modifying instance types to eliminate waste and maximize savings.
- Proactive Capacity Planning: Forecast future capacity needs based on historical trends, ensuring you have the right resources available without over-provisioning.
Security Tip: Use the EC2 Capacity Manager in conjunction with AWS Cost Explorer to not only identify savings opportunities but also to spot anomalous usage that could indicate a security misconfiguration or unauthorized activity.
A Glimpse into the Future: AWS “Project Kiro” Waitlist Opens
In an intriguing announcement, AWS has opened a waitlist for a new service codenamed “Project Kiro.” While details are still limited, Kiro is being positioned as a next-generation observability and security platform.
It aims to provide a unified solution for monitoring application performance, infrastructure health, and security posture in real-time. The core promise of Kiro is its use of AI to deliver proactive threat intelligence and automated compliance checks, moving beyond simple reactive alerting. By correlating security events with performance metrics, Kiro is designed to help teams identify and remediate the root causes of complex issues faster.
Joining the waitlist gives you a chance to be among the first to explore this promising new service.
Other Notable Updates
Beyond the major headlines, a few other important enhancements were rolled out:
- Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports enhanced monitoring intervals, allowing you to collect metrics at a granularity of up to one second. This is invaluable for troubleshooting high-performance databases and diagnosing transient performance issues.
- AWS IAM has introduced new condition keys that allow for more fine-grained access control based on the tags of the principal (the user or role) making the request. This further strengthens your ability to implement attribute-based access control (ABAC) policies for a more scalable and secure permission model.
By staying informed and integrating these new tools and features into your strategy, you can build more resilient, cost-effective, and secure applications on the AWS cloud.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-kiro-waitlist-ebs-volume-clones-ec2-capacity-manager-and-more-october-20-2025/
