New updates on AWS GovCloud (US) | Issue #8 (2026)

AWS GovCloud (US) now offers a connected agentic AI stack on Amazon Bedrock. Since May, AgentCore, Managed Knowledge Base, and AgentCore expansions for memory, policy, and managed harness have launched in AWS GovCloud (US-West). Web Search is the latest addition, grounding agents in current web knowledge alongside enterprise data.

Web Search, a built-in server-side tool on Amazon Bedrock, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. Web Search enables supported OpenAI GPT models to ground responses with information from the web, with citations to the sources the model used so users can trace each claim back to its web origin. This is especially valuable whenever an answer depends on information that changes over time or is more recent than a model’s training data, such as current events, recent releases, or the latest available information. Because the tool runs inside Amazon Bedrock, teams do not host a search index, manage crawlers, or write the tool-call loop themselves.

For leaders evaluating AI strategies, Web Search eliminates the need to integrate a third-party agentic search capability, manage external search APIs, or conduct additional security reviews for web-grounded responses. It delivers real-time web grounding as a native Amazon Bedrock tool, governed by IAM and scoped to the Region. By default, it keeps request data within the AWS boundary, serving results from a web index and cache maintained by Amazon. As an AWS-native capability governed by IAM, administrators can allow or deny it at the account or organization level and restrict it by Region. At launch, Web Search in AWS GovCloud (US-West) supports GPT-5.4, GPT-5.6 Terra, and Luna models. To learn more, see the Web Search technical blog and the Web Search documentation.

AWS Transform in AWS GovCloud (US) delivers a proven rehost path by replicating VMware servers and launching them natively on Amazon EC2. Lift-and-shift is the fast route to move VMware workloads into the AWS GovCloud (US) boundary: once your workloads are running on EC2, the full breadth of AWS services is available to replatform, refactor, and modernize them natively at your own pace.

The value for practitioners is twofold. First, the parts of a VMware migration that are traditionally slow, manual, and error-prone—discovery, dependency mapping, wave planning, and network conversion—are now automated by AI agents you direct through a chat-based workspace in natural language. Second, that automation now runs inside the AWS GovCloud (US) boundary, so federal agencies, defense contractors, and regulated organizations can plan and execute large VMware estate moves in a compliant environment. The service automates the steps that were previously hand-built:

• Discovery and dependency mapping, collecting the source inventory and mapping application dependencies so nothing gets stranded mid-migration.
• Intelligent wave planning, grouping applications and sequencing waves so large estates move in dependency-aware order rather than risky big-bang cutovers.
• Network conversion, translating VMware network configurations into native Amazon VPC constructs, with the output available as CloudFormation or CDK to deploy automatically or fold into an existing pipeline.
• Replication, test, and cutover, continuous block-level replication through AWS Transform MGN, managed from the same interface, with test instances to validate before committing.

Even though the service runs from AWS GovCloud (US-West), it can migrate servers to both AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) as target Regions, giving teams a single control point to consolidate or distribute landing zones across both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Beyond VMware, the AWS Transform launch in AWS GovCloud (US-West) also covers bare metal, Hyper-V, and database workloads, so teams with mixed source environments can consolidate their migration planning and execution through a single service.

To get started, deploy AWS Transform in AWS GovCloud (US-West), connect the source environment for discovery, let the service generate the network design and wave plan, then drive replication and cutover to your chosen AWS GovCloud (US) target.

Learn more: AWS Transform in AWS GovCloud (US) | What is AWS Transform | AWS Transform migration capabilities | Automate VMware-to-EC2 migration with AWS Transform (hands-on pattern) | New capabilities in AWS Transform for VMware | Supported target Regions | AWS GovCloud (US-West) launch announcement

 

Service Releases

Service Area	Service	Region	Announcement
Application Integration	Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow	Both	Amazon MWAA Serverless is now available in AWS GovCloud (US)
Migration & Transfer	AWS Transform	West	AWS Transform is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West)

 

Feature Releases

Service Area	Service	Region	Announcement
Analytics	Amazon EMR	Both	Amazon EMR extends support at no additional cost for customers migrating off older releases
Analytics	Amazon Kinesis Data Streams	Both	Amazon Kinesis Data Streams now supports a dry run feature to validate API requests
Analytics	Amazon Redshift	Both	Amazon Redshift rg.large instances now support single-node clusters
Analytics	AWS Glue	Both	AWS Glue zero-ETL adds target table property ownership and conflict detection
Analytics	AWS Glue	Both	AWS Glue zero-ETL now captures archived Salesforce records
Application Integration	Amazon MQ	Both	Amazon MQ now supports RabbitMQ 4.3
Application Integration	AWS Step Functions	Both	AWS Step Functions adds new AWS service integrations automatically, starting with AWS Lambda MicroVMs
Compute	Amazon EC2	Both	Amazon EC2 now supports specifying compatible instance types on AMIs
Compute	Amazon EC2	East	Amazon EC2 C8g instances now available in additional regions
Compute	AWS Lambda	Both	AWS Lambda now supports direct read configuration for Amazon S3 Files
Compute	AWS Outposts	Both	Second-generation AWS Outposts racks now in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
Compute	AWS Parallel Computing Service	Both	AWS PCS now supports custom GRES, hardware topology, and MIG
Container	Amazon ECS	Both	Amazon ECS introduces Early Success Criteria for service deployments
Container	Amazon ECS	Both	Amazon ECS expands IAM condition key support for RunTask and StartTask APIs
Container	Amazon EKS	Both	AWS Private CA EKS add-on and Connector for AD now available in AWS GovCloud (US)
Customer Engagement	Amazon Connect	West	Amazon Connect Customer dashboards now support compact mode
Customer Engagement	Amazon Connect	West	Amazon Connect Customer now lets you set specific capacity limits for different types of Tasks and Emails
Customer Engagement	Amazon Connect	West	Amazon Connect Customer now enables agents to bid on preferred shifts
Customer Engagement	Amazon SES	Both	Amazon SES now supports S/MIME email signing
Customer Engagement	AWS End User Messaging	Both	AWS End User Messaging strengthens SMS deliverability with automatic failover
Database	Amazon Aurora	Both	Amazon Aurora MySQL now supports multi-source replication and delayed replication
Database	Amazon MemoryDB	Both	Amazon MemoryDB now supports AWS PrivateLink in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
Database	Amazon RDS	Both	Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports additional SQL trace flags
Database	Amazon RDS	Both	Amazon RDS now supports the latest CU and GDR updates for Microsoft SQL Server
Database	Amazon RDS	Both	Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports community MariaDB minor versions 10.6.28, 10.11.19, 11.4.13, 11.8.9, and 12.3.3
Database	Amazon RDS	Both	Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Supplemental Patch Bundle for July 2026 Release Update
Machine Learning	Amazon Bedrock	Both	Claude Fable 5.1, Anthropic's new frontier model is now available on AWS GovCloud (US)
Machine Learning	Amazon Bedrock	West	Web Search on Amazon Bedrock is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West)
Machine Learning	Amazon Bedrock	West	Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Memory now supports direct ingestion to long-term memory
Management & Governance	AWS Config	Both	AWS Config now supports 60 new resource types
Networking & Content Delivery	Amazon API Gateway	Both	Amazon API Gateway now supports mutual TLS for backend integrations
Networking & Content Delivery	Amazon API Gateway	Both	Amazon API Gateway now supports 1 MB execution logs with configurable delivery destinations
Networking & Content Delivery	Amazon VPC	Both	AWS Gateway Load Balancer now supports TCP Reset for faster failure recovery
Security, Identity, & Compliance	Amazon GuardDuty	Both	Amazon GuardDuty adds optional threat detection rules
Security, Identity, & Compliance	AWS STS	Both	AWS STS simplifies session token size limits and adds session token size monitoring
Storage	Amazon Elastic Block Store	Both	Amazon EBS Volume Clones now supports copying volumes across accounts
Storage	Amazon S3	Both	Amazon S3 now supports PrivateLink for FIPS endpoints
Storage	AWS Backup	Both	AWS Backup now supports protecting more than 1,000 Amazon S3 buckets per account
Storage	AWS Storage Gateway	Both	AWS Storage Gateway now supports FIPS-compliant private connectivity for Amazon S3 File Gateway