AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Fable 5.1 on AWS, Amazon Linux 2027 preview, AWS Certified AI Business Strategist, and more (September 7, 2026)

By Dustin Ward

Last week, Claude Fable 5.1 became available on AWS. According to Anthropic, Claude Fable 5.1 delivers frontier intelligence for ambitious tasks across coding, scientific research, and enterprise workflows. Claude Fable 5.1 is built for long-running, high-stakes work that runs for hours and spans many applications. It can own more of a software project on its…

Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors are now generally available

By Dustin Ward

Today, Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances are generally available, powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. R9g instances are memory-optimized and deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based R8g instances, powered by the most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built. R9g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads including databases, in-memory caches (Valkey,…

AWS Weekly Roundup: Welcome DuckLabs to the team, Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD), and more (August 31, 2026)

By Dustin Ward

The news that interested me the most last week was the DuckLabs acquisition. AWS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the Amsterdam-based company behind DuckDB, the popular open source analytical database that runs in-process and executes SQL directly against files like Parquet, CSV, and JSON. DuckDB stays open source under its independent foundation…

Happy 20th Birthday, Amazon EC2

By Dustin Ward

Twenty years ago today, Jeff Barr wrote a blog post that launched the Amazon EC2 Beta. That single post introduced resizable Linux virtual servers in the cloud, billed by the hour, with one instance type (m1.small) in one Region (US East). It was minimal yet useful, and it changed how the world thinks about computing…