AWS Weekly Roundup: Prime Day 2026 by the numbers, Claude Haiku 5.5, Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic, and more (October 13, 2026)

Summary

• Amazon Prime Day 2026 peaked at 2.3 quadrillion daily requests for Amazon ElastiCache.
• Amazon DynamoDB processed over 59 trillion requests over four days with a peak of 192 million requests per second.
• AWS Lambda handled over 2.3 trillion invocations per day during the event.
• Amazon EBS peaked above 24.8 trillion I/O operations while moving more than an exabyte of data daily.
• Amazon ECS launched an average of 158.3 million tasks per day on AWS Fargate, representing a 47.7 percent increase from the previous year.
• AWS Graviton powered up to 49 percent of the Amazon EC2 compute used by Amazon.com during Prime Day.
• The AWS team ran more than 44,000 AWS Fault Injection Service experiments ahead of the event, exceeding the 2025 count by more than six times.
• Claude Haiku 5.5 is available on Amazon Bedrock at approximately 75 percent less cost than Haiku 4.5 for most tasks.
• Claude Haiku 5.5 includes effort controls to tune cost against intelligence per task.
• Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic enables real-time voice agents with lower latency, better reasoning, instruction following, and tool-calling accuracy.
• Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic supports expressive voices in seven languages, controllable turn-taking, and a 256K context window.
• Strands Bidi Agents are now generally available to pair with Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic.
• Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection now detects data exfiltration and destruction on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.
• Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection uses behavioral baselines, ML-based anomaly detection, and threat intelligence without requiring agents or configuration changes.
• AWS Lambda now supports OAuth for self-managed Apache Kafka event sources to authenticate consumers through enterprise identity providers.
• Amazon Redshift adds Apache Iceberg materialized views that store pre-computed results as Iceberg tables in Amazon S3.
• Strands Box is an open source sandbox that combines OS-level containment with fine-grained policies written in Dogwood.
• AWS Continuum for Penetration Testing integrates into CI/CD pipelines in public preview to turn testing into a deploy-time event.
• AWS re:Invent returns to Las Vegas from November 30 to December 4 with reserved seating now open.
• AWS Community Days are scheduled for San Francisco on October 13, Miami on October 14, Brisbane on October 16, Cape Town on October 16, Malta on October 16, and Mumbai on October 17.