AWS Cloud Architect & AI Expert
Sixteen AWS launches from October 14 to 27, 2026, ranked by what they change on the bill. ECS Gateway still leads (~$394/mo less for 25 services in us-east-1). ECS GPU sharing and GPT-6.1 Terra come next. Five of the sixteen are not cost cuts.
On 23 October 2026 we ran one refund-triage job 120 times on Bedrock with Strands 1.62. MCP alone passed 0 of 30 and approved an out-of-window $129 refund 10 times. A Skill alone passed 0 of 30. Both together passed 30 of 30.
One Athena query at the 10 MB minimum is about $0.00005 at $5 per TB scanned. Thirty quiet days are about $0.0015 before you count storage. The query classifies exceptions. It does not refund anyone.
A feed file is not a catalog until it passes the gate. This design quarantines a failed file and waits on a Step Functions task token before release. The large-file cutover is 100 MB, a design choice, not a service limit.
Assume 8 state transitions and 200 approved signups in a month: 1,600 transitions. Step Functions Standard includes 4,000 free transitions a month in US East (N. Virginia) at $0.000025 after that. The workflow marks READY only after the health check.
PutRestoreValidationResult accepts FAILED, SUCCESSFUL, TIMED_OUT, or VALIDATING. Once the status is set, AWS says it cannot be changed. A completed restore job is not an application check until you run one.
Four sources, one check a day, 120 Scheduler invocations a month. That volume sits inside the 14 million free EventBridge Scheduler invocations. The check notices a missing file. It does not repair the export.
Delete is a late state. A legal hold stops the machine in HELD. One Scheduler invocation on the retention date sits inside the 14 million free EventBridge Scheduler invocations a month. The first write revokes access. It does not delete objects.
On October 13, 2026 the Strands Agents team published about 94,000 Harbor trials. On matched Anthropic runs, estimated cost ran from about $0.74 to $1.57 per trial.
Checked 16 Oct 2026: Qwen Decider 2B v1 scores 180 of 231. Gemma 4 12B, released 15 Oct, scores 200 of 231 at a 136 ms H100 median. Jev stays $0.042/MTok, with no matching JevBench row.
Checked 15 October 2026. The shared MCP adapter exposes 3 tools. execute-ability can run all 7 canonical abilities, including product-delete. Week one allows two reads.
Five stop conditions, checked 4 October 2026. If the SLO is met and the only pain is a bill, modernization is the wrong program. Continue only when change rate, a seam, or a renewal forces it.
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