Concise summaries of official AWS update announcements for Amazon S3.
Information as of November 3, 2026.
AWS Transform now evaluates on-premises storage for migration to AWS, automatically matching workloads to optimal services and projecting costs after uploading a storage inventory
Amazon S3 now delivers server access logs to CloudWatch Logs in AWS GovCloud (US), European Sovereign Cloud, and China Regions, enabling real-time querying, alarms, and AWS KMS encryption.
Amazon S3 Metadata is now generally available in six new regions: Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Thailand), and Mexico (Central). This expands automated metadata collection and querying capabilities for S3 data.
Amazon S3 is now available on the Vercel Marketplace and v0 by Vercel, allowing developers to create and connect S3 resources in seconds within their development environment, gaining S3's durability, scalability, and performance through Vercel's streamlined provisioning workflow.
AWS announces Blockchain Snapshots, providing pre-synced blockchain data in Amazon S3 for Ethereum and Solana nodes, enabling faster node setup by using snapshots instead of peer-to-peer syncing.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a high-performance storage class, is now available in four more regions, enhancing access speed and reducing costs for latency-sensitive workloads.
Amazon S3 Tables has increased the default limit of table buckets per AWS Region per account from 10 to 100, enabling up to one million tables per Region.
Amazon S3 Object Lock now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) with variable retention and event holds, ensuring WORM compliance for event-based retention requirements.
Amazon S3 Vectors now supports metadata pre-filtering, boosting recall up to 5x for selective filters, and adds a prefix match operator ($startsWith) for filtering values like paths and URLs.
Amazon S3 Tables adds support for Apache Iceberg V3 data types, enabling native storage of geospatial coordinates and nanosecond-precision timestamps
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery now supports disaster recovery for AWS Graviton-based (arm64) source servers, allowing you to protect and recover Graviton workloads with the same simple, reliable DRS experience used for x86 workloads.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone offers high-performance, single-digit millisecond data access with up to 10x faster speeds and 80% lower request costs compared to S3 Standard
AWS Storage Gateway now supports FIPS 140-3 validated endpoints over AWS PrivateLink for Amazon S3 File Gateway, enabling easier use for regulated workloads.
Amazon S3 Object Lock introduces event holds, allowing you to set object retention periods based on future events like contract closings or audit completions. Event holds protect objects for a specified duration after the hold is released.
Mountpoint for Amazon S3 now allows users to limit memory usage automatically or with a user-defined cap, enabling coexistence with memory-intensive applications
Amazon S3 offers metadata and annotations in GovCloud (US) regions, simplifying data analysis and AI context management
Amazon S3 now shows specific IAM and organization policy ARNs in access denied errors, helping users quickly identify and resolve policy issues
AWS Backup for Amazon S3 now enables read-only access to backup data via standard S3 APIs without initiating a restore, allowing targeted file recovery, data validation, compliance auditing, and forensic investigation.
Amazon S3 Vectors provides purpose-built vector storage for AI agents and RAG, delivering S3's elasticity and durability
Amazon S3 Tables now supports the Variant data type defined in Apache Iceberg Version 3, enabling direct writing of semi-structured data like JSON without prior schema definition
Amazon S3 now allows transitioning objects to S3 Standard-IA and S3 One Zone-IA immediately after creation, eliminating the previous 30-day minimum retention in S3 Standard. This reduces storage costs by up to 40% while maintaining millisecond access for cold data scenarios.
Amazon S3 Event Notifications now include system-generated tags for all destinations, simplifying event filtering across multiple buckets with a single EventBridge rule.
Amazon S3 Vectors provides purpose-built vector storage for AI agents and RAG, now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone is a high-performance, single-AZ storage class designed for single-digit millisecond data access, offering up to 10x faster data access and 80% lower request costs than S3 Standard, enabling fast data access for ML training and interactive analytics.
Amazon S3 now delivers server access logs to CloudWatch Logs, enabling instant querying, alarms, cross-account and cross-Region aggregation, and KMS encryption. Logs can also be mirrored to S3 Tables in Apache Iceberg format at no additional storage cost, allowing direct SQL querying with Athena, Redshift, and other Iceberg-compatible engines.
Amazon S3 Vectors increases the number of similarity search results per query to 10,000, a 100x increase from the previous limit, aiding applications with multi-stage retrieval pipelines.
Amazon S3 adds annotations, allowing up to 1GB of custom metadata in JSON, XML, or YAML format to be attached to objects, helping AI agents and analytics tools find the right data more effectively.
Amazon S3 Vectors cuts data processing charges for queries on vector indexes with over 10 million vectors by up to 80%, lowering costs for large-scale AI, RAG, and semantic search workloads
Amazon S3 Access Grants maps identities from directories like Microsoft Entra ID or AWS IAM principals to datasets in S3, enabling scalable data permission management.
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