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

Prime Day 2026 Infrastructure Scale

Amazon published retrospective metrics for Prime Day 2026, highlighting extreme infrastructure demands. Amazon ElastiCache peaked at 2.3 quadrillion daily requests, while Amazon DynamoDB processed over 59 trillion requests with a peak of 192 million requests per second. AWS Lambda handled more than 2.3 trillion invocations per day, and Amazon ECS launched an average of 158.3 million tasks daily on AWS Fargate, a 47.7 percent increase year-over-year.

To ensure stability, the team executed over 44,000 AWS Fault Injection Service experiments prior to the event, more than six times the volume from 2025. AWS Graviton powered up to 49 percent of the Amazon EC2 compute used by Amazon.com.

New AI Model Releases

Claude Haiku 5.5 is now available on Amazon Bedrock and Claude Platform on AWS. It is the fastest model in the Claude 5.5 family and costs approximately 75 percent less than Claude Haiku 4.5 for most tasks. This release introduces effort controls, allowing users to tune cost against intelligence per task, facilitating parallel subagent workflows alongside Claude Opus 5.5.

Amazon Nova 2.5 Sonic enables real-time voice agents with improved reasoning, instruction following, and tool-calling accuracy. It features lower latency, a 256K context window, and support for seven languages. The model pairs with Strands Bidi Agents, which are now generally available, to simplify the deployment of production voice agents.

Security and Developer Tools

Amazon GuardDuty RDS Protection now detects data exfiltration and destruction on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. By analyzing queries rather than just login anomalies, it uses ML-based anomaly detection to identify unusual data access without requiring agents or configuration changes.

AWS Lambda now supports OAuth for self-managed Apache Kafka event sources, allowing authentication via enterprise identity providers like Amazon Cognito or Okta. This expands Kafka Event Source Mapping capabilities beyond SASL and mTLS for regulated industries.

Amazon Redshift added Apache Iceberg materialized views, allowing users to pre-compute joins and aggregations stored as Iceberg tables in Amazon S3. These views are queryable by engines such as Amazon Athena, Apache Spark, Trino, and Snowflake.

Strands Box is an open-source sandbox (Apache 2.0, developer preview) powered by Dogwood that provides OS-level containment and fine-grained policies for AI agents. It enforces permissions based on agent history and keeps credentials out of the agent environment via an egress gateway.