August was all about “Data Gravity.” Amazon Aurora storage limits jumped to 256 TiB, which effectively ends the “sharding” conversation for 99.9% of companies.
However, the real star was the expansion of Zero-ETL Integrations. AWS enabled seamless, near-real-time replication from Aurora to OpenSearch and RDS to Redshift. By leveraging the database’s internal transaction logs, AWS replicates data to your analytics engine without impacting the source database’s compute.
For data engineers, this means the death of brittle Python/Glue ETL pipelines for simple sync tasks. We also saw DynamoDB get “Attribute-Based Access Control” (ABAC), allowing us to manage permissions via tags rather than complex IAM policies.
August proved that the future of data isn’t in moving it, it’s in making it accessible exactly where it lives.