AWS Weekly Roundup: Istanbul Local Zones, ExtendDB Open-Source Debut, Kiro Innovations, and Highlights from May 25, 2026

There’s a truly invigorating quality to collaborating with startups — something I’ve been deeply immersed in for over two years now. Startups function at a distinct pace: the sense of urgency is palpable, resources are limited, and the outcomes feel deeply personal. Guiding them through the process of validating their business model demands not only technical expertise but also a readiness to act swiftly, question established assumptions, and commit to architectural decisions even when the ideal data isn’t yet available.

What excites me most is that the work is always tangible: every recommendation I provide to a startup directly influences whether they deliver on schedule, remain within their budget, and secure the next wave of investor trust.

Let’s explore this week’s AWS updates.

Headlines

Now Available — AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, Türkiye — AWS has launched a new Local Zone in Istanbul, Türkiye, delivering AWS compute, storage, and networking capabilities to one of Europe’s most populous metropolitan regions. AWS Local Zones position AWS infrastructure significantly closer to major population centers and industrial hubs, allowing organizations to house and process data within defined jurisdictions to satisfy data residency mandates, while achieving single-digit millisecond latency for applications that must operate near end users. This addresses compliance demands across financial services, government, telecommunications, and healthcare sectors.

Establishing a Local Zone represents a major infrastructure commitment: it demands the same standard of operational excellence as a full Region, with uniform hardware, power, and networking infrastructure, and signals AWS’s ongoing push into markets that have historically had limited cloud access.

For developers and architects in Türkiye, this unlocks a fresh range of architectural options. You can now retain and back up data within Turkish boundaries to support data residency obligations, and execute latency-sensitive workloads in the Istanbul Local Zone while maintaining seamless connectivity to the broader AWS Region — giving you the agility to design hybrid applications without the burden of operating your own data center facilities.

To discover more about our ten-year commitment, available services, customers, and partners in Türkiye, check out the launch blog post.

Last week’s launches

Here are several launches and updates that stood out to me:

• Security Hub Extended grows to 21 curated partner solutions across 9 categories — AWS Security Hub Extended now connects with 21 handpicked partner security solutions spanning 9 categories, covering endpoint protection, cloud security posture management, threat intelligence, and beyond. You can now access consolidated, prioritized security findings from a wider ecosystem of tools directly inside Security Hub, with no need for custom integrations. This is especially beneficial for enterprise security teams seeking a single, unified perspective on their security posture across both AWS and third-party solutions.
• Amazon SageMaker AI now offers OpenAI-compatible APIs for inference endpoints — You can now interact with Amazon SageMaker AI inference endpoints through OpenAI-compatible APIs, making it far simpler to transition AI workloads from OpenAI to SageMaker — or to develop applications that function across multiple providers — without any SDK modifications. This reduces the friction for teams that began prototyping with OpenAI and are now seeking to shift to a more scalable, cost-efficient infrastructure on AWS. Your existing application code runs unchanged; you just redirect it to your SageMaker endpoint.
• Pre-fetching and IAM role assumption now available for AWS Secrets Manager Agent — The AWS Secrets Manager Agent can now pre-fetch secrets at startup and assume IAM roles to access them, removing the cold-start delay tied to on-demand secret retrieval in latency-critical applications. You can set up the agent to preload the secrets your application requires before it begins handling traffic, minimizing the chance of secrets-related latency spikes in production. IAM role assumption support also simplifies sharing the agent across workloads that operate under different permission boundaries.
• AWS unveils ExtendDB, an open-source DynamoDB-compatible adapter — AWS has released ExtendDB as open source, a DynamoDB-compatible adapter that lets you leverage the DynamoDB API and data model on top of alternative backend storage systems. This is especially handy for local development and testing — you can code against the DynamoDB API without needing an active AWS connection. It’s also advantageous for use cases where you require DynamoDB-compatible behavior with greater control over the underlying storage layer. It’s a practical solution for teams aiming to build portability into their data access layer.
• AWS SAM CLI integrates AWS CloudFormation Language Extensions support to speed up local serverless development — The AWS SAM CLI now supports AWS CloudFormation Language Extensions in local environments, enabling you to use transforms, dynamic references, and other CloudFormation language features directly within your local development and testing workflows. This bridges a long-standing gap between what you can validate locally and what executes in production, making local serverless development quicker and more dependable. If you develop serverless applications with SAM and run into edge cases during local testing, this enhancement will noticeably improve your workflow.

For a complete rundown of AWS announcements, make sure to regularly check the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts and resources that may catch your interest:

• Amazon Bedrock rolls out new advanced prompt optimization and migration tool — This post highlights the newly released Advanced Prompt Optimization and Migration Tool in Amazon Bedrock, designed to help you automatically refine your prompts for stronger model performance and guide you in migrating prompts across different foundation models. It’s essential reading if you’re fine-tuning prompt quality for production AI workloads.
• Introducing Kiro Web — Kiro, AWS’s AI-driven development environment, now offers a web-based interface. Kiro Web enables you to access Kiro’s spec-driven development, AI chat, and agent features directly from your browser, with no need to install the desktop IDE. This marks a meaningful step toward broadening access to AI-assisted development — whether you’re conducting a quick review, prototyping from a different machine, or onboarding your team to the Kiro workflow.
• Announcing updated retry behavior for AWS SDKs and Tools — AWS has revised the default retry behavior across its SDKs and CLI tools, strengthening resilience against transient errors without requiring any configuration adjustments from developers. The revised behavior features more intelligent backoff strategies and improved handling of throttling responses. If you’re