With re:Invent 2025 behind us and over 60 launch announcements, here are five hidden gems that may have gone unnoticed but still have big cost impacts. While everyone was talking about the database savings plans and AI announcements, these quieter launches are already helping customers optimize their cloud spend in creative ways.
1. Amazon Athena Capacity Reservation Controls
Amazon Athena now gives you granular control over Data Processing Unit (DPU) usage for queries running on Capacity Reservations. This might sound technical, but the cost impact is immediate you can now configure DPU settings at the workgroup or query level to eliminate over-provisioning and control concurrency. DPU setting controls the compute power (CPU/RAM) for your queries, allowing you to balance cost and performance using Capacity Reservations.
Previously, Capacity Reservations allocated resources generously, potentially wasting capacity on small queries, while critical…
