Fire-It-In-There Friday — 11/21/25 — AWS Quietly Fixes the Things That Slow Teams Down
Some weeks are loud. Some weeks are full of sizzle and hype.
And then you get a week like this one—quiet on the surface, but packed with changes that unlock real velocity for teams building, migrating, or modernizing in AWS.
This is the kind of week where you can actually feel friction being removed from the platform.
Below are the updates worth your attention—plus why they matter for your roadmap, your budget, and your team’s sanity.
1. Regional NAT Gateways — The “Why Didn’t This Exist 10 Years Ago?” Update
AWS introduced Region-wide NAT Gateways, giving us a simpler, more scalable model than the old per-AZ pattern.
🔗 Docs: Regional NAT Gateways
🔗 Announcement: AWS NAT Gateway Regional Availability
This immediately reduces:
Boilerplate IaC
Failure points
Operational overhead
NAT sprawl across AZs
The “Wait… why do we need three of these?” conversations
Less plumbing. More building.
2. Savings Plans + RI Group Sharing — A Big Win for FinOps
Long overdue, but absolutely welcome: Savings Plans and Reserved Instances now support group sharing across accounts.
🔗 Announcement: Savings Plans & RI Group Sharing GA
Impacts you’ll see immediately:
Fewer stranded commitments
Cleaner org-level optimization
Predictable utilization across BUs
Easier MAP alignment
Less manual spreadsheet reconciliation
A much-needed simplification for multi-account orgs.
3. Required Tag Enforcement for IaC — The Pain Point Finally Gets a Fix
AWS now supports required tag validation across CloudFormation, Terraform, and Pulumi before resources are created.
🔗 Announcement: Validate & Enforce Required Tags
This solves years of frustration:
Orphaned resources
Untracked spend
Governance drift
Late-night “Who owns this?” cleanups
Sprawling remediation scripts
It’s vendor-agnostic, predictable, and badly needed.
4. EBS Volume Recycle Bin — Cleanups Just Got Safer (and Cheaper)
Amazon EBS now supports Recycle Bin protection for volumes, enabling automatic cleanup without fear of accidental loss.
🔗 Announcement: Recycle Bin Support for EBS Volumes
Why this matters:
You can automate deletion workflows
You reduce unattached volume waste
Snapshot sprawl becomes manageable
You get a safety net without overpaying
This is going straight into cost-optimization playbooks.
5. Managed External Secrets — Small Launch, Big Potential
AWS released Managed External Secrets, starting with a small list of launch partners.
🔗 Docs: Managed External Secrets
For hybrid and multi-vendor environments, this is the beginning of a much cleaner secrets-distribution model:
Centralization without rewrites
Multi-stack consistency
Fewer fragile custom sync scripts
Stronger integration for existing enterprise key stores
The early partner list is short. The potential is not.
Bonus Round — The Thread Running Through This Week
Zoom out, and AWS is clearly prioritizing:
Simplifying foundational services
Reducing operational overhead
Strengthening multi-account governance
Improving default hygiene around cost and compliance
Expanding automation surfaces
Removing long-standing daily friction
These are the kinds of updates that quietly increase velocity across entire orgs.
And for teams migrating or modernizing—especially those cleaning up years of legacy-first deployments instead of intentional, cloud-aligned modernization patterns—these changes translate into real, immediate momentum.
What This Means for Teams
Together, this week’s updates help you:
Ship faster
Reduce spend
Build cleaner foundations
Improve governance
Strengthen automation strategies
Remove busywork from daily operations
It’s incremental progress, but the kind that compounds.