Season 5, Episode 31 of the LogiCast AWS News Podcast brings together Logicata’s Karl Robinson and Jon Goodall with AWS Community Builder and cloud instructor, Charity Francis.
They unpack five AWS announcements across compute, storage, operations and cost management, from extended Lambda timeouts to AWS’s latest Gartner ranking. Somehow, they also spend a surprising amount of time debating whether Jon’s Bupa physio allowance can sustain karate and judo in his thirties.
06:08 – AWS Lambda Managed Instances: 90-Minute Function Timeout
AWS has extended the timeout for Lambda Managed Instances from 15 to 90 minutes. The team discusses where this middle ground between standard Lambda and EC2 could prove useful, including large file transfers and media processing. They also examine networking constraints and the limitation to asynchronous invocations.
16:20 – Amazon S3 Object Lock: Variable Retention with Event Holds
S3 Object Lock can now begin retention periods when a defined external event occurs, rather than from a fixed date. The team considers potential applications in healthcare, financial services and legal environments, where retention requirements may begin after an audit or another regulatory milestone.
22:40 – AWS Systems Manager: Expanded EC2 Unmanaged Instance Diagnostics
AWS Systems Manager can now diagnose six additional issues that prevent EC2 instances from appearing as managed. Jon and Charity discuss how the improvement can reduce troubleshooting time, limit reliance on bastion hosts and make Session Manager more dependable across large fleets.
27:48 – AWS Budget Alerts: Programmatic Account Access Management
This AWS solution automatically removes IAM Identity Center access when a budget threshold is crossed. The team debates whether this “soft lock” goes far enough, balancing the benefits of automated resource cleanup against the risk of deleting valuable workloads or test data.
37:35 – AWS Named a Leader in Gartner’s 2026 Magic Quadrant
AWS has been named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Strategic Cloud Platform Services for the 16th consecutive year. The discussion considers AWS’s strength in execution, its position behind Google and Microsoft on completeness of vision, and whether labelling five of seven vendors as Leaders weakens the framework’s value.
