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Bring AWS regional capabilities into your own VPC with Capability Insights!

AWS What's New ★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure#devops

Hey there, it's me, Shii-chan! Today I found an announcement that will make anyone doing multi-Region design smile.

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

Over on the AWS What's New feed, AWS announced Capability Insights for AWS, an open-source solution. It lets you deploy a dashboard of regional capabilities data — which services, features, API operations, and CloudFormation resource types are available in each Region — right inside your own Amazon VPC. The code is published on GitHub.

Why it matters

When you plan multi-Region architectures, regional expansion, or disaster recovery, checking "does this Region have the services I need?" is tedious and slow. And some teams, because of data residency requirements or compliance rules, want that information to stay entirely inside their own network. Capability Insights targets exactly that, letting you own the regional capabilities data as infrastructure you control.

What changes

All the data stays inside your VPC, so you can use it while meeting data residency and compliance requirements. The dashboard auto-refreshes every 24 hours, keeping the latest status of services, features, API operations, and CloudFormation resource types across all Regions.

The part I like is the Workload Analysis component. It scans your CloudTrail logs and CloudFormation stacks to narrow 200+ services down to the ones your account actually uses, turning what used to be multi-week gap analysis into a quick review.

Dive Deep

To deploy it, you need AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Step Functions, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue. You can run it in any Region where those services are available.

As for cost, there are no extra licensing fees — it runs on standard AWS service pricing for the services you use.

Wrap-up

  • Capability Insights for AWS is an open-source dashboard that puts regional capabilities data inside your own VPC
  • It auto-refreshes every 24 hours, and Workload Analysis narrows things down to the services you actually use
  • Data stays within your VPC, with no extra licensing costs — just standard pricing

If you have multi-Region design or regional expansion coming up and dread the capability research, this one is for you!

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