AWS Launches Capabilities by Region Tool

Write for InfoQ

AWS recently launched AWS Capabilities by Region, a new planning tool designed to give architects, platform engineers, and developers deep visibility into service, feature, and resource availability across its global network of regions.

Earlier, determining the availability of a specific feature, such as a new Amazon S3 storage class or a niche EC2 instance type, across many regions required navigating disparate documentation or performing manual checks, often leading to deployment delays and costly refactoring. The new tool centralizes this critical information. As Manjunath Kumatoli commented on LinkedIn, this change offers immediate operational relief:

All these days we were dependent on support ticket to check availability of service in a region. This tool will help a lot in planning.

With AWS Capabilities by Region, users can explore service availability through an interactive interface, compare multiple Regions side-by-side, and view a forward-looking roadmap. As Channy Yun, a principal developer advocate for AWS, noted:

You can explore service availability through an interactive interface, compare multiple Regions side-by-side, and view forward-looking roadmap information. This detailed visibility helps you make informed decisions about global deployments and avoid project delays and costly rework.

A screenshot of a computerAI-generated content may be incorrect.

(Source: AWS News blog post)

The feature set is highly focused on pre-deployment planning, allowing users to easily select and compare multiple AWS regions to identify the precise feature sets they share. In addition, the tool provides directional launch planning, indicating services expected in a region with statuses like Planning, Not Expanding, or a specific release quarter (e.g., 2026 Q1).

Luc van Donkersgoed, a Serverless Hero, praised the clarity of the product in a Bluesky post:

AWS just launched "AWS Capabilities by Region" - arguably one of their best-named products in years. It interactively shows which services and APIs are available, planned, and NOT planned for a region. A very welcome addition to service transparency!

While the tool was widely welcomed, some practitioners noted that the focus on visibility does not solve the underlying issue of regional feature disparity. Andreas Wittig expressed this architectural frustration on LinkedIn:

The AWS Community celebrates the release of AWS Capabilities by Region, an overview of the service and feature availability by region. But that's not what customers asked for. At least, not me. I'm asking to close the gaps between regions instead. The current situation creates unnecessary complexity for those building solutions that need to be deployed across multiple regions. Please focus on rolling out all services and features to all regions. That's the customer-centric approach here.

Beyond the interactive portal, the AWS Capabilities by Region data is also accessible through the AWS Knowledge MCP Server.

Furthermore, it enables automated workflow integration, transforming manual checks into governance enforcement: IaC tools and custom-built systems can now enforce regional capability checks as part of their governance processes, ensuring compliance and architectural standards are automatically enforced. The Knowledge MCP Server is publicly accessible, does not require an AWS account, and enables developers to integrate regional capability checks directly into their CI/CD pipelines.

Related Topics:

• Development
• Architecture & Design
• DevOps
• Governance
• Amazon Web Services
• Amazon
• AWS
• Architecture
• Compliance
• Cloud

We protect your privacy.