All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🛡️ Cloudflare introduces Bot Preference Sync to align zone-level AI bot settings with a site's robots.txt, available to all customers from Free to Enterprise. The feature prepends generated directives to any existing robots.txt so owners' Search, Agent, and Training preferences match edge-enforced rules and managed blocks. Bot Preference Sync is on by default for new customers and can be disabled by those who need custom, fine-grained policies.

🔔 Amazon Bedrock announces reduced pricing for OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol, reflecting OpenAI's API price cuts. Sol now costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, representing a 20% reduction on input and a 33.3% reduction on output pricing. The promotional rates apply at least through November 21, 2026, making high-volume, agentic coding and research workflows more cost-effective.

🤖 Managers can now query Amazon Connect Customer in plain language to get answers, evidence, and recommended fixes in seconds. The feature searches over 150 metrics across self-service, agent, and queue performance to identify what matters and explain why. Users can start with broad questions and drill down—receiving prioritized actions with confidence scores and projected impact. Available in all Regions that support Amazon Connect Customer AI Agents.

🖥️ The Deadline Cloud Monitor desktop app now displays download progress, status, and health for automatic job file downloads to your destination drive. The monitor provides visibility into render environments, jobs, resources, and costs, and the new Download status column appears at both job and task levels to confirm when outputs are available. An indicator shows how current the status is and the app provides guidance when files are unavailable.

🔧 The Amazon EKS Capability for Argo CD now accepts a standard argocd-cm ConfigMap in your cluster to enable custom configuration. This managed GitOps continuous delivery experience can be tuned to your team’s workflows, including custom health checks for Custom Resources, UI banner content, and resource watch/compare behavior. AWS applies settings configured the same way as upstream Argo CD, and built-in health checks for AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) and kro resources are included.

🚀 AWS Glue 6.0 is now generally available with a 30% price reduction and upgraded runtimes including Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.13, and Scala 2.13. It adds full support for Apache Iceberg v3, newer Apache Hudi and Delta Lake versions, and productivity features such as Spark Declarative Pipelines, Real-Time Mode streaming, and Arrow-native Python UDFs. Glue 6.0 is available across AWS Commercial, GovCloud (US), and China regions.

🔒 Chris Betz argues that as AI amplifies both attacker and defender capabilities, organizations must reinforce core security controls rather than abandon them. He emphasizes layered defenses—MFA, Zero Trust, patching, and detection and response—and describes how AI accelerates vulnerability discovery, threat modeling, and remediation. CISOs should combine technical rigor with strategic leadership to align security with business goals.

🎮 Microsoft says the August 2026 Windows update (KB5121003) has triggered game crashes, freezes, and EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION errors on systems running Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. The company is investigating and attributes the problem to drivers or components installed by peripherals with RGB lighting that include files named like inpoutx64. Affected titles include ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals. Developers such as Embark Studios offered a temporary workaround involving removal of the inpoutx64 driver while Microsoft continues its investigation.

📣 Microsoft is rolling out a Classic Outlook theme for Outlook on the web and New Outlook for Windows as part of a targeted release starting mid-August and completing by late September. The theme will become generally available worldwide between late September and late October. When enabled, it adjusts visual styling, layout, typography, icons, and selected interactions while respecting administrator settings and not migrating users automatically.

🛡️ Wazuh introduces AI-assisted capabilities to help Security Operations Centers reduce alert fatigue and accelerate investigations. The Wazuh AI Analyst on Wazuh Cloud delivers automated, scheduled security reports using Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic’s Claude, with encrypted processing and no model training on customer data. Self-deploy options include local Llama 3 via Ollama and FAISS-backed vector search for private threat hunting, while cloud-hosted Claude 3.5 Haiku can be integrated through OpenSearch Assistant for conversational guidance.

🔒 OpenAI introduced Private Safety Processing to detect misuse across related AI interactions while maintaining its Zero Data Retention (ZDR) commitment. The system generates narrowly defined safety signals instead of exposing prompts or responses, and can operate with customer-held encryption keys or enterprise-controlled infrastructure. It is being piloted with eligible enterprise and API customers to address risks that emerge over time rather than in single prompts. The approach shifts investigative responsibility toward customers while aiming to preserve privacy.

📣 Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) now supports per-request open and click tracking override parameters in the SendEmail and SendBulkEmail APIs. This lets senders enable or disable open and click tracking on individual API calls instead of managing multiple configuration sets. The override takes precedence over the associated configuration set and helps honor recipient-level consent requirements like GDPR and CNIL guidance. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SES is offered and has no additional cost.

🚀 The AWS Local Zone in Las Vegas, Nevada is now generally available. This Local Zone supports Amazon EC2 instances (C7i, M7i, R7i, C8gn), Amazon EBS volume types (gp3, gp2, io1, sc1, st1), Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Direct Connect. AWS Local Zones extend AWS infrastructure closer to metropolitan areas to enable single-digit millisecond latency, address data residency, and support AI/ML inference and migration of legacy applications. Enable the Las Vegas Local Zone (us-west-2-las-2a) from the AWS Global View or use the ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API.

🚀 Amazon EC2 C8gd, M8gd, and R8gd instances with up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe SSD are now available in more regions. Powered by AWS Graviton4, they deliver up to 30% better performance than Graviton3 and improved I/O and query speeds for demanding workloads. Instances offer up to 50 Gbps network, EBS bandwidth controls, Elastic Fabric Adapter on larger sizes, and 12 sizes per family to suit diverse compute, balanced, and memory-intensive use cases.

🔐 Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB now supports AWS KMS customer managed keys to encrypt data at rest for InfluxDB 2 databases, InfluxDB 2 Read Replicas, and InfluxDB 3 clusters. Customers choose a symmetric AWS KMS key during resource creation; the key must reside in the same AWS account and Region and cannot be changed later. The capability is available via the AWS Console, AWS CLI, and the Timestream for InfluxDB API across all supported Regions, with standard AWS KMS charges applying.

🔒 This post announces a new AWS Network Firewall capability—rule hit count—that provides visibility into how often stateful rules match network traffic across custom and managed rule groups. Rule hit counts increment when matches produce alert logs (alert, drop, reject), and pass rules can be tracked by adding the alert keyword. Alert logs include aws_metadata with resource ARN and signature ID, are delivered to CloudWatch Logs or S3, and drive the Top Rule Hits dashboard for monitoring and compliance validation.

🚀 Amazon EC2 P6-B300 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region. These instances offer 8x NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs with 2.1 TB high-bandwidth GPU memory, 6.4 Tbps EFA networking, 300 Gbps dedicated ENA throughput, and 4 TB of system memory. The P6-B300 delivers 2x networking bandwidth, 1.5x GPU memory, and 1.5x GPU TFLOPS (FP4) versus P6-B200, targeting large trillion-parameter FMs and LLM training and deployment. The p6-b300.48xlarge size is available in Seoul, US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US-East), and US East (N. Virginia).

🔐 Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports managed certificate authority (CA) rotation with automated safeguards. Amazon EKS will manage the rotation lifecycle and update AWS-managed components to trust the successor CA, while customers must replace worker nodes and update external clients to trust the new CA. Features include advance expiration notifications, automatic successor CA appending and activation, and rollback capability. The feature is available at no additional cost in all commercial AWS Regions and can be managed via CLI, APIs, CloudFormation, and the AWS console.

🔒 Starting today, CloudFront can use Origin Access Control (OAC) to restrict access to Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points (MRAP), allowing only designated CloudFront distributions to reach MRAP origins. This native integration removes the need for customers to compute and forward SigV4a Authorization headers via custom Lambda@Edge functions. CloudFront now signs requests to S3 MRAP origins, improving cache-miss fill performance from the nearest replicated region and enforcing OAC-secured access. The feature is available globally except in the CloudFront China region and can be enabled via Console, SDK, CLI, or CloudFormation with no additional fees.

🔐 Partners can now authorize AWS Partner Central agents from third-party tools like Amazon Quick and Kiro using AWS Sign-In and OAuth, eliminating the need for separate SigV4 proxies or console sign-ins. This change lets partners use their existing AWS identities, IAM permissions, and governance controls to grant agent access without extra authentication software. Administrators retain control via IAM policies, token introspection and revocation, dynamic client registration, and CloudTrail auditing. OAuth support is available through the Partner Central agents MCP Server in US East (N. Virginia).