All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔁 AWS has made cross-account sharing generally available for EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML, enabling organizations to share reserved GPU capacity across AWS accounts via AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). Teams can purchase Capacity Blocks and provision them to multiple accounts at no extra cost, improving utilization and lowering costs. The feature is available in Regions where Capacity Blocks are offered, and administrators enable sharing by creating a RAM Resource Share and adding Capacity Block resources.

🔍 Cloud migrations have introduced dynamic infrastructure, container sprawl, and multi‑cloud complexity that often create blind spots and make cloud-native logs inconsistent. Network-layer telemetry and Network Detection and Response (NDR) offer a consistent, provider-agnostic signal that analysts already know how to read. Combining mirrored traffic, flow logs, TLS metadata, DNS, and container context helps detect exfiltration, C2, cryptomining, and suspicious admin activity. Operationalizing these signals—baseline tuning, egress monitoring, and continuous validation—improves cloud defense.

🔓 This article explains how to begin using Gemini 3 by activating the Google Cloud Free Trial, which grants new users $300 in credits valid for 91 days plus ongoing Free Tier usage. It walks through eligibility checks, signing in with a Google Account, accepting terms, and completing identity verification with a payment method (you are not charged automatically). The post highlights useful Free Tier limits — including Cloud Run, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery — and shows how to enable billing, import the Cloud Project into Google AI Studio, create a project-attached API key, and call Nano Banana Pro and other Gemini Pro models.

🚀 Claude Opus 4.6 is now available in Amazon Bedrock, delivering Anthropic’s most capable model for coding, agentic tasks, and professional workflows. It emphasizes advanced multi-step reasoning, proactive subagent orchestration, and long-horizon code development. The release supports preview context windows of 200K and 1M tokens and targets enterprise-grade reliability for complex automation and cybersecurity use cases.

🤖 Google’s Agent Factory episode demonstrates how Gemini 3, the Gemini CLI, and Antigravity enable rapid creation of agentic workflows and lightweight “AI employees.” Smitha Kolan, Vlad Kolesnikov, and guest Brandon Hancock present live demos building a portfolio site, parallel market-research agents, and a video-generating agent. The session highlights multimodal prompting, SOP-driven automation, parallel execution, and one-click deployment to Cloud Run.

🛡️ CrowdStrike's Falcon Linux sensor now offers enhanced visibility and detection for PHP web shells, improving discovery of both pre-existing and obfuscated variants. The On write script file visibility capability captures script content and context as files are written, while Enhance PHP visibility surfaces dynamically evaluated PHP (eval/assert/create_function) as PhpEvalString events. These features have already supported OverWatch in identifying hundreds of web shells and provide richer telemetry for faster investigations and hunting.

🚀 Palo Alto Networks has reworked its NextWave partner program and unified it with a value exchange framework to simplify engagement, reward impact and accelerate growth in 2026. The update emphasizes predictability, repeatability and profitability, expanding enablement, labs, demos, quoting APIs and targeted rebates. Partners gain clearer paths for specialization, delivery and managed services while customers benefit from more consistent, integrated AI-driven security outcomes.

🚀 AWS Batch now supports unmanaged compute environments on Amazon EKS, extending Batch's job scheduling and orchestration to clusters you manage directly. You can create compute environments via the CreateComputeEnvironment API or the AWS Batch console by selecting an existing EKS cluster and specifying a Kubernetes namespace, then associate nodes using kubectl labels. This option preserves customer control over Kubernetes infrastructure for security, compliance, or operational requirements and is available today in all regions where AWS Batch operates.

🚀 Amazon EC2 G7e instances, powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, are now available in US West (Oregon). These instances deliver up to 2.3x inference performance compared to G6e and offer up to eight GPUs with 96 GB per GPU, 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, 192 vCPUs, and up to 1600 Gbps of networking. They target LLMs, agentic and multimodal generative AI, spatial computing, and workloads that require combined graphics and AI processing, while supporting GPUDirect P2P and RDMA in UltraClusters for low-latency multi-GPU scaling.

🔈 Cartesia's Sonic 3 model is now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, giving AWS customers a turnkey option for advanced streaming text-to-speech. Sonic 3 is a state space model (SSM) offering high naturalness, accurate transcript following, sub-100ms latency, and fine-grained control over volume, speed, and emotion. It supports 42 languages, natural laughter, and voices optimized for agents and expressive characters. Deployments can be launched from SageMaker Studio or via the SageMaker Python SDK.

🔧 Amazon Bedrock now offers structured outputs that return model responses conforming to user-defined JSON schemas, reducing the need for application-level validation. The capability, generally available in February 2026 for Anthropic Claude 4.5 and select open-weight models, supports schema definitions or strict tool definitions. It is available via the Converse and Invoke APIs across commercial AWS Regions where Bedrock is supported.

🔍 The John Lewis Partnership’s platform team redefined how it measures the value of its internal developer platform, moving beyond simple tenant counts. They began with lead-time metrics for service creation, onboarding and first-customer deliveries, then adopted DORA metrics and a Technical Health score to capture operational quality and resilience. Combining telemetry with developer-experience feedback helped prioritise paved roads, automate change handling and simplify security assurance to reduce friction and speed delivery.

🔍 Amazon SageMaker now provides Data Lineage for Apache Spark jobs run on Amazon EMR and AWS Glue within IDC-based SageMaker Unified Studio domains. The feature captures schema and column-level transformations from EMR-EC2, EMR-Serverless, EMR-EKS, and Glue, and makes lineage explorable as a visual graph or queryable via APIs. Teams can compare transformation history across Spark jobs to investigate regressions, trace root causes, and assess impact. Spark lineage is available in all existing SageMaker Unified Studio regions.

🚀 Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now natively supports linear and canary deployment strategies for services using Network Load Balancers (NLB). Teams can shift traffic incrementally or start with a small percentage to validate updates for TCP/UDP, low-latency, long-lived connections, and static-IP workloads. Integrations with Amazon CloudWatch alarms allow automated pause or rollback on detected issues. Configuration is available via the AWS Console, CLI, or IaC for new and existing services across commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

🔍 John Lewis moved beyond simple adoption counts to measure whether its internal developer platform actually delivered value. Initially the team tracked practical lead-time metrics — Service Creation Lead Time, Onboarding Lead Time, and First Customer Lead Time — to show speed to production and prioritize improvements. Over time they adopted DORA metrics, centralized telemetry in BigQuery and dashboards, automated change handling, and introduced a Technical Health score to guide investments and reduce developer friction.

🔁 Microsoft announces Azure NetApp Files Elastic zone‑redundant storage (ANF Elastic ZRS), a managed multi‑AZ file service that synchronously replicates data across three or more availability zones to deliver high availability and resiliency. The service provides automatic, service‑managed failover while preserving the same mount target and service endpoint to minimize application disruption and ensure zero data loss. ANF Elastic ZRS supports NFS and SMB, ONTAP data management features (snapshots, clones, backup), metadata performance optimizations, and cost‑efficient single‑volume multi‑AZ availability.

🔍 AWS is rolling out the Related resources tab for security groups in the Amazon EC2 and VPC consoles, now generally available. The tab consolidates all resources that depend on a specific security group — such as EC2 instances, ENIs, RDS, and ElastiCache — into a single view, reducing the need to check services individually. This streamlines impact assessment before modifying or deleting security groups and is available in all AWS commercial regions at no additional cost.

🚀 AWS announced general availability of new Amazon EC2 C8id, M8id, and R8id instances powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors. These instances deliver up to 43% higher compute performance and 3.3x more memory bandwidth versus the sixth-generation C6id, M6id, and R6id families, and scale to 384 vCPUs, 3 TiB RAM, and 22.8 TB NVMe SSD storage. They also introduce Instance Bandwidth Configuration for a 25% flexible allocation between network and EBS bandwidth to better match workload needs. Availability is currently in select US regions and Frankfurt for R8id; purchase options include On-Demand, Savings Plans, and Spot.

🔐 Amazon EKS now directly integrates EKS add-ons with EKS Pod Identity in AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West), simplifying lifecycle and IAM permission management for add-ons that need access to AWS services. You can manage Pod Identities via the EKS console, CLI, API, eksctl, and IaC tools like AWS CloudFormation. This GA expansion increases the set of Pod Identity–compatible add-ons available during cluster creation.

🛡️ Microsoft has begun rolling out native Sysmon functionality to some Windows 11 systems enrolled in the Windows Insider program. The built-in feature is disabled by default and requires uninstalling any Sysmon copies from the Sysinternals site before enabling the native implementation. Administrators can enable it via Settings or by running Dism, then complete installation with sysmon -i. Captured events are written to the Windows Event Log and support custom configuration files to filter telemetry.