All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🛰️ Google has extended geospatial analytics in BigQuery, integrating Google Earth AI models and new datasets to enable richer planetary and community insights. Announced at Google Cloud Next '26 and with recent March updates, the release includes Street View Insights (GA) with upcoming LiDAR, experimental Aerial and Satellite Insights, and licenseable Aerial & Satellite Models in Model Garden. These capabilities aim to accelerate infrastructure assessment, logistics planning, renewable-energy siting, and public-sector decision-making by bringing multi-perspective imagery and derived datasets directly into analytics workflows.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports G7e and r5d.16xlarge instances to improve large-model development, training, and deployment at scale. G7e uses NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, offering up to 2.3x better inference performance than G6e and up to 768 GB GPU memory for larger LLMs, multimodal, and agentic AI workloads. The r5d.16xlarge provides 64 vCPUs, 512 GB RAM, and NVMe storage for distributed preprocessing, feature engineering, and memory-heavy orchestration; G7e is available in select US and Asia Pacific regions while r5d.16xlarge is available across all HyperPod regions.

📊 Amazon SageMaker Training Plans now publishes Amazon CloudWatch metrics to track utilization of capacity reservations tied to purchased Flexible Training Plans. Administrators gain both historical and real‑time views of instance usage at the individual plan level and across an account, enabling informed decisions about capacity allocation and cost optimization. This observability helps teams align compute consumption with AI budgets and timelines while reducing wasted reserved capacity.

⚡ AWS has made Amazon EC2 C8ine and M8ine instances generally available. Powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the latest sixth-generation AWS Nitro cards, these instance families deliver up to 43% higher compute performance and up to 2.5× higher packet performance per vCPU versus prior-generation network-optimized instances. They also offer up to 2× higher Internet-gateway throughput and are targeted at security and network virtual appliances such as virtual firewalls, load balancers, and Telco 5G UPF. C8ine and M8ine are available in select AWS regions via Savings Plans and On-Demand.

🚀 AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 R8in network-optimized and R8ib EBS-optimized memory-optimized instances. Powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the latest sixth-generation AWS Nitro cards, the new instances deliver significantly higher throughput and efficiency versus prior generations. R8in offers up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth for real-time analytics and AI/ML caching, while R8ib provides up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth for storage-intensive databases. These instances are available in select US and Europe regions on Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot.

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced general availability of Amazon EC2 M8in network‑optimized and M8ib EBS‑optimized instances, powered by custom sixth‑generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the latest Nitro cards. They deliver up to 43% higher performance versus M6in/M6ib. M8in provides 600 Gbps network bandwidth for real‑time analytics, in‑memory caching, AI/ML cache fleets and 5G UPF; M8ib offers up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth for high‑performance file systems and NoSQL. Available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Spain) via On‑Demand, Spot and Savings Plans.

📧 Microsoft is investigating an ongoing Outlook.com outage that is causing intermittent sign‑in failures and unexpected sign‑outs for some users. A high volume of reports on Downdetector indicate many customers are seeing connection problems and too many requests errors when attempting to access mailboxes. Microsoft says client sign‑in scenarios may be contributing and is validating interactions across service components. The company has flagged the incident as a service degradation but has not disclosed a root cause or affected regions.

🔒 CrowdStrike has been named a Leader in Frost & Sullivan’s 2026 Radar for Cloud‑Native Application Protection Platforms, marking the fourth consecutive recognition. Frost & Sullivan evaluated over 30 CNAPP offerings and the top 13 vendors, highlighting CrowdStrike for combining posture management with real‑time detection and response in Falcon Cloud Security. Recent features such as adversary‑informed risk prioritization, Timeline Explorer, and Charlotte AI are cited for accelerating investigation and automated remediation.

🛠️ Microsoft is rolling out a revamped Windows Insider Program to simplify channel structure and improve transparency around feature availability. The company is merging Dev and Canary into a new Experimental channel for high-risk or potentially non-shipping work, while maintaining an updated Beta channel where features in release notes will be broadly available without gradual rollouts. Experimental items may be gated behind Feature flags that users can toggle in Settings, and Microsoft is migrating Insiders in phases while shipping several preview builds and an updated Windows Update experience to give users more control over updates and reboots.

🐧 AWS now offers new Amazon WorkSpaces Personal bundles featuring Rocky Linux 9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, and Ubuntu 24.04, enabling customers to launch managed WorkSpaces with the latest enterprise-grade Linux distributions. These bundles provide access to modern package ecosystems, improved security postures, and extended long-term support lifecycles, and they offer a migration path ahead of Amazon Linux 2 end of life in June 2026. The new options are available in all AWS Regions where WorkSpaces is offered; select a bundle when creating a Linux WorkSpace and review pricing on the Amazon WorkSpaces pricing page.

🚀 AWS Lambda now offers Provisioned Mode for event source mappings that consume Apache Kafka in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) and both AWS GovCloud (US‑East) and GovCloud (US‑West) Regions. Provisioned Mode lets you provision and auto-scale a configured minimum and maximum number of event pollers so polling capacity is ready to handle sudden traffic spikes and reduce processing delays. It supports Amazon MSK and self‑managed Kafka and can be enabled via the ESM API, Console, CLI, SDKs, or CloudFormation. Usage of event pollers is billed by Event Poller Units (EPUs).

🔗 Amazon Quick now integrates with Vee, the AI assistant from Visier, via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling HR, finance, and operations leaders to access governed workforce intelligence directly inside the Quick workspace. After connecting to Visier’s remote MCP server, users can ask natural-language questions about headcount, attrition, tenure, and open requisitions and receive answers grounded in Visier’s governed data model. Vee can also be invoked from automated Quick Flows to run recurring reviews or draft documents, and Quick augments responses with enterprise knowledge from Quick Spaces—such as budgets, policies, and plans—so answers reflect the broader organizational context. The Visier integration is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Quick is offered.

🔒 Amazon announced VPC egress support for AgentCore Gateway targets and AgentCore Identity, available in managed and self‑managed configurations. The capability lets Gateways invoke private resources inside a customer VPC (for example, EKS-hosted MCP servers) and allows Identity to validate tokens from and fetch tokens for private IdPs. The release also adds private DNS resolution for managed egress resources and is available in fourteen AWS Regions.

🔧 Microsoft is rolling out Windows Update improvements to give users more control over update timing and reduce disruptive restarts. Insiders will see options to skip updates during OOBE, select specific pause dates via a calendar for up to 35 days, and separate standard power actions from update-triggering commands. Driver, .NET, and firmware updates will be consolidated with monthly quality updates to minimize reboots, while users can still opt to install specific updates earlier.

🤖 Google Cloud Next '26 in Las Vegas showcased a broad enterprise push into the agentic era, with over 32,000 attendees and 260 product, partner, and customer announcements. Highlights include the new Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, the Gemini Enterprise app, 8th-generation TPUs, and a host of agent-focused capabilities for development, runtime, memory, observability, and governance. The week emphasized production readiness, cross-cloud data integration, and strengthened security through the Wiz acquisition and Model Armor integrations.

🔐 AWS Secrets Manager now prefers hybrid post-quantum TLS (ML‑KEM) for supported clients to reduce harvest-now, decrypt-later risk. Customers using the listed clients and SDK versions can get ML‑KEM key exchange without code changes; secrets at rest remain encrypted with AWS KMS and symmetric algorithms are considered quantum-resistant. Verify client negotiation via CloudTrail tlsDetails.keyExchange == X25519MLKEM768 and check SDK/OpenSSL requirements (for example, OpenSSL 3.5+ for Python). CRYSTALS‑Kyber support is being phased out in 2026, so upgrades are recommended to avoid fallback to traditional TLS.

🔒 Amazon Connect now records agent activity status changes made through analytics dashboards in CloudTrail, capturing the supervisor identity, timestamp, and the specific status transition. This enhancement provides contact centers with clearer audit trails and operational visibility for actions such as switching an agent from "Available" to "Break." The capability is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions where Amazon Connect is offered; ensure CloudTrail logging is enabled to see the events automatically.

🔐 Microsoft will roll out Entra passkey support for phishing‑resistant passwordless authentication on Windows devices starting in late April, with general availability expected by mid‑June 2026. The capability enables device‑bound FIDO2 passkeys stored in the Windows Hello container and used via face, fingerprint, or PIN on corporate, personal, and shared devices, including unmanaged Windows machines. Administrators can control rollout and access through Conditional Access and Authentication Methods policies.

📊 Amazon Connect now exposes eight new metrics to evaluate AI agent outcomes, including goal success rate, faithfulness score, and tool selection accuracy. These metrics give contact center teams visibility into whether AI-driven interactions resolve customer requests and where contextual hallucinations occur. Metrics are accessible from the AI Agent Performance dashboard, the GetMetricDataV2 API, or a zero-ETL data lake for custom reporting. This capability is available in all Regions that support Amazon Connect AI Agents.

🚀 AWS has added High Memory U7i instances in new regions, bringing the u7i-8tb.112xlarge to Europe (Stockholm, Zurich), the u7in-16tb.224xlarge to US East (Ohio), and the u7in-24tb.224xlarge to Europe (Stockholm). These 7th-generation instances are powered by custom 4th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) and DDR5 memory, offering 8, 16, and 24 TiB options with 448 or 896 vCPUs. They deliver high EBS and network throughput (up to 100 Gbps EBS; up to 100–200 Gbps network) and include ENA Express, making them well suited for mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.