All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Amazon SageMaker HyperPod: Programmatic Node Recovery

🚀 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod is now generally available with new programmatic APIs that let administrators reboot or replace cluster nodes at scale. The BatchRebootClusterNodes and BatchReplaceClusterNodes APIs provide an orchestrator-agnostic way to recover unresponsive or degraded nodes for both Slurm and EKS clusters. Each API supports batch operations for up to 25 instances and complements existing orchestrator-specific workflows. The capabilities are currently available in US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and are accessible via the AWS CLI, SDKs, or API calls.

AWS API MCP Server Now Available on AWS Marketplace

🔐 The AWS API MCP Server is now available on AWS Marketplace, enabling customers to deploy the Model Context Protocol (MCP) server to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore as a managed offering. The marketplace deployment provides built-in authentication (SigV4 or JWT), session isolation, and simplified container management while enabling configurable IAM roles and network settings to meet enterprise security requirements. Customers also benefit from AgentCore's logging and monitoring capabilities and regional availability where Bedrock AgentCore is supported.

AWS Health: actionability and persona for triage updates

🔔 AWS Health introduced two new event schema properties — actionability and persona — to help customers identify and prioritize operational notifications. Delivered via the AWS Health API and Health EventBridge, these fields let organizations programmatically flag events that require customer action and route them to relevant teams such as security or billing. Available across all AWS Commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions, the change streamlines integrations with monitoring, ticketing, and automation systems to improve triage and remediation workflows.

AWS Compute Optimizer: Unused NAT Gateway Recommendations

🔔 AWS announced that AWS Compute Optimizer now provides idle resource recommendations for NAT Gateways, helping identify unused NAT Gateways and realize potential cost savings. The feature flags NAT Gateways that show no traffic over a 32-day analysis period by evaluating CloudWatch metrics such as active connection count and incoming packet metrics. Compute Optimizer also checks Route Table associations to avoid recommending critical backup resources and surfaces estimated savings and utilization details for validation before remediation.

Amazon CloudWatch Adds Deletion Protection for Log Groups

🔒 Amazon CloudWatch now lets you enable deletion protection on log groups to prevent accidental or unintended removals. Once enabled, a log group cannot be deleted until protection is explicitly turned off, helping preserve audit, compliance, and operational logs. The feature is available in all AWS commercial Regions and can be configured during creation or applied to existing groups via the Console, AWS CLI, AWS CDK, and AWS SDKs.

Amazon Route 53 Accelerated Recovery for Public DNS

⚡ Enabling the accelerated recovery option for Amazon Route 53 public hosted zones gives customers a predictable 60-minute recovery time objective (RTO) to regain the ability to modify public DNS records if AWS services in US East (N. Virginia) are temporarily unavailable. The feature is available globally except in GovCloud and China, and there is no additional charge. It supports faster DNS change operations for banking, FinTech, and SaaS customers to meet continuity and disaster recovery objectives.

Microsoft hardens Entra ID sign-ins against script injection

🔒 Microsoft will strengthen the Entra ID browser sign-in experience starting mid-to-late October 2026 by enforcing a stricter Content Security Policy that permits scripts only from Microsoft-trusted CDN domains and approved inline sources. The change applies to sign-ins at login.microsoftonline.com; Microsoft Entra External ID is not affected. Administrators should test sign-in flows, remove code-injecting extensions and review developer-console violations to identify and address dependencies before the rollout.

Huawei and Chinese Surveillance: Industry Complicity

🔍 The excerpt, from House of Huawei, recounts Wan Runnan’s experience as a celebrated 1980s entrepreneur who later fled China after supporting the 1989 pro‑democracy protests. At a late‑1980s dinner, local officials told him the Ministry of State Security planned to embed agents in tech firms under the pretext of protection, particularly in roles handling international relations. Wan reports that similar approaches were made to other companies and says Huawei, then a small Shenzhen startup, almost certainly would not have been exempt. He warns that telecommunications back‑end platforms are uniquely able to enable state eavesdropping, a rare public glimpse into intelligence ties with industry.

Passwork 7: Self-hosted Password and Secrets Manager

🔐 Passwork 7 is a self-hosted password and secrets manager designed for enterprise teams, combining a user-facing password vault with a programmatic secrets management system. It introduces a flexible vault architecture (user, company, and custom vault types), granular RBAC, secure internal and external sharing, and comprehensive audit trails. The platform supports SSO/LDAP, an API-first model with a Python connector, CLI and Docker deployment, and a zero-knowledge encryption mode to keep data encrypted client-side. Passwork 7 targets organizations seeking unified human and machine credential governance with self-hosting and compliance controls.

Amazon Quick Research Adds Third-Party Industry Data

🔍 Amazon Quick Research now integrates specialized third-party industry datasets from S&P Global, FactSet, and IDC, alongside public patent and PubMed collections. Users with existing subscriptions can combine these authoritative sources with enterprise data and real-time web search inside a unified AI workspace. The capability compresses weeks of data discovery and analysis into minutes and helps teams move more quickly from insight to action. The integration is available in select AWS Regions.

Amazon Bedrock Reserved Tier for Predictable Performance

🔒 Amazon Bedrock now offers a Reserved service tier that provides prioritized compute and guaranteed input/output tokens-per-minute capacity for inference workloads. Customers can reserve asymmetric input and output capacities to match workload patterns, and excess traffic overflows automatically to the pay-as-you-go Standard tier to keep operations running. The tier targets 99.5% model response uptime and is available today for Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4.5, with 1- or 3-month reservations billed monthly at a fixed price per 1K tokens-per-minute.

SageMaker AI Adds Flexible Training Plans for Inference

⚙️ Amazon SageMaker AI's Flexible Training Plans (FTP) now support inference endpoints, allowing customers to reserve guaranteed GPU capacity for planned evaluations and production peaks. You choose instance types, compute requirements, reservation length, and start date, then reference the reservation ARN when creating an endpoint. SageMaker AI automatically provisions and runs the endpoint on the reserved capacity for the plan duration, removing much of the infrastructure scheduling overhead. FTP for inference is initially available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and US East (Ohio).

AWS Knowledge MCP Server Adds Topic-Based Search for Domains

🔎 The AWS Knowledge MCP Server now supports topic-based search across specialized documentation domains, enabling more precise queries against areas such as Troubleshooting, AWS Amplify, AWS CDK, CDK Constructs, and AWS CloudFormation. This enhancement lets MCP clients and agentic frameworks target domain-specific resources to reduce noise and improve relevance. The capability complements existing API reference and general documentation search features and is available immediately at no additional cost, subject to standard rate limits.

Amazon Lex Enables LLMs as Primary NLU Across Connect

🤖 Amazon Lex now lets developers use Large Language Models (LLMs) as the primary natural language understanding option for voice and chat bots. Using LLMs improves handling of complex or misspelled utterances, extracts key details from verbose inputs, and enables intelligent follow‑up questions when customer intent is unclear. This capability is available in all AWS commercial regions where Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex operate, helping teams build more accurate, conversational self‑service experiences.

AWS Glue 5.1 GA: Spark 3.5, Iceberg 3.0, Lake Formation

⚡ AWS Glue 5.1 is now generally available, upgrading core engines to Apache Spark 3.5.6, Python 3.11, and Scala 2.12.18 to deliver performance and security improvements. The release refreshes open table format support (Apache Hudi 1.0.2, Apache Iceberg 1.10.0, Delta Lake 3.3.2) and adds Apache Iceberg format 3.0 features such as default column values and deletion vectors. AWS Lake Formation now enforces fine‑grained write control for Spark DDL/DML, and Glue adds full‑table access control for Hudi and Delta tables in Spark.

Amazon EMR and AWS Glue Enforce Lake Formation Write FGAC

🔐 Amazon has extended AWS Lake Formation fine-grained access control to include write operations for tables registered with Lake Formation when used in Apache Spark jobs on Amazon EMR and AWS Glue. Administrators can now enforce table-, column-, and row-level permissions for DML actions (CREATE, ALTER, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE INTO, DROP) as well as read operations, enabling single-job read/write pipelines. The change reduces the need for separate clusters or applications and centralizes governance. The feature is available in all Regions where EMR, Glue, and Lake Formation are supported.

Amazon EMR and AWS Glue Add Audit Context for Lake Formation

🔒 Amazon EMR and AWS Glue now include comprehensive audit context support for AWS Lake Formation credential vending APIs and AWS Glue Data Catalog GetTable and GetTables calls. Enabled by default, the feature logs platform type and identifiers (Cluster ID, Step ID, Job Run ID, Virtual Cluster ID) to AWS CloudTrail for enhanced security auditing and troubleshooting. It supports EMR 7.12+ and AWS Glue 5.1+ across all Regions that offer EMR, AWS Glue, and Lake Formation.

Amazon S3 Metadata Now Available in 22 More Regions

🔍 Amazon S3 Metadata is expanding to twenty-two additional AWS Regions, bringing automated, queryable object and custom metadata closer to more customers. The feature automatically populates metadata for both new and existing objects in near real-time and supports system-defined details (size, source) and user-defined tags such as product SKUs or transaction IDs. This expansion makes S3 Metadata generally available in 28 Regions and enables faster data discovery, curation, and analytics inside existing S3 workflows.

AWS Secrets Manager Introduces Managed External Secrets

🔐 AWS Secrets Manager now supports managed external secrets, a new secret type that standardizes storage and enables automated rotation for third-party application credentials such as Salesforce, Snowflake, and BigID. The feature separates rotation metadata from secret values and integrates directly with providers to remove the need for custom rotation functions. It leverages existing IAM, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, and KMS controls and follows standard Secrets Manager pricing with no additional charge.

Black Friday 2025: Cybersecurity, VPN and Antivirus Deals

🔒 Black Friday 2025 brings a broad selection of verified promotions across security software, VPNs, password managers, antivirus suites, online training, and hardware from major vendors. Highlights include up to 86% off VPN subscriptions, up to 70% off antivirus products, deep discounts on password managers, and reduced pricing for privacy removal services and certification courses. Most offers run from late November through early December and include date-limited coupons; availability and exact savings vary by provider, so confirm terms before buying. BleepingComputer discloses some links are affiliate-supported; if a listed promotion fits your needs, act promptly while the offer remains live.