All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 At Google Cloud Next ’26, Google unveiled a suite of GKE enhancements focused on large-scale AI and agentic workloads. Highlights include the new GKE Agent Sandbox (gVisor-based isolation for fast, secure sandboxes), private GA of GKE hypercluster to manage millions of accelerators across regions, and inference upgrades like Predictive Latency Boost and KV cache tiering. Preview RL features and intent-based autoscaling on custom metrics further enhance utilization and reliability.

🚀 At Google Cloud Next '26, Looker was updated to enable Agentic BI through deeper integration with Gemini and BigQuery, introducing conversational agents that can trigger downstream business actions. New agents include upgraded Conversational Agents, Dashboard Agents, embedded conversational experiences, and Agentic Workflows. The release also modernizes the UI with AI-powered self-service tools like Visualization, Expression, and Insight Assistants. Emphasis is on governed semantic layers, open protocols, and developer tooling to reduce hallucinations and accelerate model-driven analytics.

🔎 Google is evolving Dataplex into the Knowledge Catalog, an always-on context engine that supplies AI agents with business semantics, entity relationships, and governance to reduce hallucinations and latency. It aggregates metadata across Google services and third-party catalogs, ingests LookML and BigQuery measures, and packages governed data products for production use. Enrichment via multimodal extraction and Gemini plus access-aware, high-precision semantic search helps agents retrieve authoritative context in real time.

⚠️ Microsoft has traced an ongoing Universal Print sharing failure to a code change in the Microsoft Graph API, which increased Entra ID directory replication latency and exposed a pre-existing race condition that causes intermittent “Sharing Print Failed” errors when creating certain printer shares. The issue (UP1287359) affects shares created with the "Allow all users in my organization" toggle or when specific users/groups are selected. Microsoft is deploying a corrective code change and published a 13-step workaround that involves creating the share without assigning members initially, waiting for propagation, and then adding users or security groups manually.

🛡️ Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server now supports the latest General Distribution Release (GDR) updates from Microsoft for SQL Server 2019 (CU32+GDR KB5077469, RDS version 15.00.4460.4.v1) and SQL Server 2022 (CU23+GDR KB5077464, RDS version 16.00.4240.4.v1). These GDRs remediate vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-21262 and CVE-2026-26115. You can apply the recommended updates using the Amazon RDS Management Console or programmatically via the AWS SDK or CLI; see the Amazon RDS Custom User Guide for upgrade guidance.

🚀 AWS has expanded Lambda durable functions into 16 additional regions, enabling developers to run orchestrated, multi-step serverless workflows closer to users and data. The feature adds primitives like steps and waits to checkpoint progress, recover from failures, and pause execution without incurring compute charges for on‑demand functions. You can enable durable functions for Python 3.13/3.14, Node.js 22/24, or Java 17+ via the API, Console, SDK, or IaC tools such as CloudFormation, SAM, and CDK.

🔒 CrowdStrike's Falcon Cloud Security delivered a 264% return on investment over three years, according to a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study. By unifying cloud posture management and runtime protection on a single platform, organizations gained real-time cross-domain context, runtime controls, and AI-assisted triage that improved detection and response. The study quantified $13.8 million in benefits with payback in under six months and reported reductions in multicloud tooling costs, investigation time, and false positives.

🔒 CrowdStrike expanded real-time cloud detection and response (CDR) to Google Cloud, ingesting Google Cloud activity into the Falcon Cloud Security detection pipeline. The beta capability analyzes cloud telemetry in real time and integrates with the broader Falcon platform, threat intelligence and CrowdStrike Charlotte AI to accelerate hunting and investigations. The company also added Kubernetes control plane detections for GKE and regional Google Cloud infrastructure support to help meet data residency requirements.

🔁 Amazon has added a rollback capability for Amazon OpenSearch Service service software updates, allowing administrators to revert a domain to a previous software state if issues occur. Rollbacks use a blue/green deployment model and must be initiated within 15 days of an applied update via the new RollbackServiceSoftwareUpdate API, the AWS CLI, or the management console. The option is available in all Regions where the service is offered.

🔒 The Winter 2025 SOC 1 report from AWS is now available, covering 184 services for the 12‑month period January 1–December 31, 2025. Customers can download the report through AWS Artifact. AWS reiterates its commitment to meeting heightened expectations for cloud service providers, and to continuously bring additional services into compliance scope. If you have questions or feedback, contact your AWS account team or the AWS Compliance team.

🚀 Azure Accelerate for Databases is a Microsoft program that helps organizations modernize database estates to become AI-ready. It bundles a Savings Plan (up to 35% vs. pay-as-you-go), delivery funding, Azure credits, zero-cost Cloud Accelerate Factory support, partner services, AI-enhanced assessments, and role-based skilling. The offering aims to reduce friction and speed migrations at scale. Microsoft highlights Thomson Reuters’ migration of over 18,000 databases as a customer example.

🔧 Amazon SageMaker AI now provides inference recommendations that automate optimization and benchmarking to deliver validated, deployment-ready configurations. Customers supply their own generative models, define expected traffic patterns, and set a performance objective — optimize for cost, minimize latency, or maximize throughput. SageMaker analyzes model architecture, benchmarks across multiple instance types using NVIDIA AIPerf, and returns metrics such as time to first token, inter-token latency, request latency percentiles, throughput, and cost projections. The capability is available today in seven AWS Regions.

🌐 Amazon SageMaker now supports multi-region replication from IAM Identity Center (IdC), allowing administrators to deploy SageMaker Unified Studio domains in regions separate from their IdC instance. This capability preserves centralized single sign-on while enabling data residency and sovereignty controls. It is aimed at enterprise and regulated customers who need to process sensitive data in specific jurisdictions without fragmenting identity management.

🔔 AWS has added five new Qwen foundation models to SageMaker JumpStart, including Qwen3-Coder-Next, Qwen3-30B-A3B, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507, Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct, and Qwen3.5-4B. The models support agentic coding, extended reasoning, multimodal and multilingual workloads, and lightweight deployments. Customers can deploy them from SageMaker Studio or via the SageMaker Python SDK to accelerate development of coding agents and multimodal applications.

🔗 Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) introduces the Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes gateway to automate networking between an EKS cluster VPC and Kubernetes Pods running on EKS Hybrid Nodes. The gateway removes the need to make on‑premises pod networks routable and avoids extensive coordination with network teams by automatically maintaining VPC route tables as workloads scale. Deployed to Amazon EC2 instances via Helm, the gateway also enables control-plane-to-webhook, pod-to-pod, and AWS service connectivity (ALB, NLB, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus). The codebase is open source and the feature is available in all Regions where EKS Hybrid Nodes is supported, excluding China Regions. AWS offers the gateway itself at no additional charge; customers pay for underlying EC2 and data transfer costs.

🧾 AWS Marketplace now provides a unified, self-service workflow for sellers to submit VAT invoices and receive automated VAT disbursements under deemed supply rules in the EU, UK, and Norway. Sellers can use the AWS Marketplace Management portal or AWS Partner Central to submit invoices, track status in real time, and consolidate multiple deemed supply transactions into a single periodic invoice when they share the same AWS EMEA branch and currency. The system validates required fields and disburses VAT after buyer payment, while supporting pre-submission so payments are processed once conditions are satisfied. Enhanced Seller Reports assist reconciliation and audit readiness and remove prior manual steps and separate platform onboarding.

🚀 Google Public Sector is launching coordinated initiatives to help partners build, certify, and bring AI solutions to government customers faster. The program includes a federal startup accelerator in collaboration with NVIDIA for AI-focused ISVs, an expanded ISV ATO Accelerator offering up to $1M in funding, and a new Distributor Channel Private Offer with Carahsoft. These efforts target procurement, compliance, and legacy environment barriers to speed deployment of mission-critical AI.

🎉 Google Cloud today announced its 2026 Partner of the Year winners, honoring partners who used Google Cloud technologies to deliver transformative customer outcomes. Winners span global and country-level awards across categories such as Artificial Intelligence, Data, Security, Infrastructure Modernization, Google Workspace, and more. The awards recognize innovation, collaboration, and measurable impact in industries worldwide. Congratulations to the partners driving progress and customer success.

🔒 Amazon now enables AWS PrivateLink access for Athena Spark, allowing clients in an Amazon VPC to reach Athena Spark APIs and endpoints without traversing the public internet. You can create an interface VPC endpoint to connect to Athena Spark using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS CloudFormation. The endpoint covers all Athena Spark APIs and endpoints — including Spark Connect, Spark Live UI, and the Spark History Server — keeping communication inside the AWS network to support security and compliance requirements.

📌 AWS Lambda now supports S3 Files, allowing functions to mount Amazon S3 buckets as file systems and perform standard file operations without pre-downloading objects. Built on Amazon EFS, S3 Files combines file-system performance with S3 scalability and durability, and multiple functions can share a mounted workspace concurrently. The integration streamlines stateful and AI/ML workflows and is configurable via console, CLI, SDKs, CloudFormation, or SAM; standard Lambda and S3 pricing applies.