All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Starting in February 2026, Amazon EC2 M7i instances are now available in the Africa (Cape Town) Region, powered by AWS-custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids). These chips deliver up to 15% better performance than comparable x86 Intel processors and up to 15% improved price-performance versus M6i, targeting sustained CPU-intensive workloads like gaming servers, CPU-based ML, and video streaming. M7i offers larger sizes up to 48xlarge and two bare-metal options (metal-24xl, metal-48xl) that include built-in Intel accelerators for data streaming, in-memory analytics, and cryptographic offload.

🛡️ Google says it blocked more than 1.75 million apps from being published on Google Play in 2025 and denied over 255,000 apps access to sensitive user data. The company also banned over 80,000 developer accounts and strengthened detection by integrating generative AI into its review process to identify evolving malicious patterns. Play Protect scanned an estimated 350 billion app instances daily and flagged over 27 million malicious sideloaded apps, while the Play Integrity API processed more than 20 billion checks per day.

📢 Amazon MQ now supports ActiveMQ 5.19, bringing a set of fixes and improvements over prior ActiveMQ releases. Amazon MQ will automatically manage patch-level upgrades for your brokers and apply compatible security patches during your scheduled maintenance window. If you are using older versions such as 5.18, AWS recommends upgrading via the AWS Management Console. This version is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon MQ is offered.

🎿 Using Google Cloud AI and Gemini-era vision from DeepMind, the Google Cloud Team and U.S. Ski & Snowboard built a tool that extracts full 3D biomechanical pose data from ordinary video to measure rotation, posture, and airtime. The system defines a torso-based Body Frame and uses quaternions to compute true angular travel, producing a new metric called Rotational Degrees. Visual outputs like the Cork Ribbon reveal axis tilt and consistency for coaches and broadcasters, helping quantify efficiency and the physical feasibility of higher-degree tricks.

🔁 BigQuery now provides autonomous embedding generation that automatically maintains an embedding column derived from a source column, eliminating manual embedding pipelines and synchronization burdens. The managed column is defined via familiar SQL (GENERATED ALWAYS AS AI.EMBED) and can be stored asynchronously. It integrates with VECTOR_SEARCH and a new AI.SEARCH function, and supports secure calls to Vertex AI models with connection-based permissions. The feature is available in preview.

💬 This Google Cloud post by David Tamaki Szajngarten demonstrates how to build a context-aware conversational agent for BigQuery using the Conversational Analytics API powered by Gemini. It provides a reference Python SDK flow to register BigQuery tables, create a DataAgent with system instructions and permitted datasources, and deploy stateful or stateless conversations. The article shows a streaming chat loop that returns generated SQL, DataFrame-like results, Vega‑Lite chart specs, and final natural-language answers, and highlights integration with the Agent Development Kit (ADK) and lifecycle controls.

📘 Microsoft published a new e-book, Establishing proactive defense—A maturity-based guide for adopting a dynamic, risk-based approach to exposure management, that helps security teams move from fragmented, reactive practices to a unified, risk-driven exposure management model. The guide describes five maturity levels, common pain points, and practical next steps to prioritize and verify mitigations. It is intended for security leaders seeking to turn telemetry into measurable risk reduction.

🚀 Google announced Gemini 3.1 Pro, an upgraded foundation model in the Gemini 3 series that emphasizes deeper reasoning and complex problem solving. The model is available in preview in Vertex AI and Gemini Enterprise, and developers can access it through Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, Android Studio, Google Antigravity, and the Gemini CLI. Early customers report meaningful gains in speed, efficiency, and accuracy across code, 3D transformations, and product design workflows.

📱 Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) and Asia Pacific (Taipei) Regions can now send SMS to subscribers across more than 200 countries and territories. Customers in these Regions can send messages via AWS End User Messaging, bringing SMS support to 32 AWS Regions. Amazon SNS is a fully managed pub/sub service that delivers to endpoints such as AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and SMS adds an additional mobile delivery channel. This expansion helps developers extend global notification workflows and manage messaging at scale.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has expanded availability of M8i-flex instances to Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt) and Canada (Central). These instances use AWS-exclusive custom Intel Xeon 6 processors and deliver up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x the memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based generations. AWS reports up to 20% higher overall performance compared with M7i-flex, with workload-specific gains—up to 60% for NGINX, 30% for PostgreSQL, and up to 40% for AI recommendation models. To launch instances, sign in to the AWS Management Console.

🔒 AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now issues public certificates with a 198-day maximum validity, replacing the prior 395-day default to comply with the CA/Browser Forum’s 200-day mandate effective 15 March 2026. No customer action is required: new and renewed public certificates default to 198 days while existing longer-lived certificates remain valid until renewal or expiry. ACM continues to auto-renew certificates (now 45 days before expiry); existing longer-term certificates will renew 60 days before expiry and convert to the 198-day term. AWS also reduced prices for exportable public certificates to reflect the shorter validity.

🤖 Amazon Web Services today announced that Amazon Aurora DSQL now integrates with Kiro powers and AI agent skills to accelerate database-backed application development. The integration packages the Aurora DSQL Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with development best practices so AI agents can assist with schema design, performance tuning, and routine database operations out of the box. Kiro powers provides a curated registry of MCP servers, steering files, and agent hooks with one-click installation in the Kiro IDE. The Aurora DSQL skill extends the same guidance to other agent ecosystems via a Skills CLI, allowing agents to dynamically load Postgres-compatible SQL patterns, distributed design advice, and IAM authentication guidance.

🔌 Google Cloud now offers managed MCP servers for databases and developer tooling, enabling MCP-compliant AI agents (including Gemini) to access data and infrastructure without deploying additional infrastructure. The expansion adds AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, Spanner, Cloud SQL, Bigtable and Firestore, plus a Developer Knowledge MCP server for IDE documentation access. These servers use IAM-based authentication and Cloud Audit Logs for observability and governance, letting teams scale agentic workloads securely.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now offers Mistral AI Devstral 2 123B, an open-weight 123B-parameter LLM optimized for agentic software engineering workflows. The model focuses on code generation, automation, and reliable multi-step reasoning, supporting long-context comprehension for multi-turn coding tasks. Bedrock exposes Devstral 2 via a single, fully managed API so customers do not need to provision infrastructure or host models. It is intended for production coding assistants, automated code review, and complex software development agents and is available in select AWS Regions.

⚙️ Provisioned Throughput on Vertex AI standardizes reserved capacity across first-party, third-party, and open-source models, adding multimodal and operational enhancements to support production-scale AI agents. The update introduces Anthropic integration (private preview), PT for popular open models such as Llama 4, Qwen3, and GLM-4.7, and native support for high-bandwidth modalities including Gemini 3, Nano Banana, and Gemini Live API. Operational improvements — one-week PT terms, scheduled change orders, and explicit caching for long contexts — enable predictable latency, flexible commitments, and lower input costs for peak events and high-concurrency workloads.

🔗 Google Cloud and Ab Initio announced an integrated suite of data and metadata connectors, agents, and governance capabilities to give Gemini and other AI models reliable access to enterprise data across hybrid environments. The partnership federates over 500 sources and supplies field-level lineage from 100+ extractors to populate Dataplex and BigQuery with AI-ready context. This unified metadata hub aims to support explainable, auditable agentic AI while preserving distributed data ownership and compliance.

🔗 Ab Initio and Google Cloud announce integrations of data connectors, metadata connectors, and agent capabilities to help enterprises build agentic AI across hybrid environments. The integration federates distributed data into a unified layer and extends Dataplex with bi-directional metadata exchange, lineage, and active metadata. Together with BigQuery and Gemini, this enables explainable, auditable agents that operate on trustworthy, multi-cloud data.

🔔 Amazon Connect Cases now integrates with AWS Service Quotas, enabling administrators to view applied limits, monitor utilization, and request quota increases directly from the Service Quotas console. Eligible quota requests can be automatically approved, reducing manual approval bottlenecks. Available in multiple AWS Regions, this update helps teams scale case workloads and avoid unexpected service constraints.

🔷 Google Spanner has been ranked #1 by Gartner in the Critical Capabilities report for the Lightweight Transactions use case for the second consecutive year and #2 for OLTP. The post highlights Spanner’s distributed transaction support (5.0/5.0), high transactional consistency (4.9/5.0), and AI/ML integration (4.6/5.0). It also summarizes 2025 product advances—Spanner Graph GA, integrated hybrid search, a columnar engine, and Cassandra-compatible APIs—and cites customer deployments at Palo Alto Networks, Mercado Libre, and Unico.

🔐 Amazon Managed Grafana now supports customer-managed keys (CMKs) through AWS Key Management Service (KMS), enabling you to encrypt workspace data with keys you control. Previously, Amazon Managed Grafana used AWS-owned keys by default; this option lets organizations add a self-managed encryption layer to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. The feature is available in all generally available regions except AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.