All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔁 Amazon RDS and Aurora now allow viewing and modifying backup retention periods and preferred backup windows before and during snapshot restores. Previously, restored instances and clusters inherited backup settings from snapshot metadata and required post-restore changes. The update exposes these backup configuration values on automated backups and snapshots and lets you set or change them as part of the restore workflow. This capability is available across all supported engines and regions via the Console, AWS CLI, and SDKs at no additional cost.

🔐 Cyber attackers are increasingly embedding malware inside password-protected ZIP archives and splitting the delivery chain by sending the archive via email while transmitting the password out-of-band (SMS or messaging apps). Traditional scanners struggle to inspect these encrypted attachments. New Threat Emulation capabilities can now inspect and block malicious ZIP files without requiring the password, closing the delivery gap. This reduces reliance on manual password sharing and strengthens perimeter defenses.

🔒 In December 2025 npm completed a major credential overhaul, revoking long‑lived classic tokens and moving to short‑lived session tokens and OIDC Trusted Publishing to reduce supply‑chain risk. While MFA by default and ephemeral per‑run CI credentials limit exposure, optional 90‑day tokens that bypass MFA and successful MFA phishing still permit rapid malicious publishes. Developers should favor OIDC, avoid long‑lived bypassable tokens, and enforce MFA-on-publish where possible to further harden the ecosystem.

🔢 Amazon Aurora DSQL now supports identity columns and sequence objects, enabling auto-incrementing, integer-based IDs to be generated directly in the database. This simplifies migrations from PostgreSQL and reduces the need for application-layer ID generation. The capability is available in all Regions where Aurora DSQL is provided and supports compact, human-readable identifiers such as order numbers and account IDs.

🔁 ecdysis is a Cloudflare open-source Rust library that enables graceful process restarts without dropping live connections or refusing new connections. It uses a fork-then-exec model with inherited listening sockets and a readiness handshake so the new process can initialize safely. The design provides crash safety during upgrades and prevents gaps where the kernel would refuse connections. The library integrates with Tokio and systemd and has been production-proven since 2021, saving millions of requests across Cloudflare’s global network.

⚙️ AWS now supports the latest x86 Amazon EC2 instance families — C8i, M8i, and R8i — on second-generation AWS Outposts racks. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and offer about 20% better performance, 2.5× more memory bandwidth, and 20% more compute capacity versus the prior C7i, M7i, and R7i models within the same rack footprint. They are aimed at on-premises workloads such as larger databases, memory-intensive applications, real-time analytics, high-performance video encoding, and CPU-based edge ML inference.

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced that Amazon Bedrock now supports the latest open-weight models in Asia Pacific (Sydney) through the bedrock-mantle endpoint. The update brings models from providers including DeepSeek, Google, MiniMax, Mistral, Moonshot AI, Nvidia, and OpenAI, expanding local model choice. Powered by Project Mantle, bedrock-mantle delivers a distributed, serverless inference engine with advanced quality-of-service controls, automated capacity management and unified pools. It also offers out-of-the-box OpenAI API compatibility to simplify integration for developers.

🔐 Bitwarden has introduced Cupid Vault, a free feature that lets users create a two-person shared Organization to securely share login credentials with a trusted email address. Owners assign credentials to the second member, can verify enrollments using a fingerprint phrase to prevent man‑in‑the‑middle attacks, and can revoke access at any time; the Organization vault is isolated from personal vaults. Cupid Vault is limited to two users and two collections and is distinct from Bitwarden's paid Family, Teams, and Enterprise plans that provide broader sharing and role-based controls.

🔐 Amazon announced that Amazon S3 Access Grants are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region. Access Grants map corporate identities in directories such as Microsoft Entra ID or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to S3 datasets, enabling scalable, identity-based data access. The feature automates S3 permission assignment for end users and simplifies data governance for enterprises operating in Taipei. Refer to the AWS Region Table and product documentation for regional availability and deployment guidance.

🔒 Amazon Bedrock now supports AWS PrivateLink for the bedrock-mantle endpoint, enabling private network access to OpenAI API-compatible service endpoints. The bedrock-mantle endpoint is powered by Project Mantle, a distributed inference engine that simplifies model onboarding and delivers serverless, high-performance inference with QoS controls and higher default quotas. This expansion gives enterprises a private connectivity option across multiple AWS Regions for building and scaling generative AI applications.

🔐 AWS has added Amazon DynamoDB to the set of services supported by Resource Control Policies (RCPs), enabling organizations to centrally constrain the maximum permissions available to resources. Administrators can now use RCPs to block identities outside their AWS Organization from accessing DynamoDB, helping enforce a data perimeter and baseline security standards. RCPs are available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

🚀Amazon increased default quotas for Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 in Amazon Bedrock running in AWS GovCloud (US-West and US-East), raising throughput to 5,000,000 tokens per minute and 1,000 requests per minute. The 25× increase aligns GovCloud limits with commercial regions and lets regulated customers scale high-volume AI workloads more effectively. Consult the AWS GovCloud console and Bedrock documentation to get started.

🔔 The Frankfurt Cyberintelligence Institute (CII) has launched the Cyber Risk Observation Service (CYROS), a smartphone warning app that consolidates security-relevant alerts on ransomware, phishing and digital sabotage. CYROS aggregates official and specialist sources — including the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), consumer protection groups and security vendors, and will integrate SOC feeds from Datagroup. Alerts are paired with tailored guidance and are sortable by topic, life area and federal state; the app is free in app stores and alerts are also accessible online.

🌐 AI troubleshooting in the AWS Support Center is now available in seven additional languages beyond English: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Simplified), Mandarin (Traditional), Spanish, Portuguese, and French. The capability provides immediate, contextual recommendations while customers create support cases, helping to diagnose and remediate issues faster. It is integrated into the support experience and available to all customers regardless of support plan; users can enable it via console language settings and the "Try it now" banner.

🚀Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 X8i instances, next-generation memory-optimized VMs powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS. X8i delivers up to 43% higher performance, up to 1.5x more memory capacity (to 6 TB) and 3.3x greater memory bandwidth versus the prior X2i generation, targeting SAP HANA, large databases, analytics and EDA. The family includes 14 sizes, two bare-metal options, and is available in select US and EU regions; purchase options include On-Demand, Savings Plans and Spot.

💡 Google Cloud updated its spend-based Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), moving from a credit-based model to a direct discounted price model that makes net costs and savings visible at a glance. The rollout began in July 2025 and is now generally available, expanding SKU coverage to include Cloud Run and H3/M-series VMs and correcting reporting gaps for mixed Flex CUD environments. The unified CUD Analysis provides hourly granularity (up to 30 days), CSV exports, and a metadata export for programmatic joins with Billing BigQuery Export datasets. Enhanced recommendation and scenario modeling let FinOps teams size commitments, tune coverage thresholds, and validate pre/post migration savings.

💡 Pantone built an agentic AI experience, the Palette Generator, to translate decades of color expertise into an interactive, chat-driven workflow. The system uses specialized agents for roles like a “chief color scientist” and relies on Azure Cosmos DB as the real-time persistence layer for chat history, prompts, and interaction telemetry. By moving toward vectorized embeddings and integrating with Microsoft Foundry and Azure AI services, Pantone improved semantic relevance and global scale. The architecture prioritized fast retrieval, conversational memory, and iterative learning.

⚡AWS announced general availability of new Amazon EC2 M8azn instances, powered by fifth-generation AMD EPYC (Turin) processors delivering up to 5 GHz maximum CPU frequency. M8azn offers up to 2x compute versus M5zn and up to 24% higher performance than M8a, with increased memory bandwidth, a larger L3 cache, and higher networking and EBS throughput. Available in nine sizes (2–96 vCPU) including two bare-metal options, these Nitro-based instances target latency-sensitive workloads such as HFT, real-time analytics, HPC, gaming, and simulation. Regions at launch include N. Virginia, Oregon, Tokyo, and Frankfurt, and they are available via Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot.

📝 Cloudflare has introduced Markdown for Agents, an edge feature that converts HTML to Markdown in real time when a client requests text/markdown via content negotiation. The service returns a markdown body, a content-type of text/markdown, and an x-markdown-tokens header estimating token count to help with chunking and context-window planning. Converted responses also include a Content-Signal header (ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes) to indicate permitted downstream uses. The feature is available in Beta at no additional cost for Pro, Business, Enterprise and SSL for SaaS customers.

🔒 Certification has shifted from a compliance checkbox to a practical control CISOs use to demonstrate how security is designed, governed, and sustained. Fortinet frames credible certification programs as evidence that processes such as vulnerability handling, lifecycle management, and secure development are enforced and repeatable, not ad hoc. The company highlights more than 130 active certifications and its recent IEC 62443-4-1 Maturity Level 2 achievement, and points stakeholders to the Fortinet Trust Portal for transparent, verifiable documentation.