All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🤖 Google’s open-source Agent Development Kit (ADK) simplifies creating autonomous AI agents that use LLMs such as Gemini as their reasoning core. The post presents three hands-on codelabs that guide developers through building a personal assistant agent, adding custom and third-party tools, and orchestrating multi-agent workflows. Each lab demonstrates practical patterns—scaffolding an agent, integrating tools like Google Search and LangChain components, and using Workflow Agents and session state to pass information—so teams can progress from experiment to production-ready agent systems.

📍 Google has introduced a dedicated form for businesses on Google Maps to report extortion attempts where threat actors post inauthentic negative reviews and demand payment to remove them. The move targets review bombing schemes that flood profiles with fake one-star reviews and then coerce owners, often via third-party messaging apps. Google also highlighted related threats — from job and AI impersonation scams to malicious VPN apps and fraud recovery cons — and advised practical precautions for affected merchants and users.

🔒 Amazon Cognito user pools now support AWS PrivateLink, enabling private VPC connectivity to manage and authenticate against user pools without traversing the public internet. The enhancement covers user pool management APIs, administrative operations, and sign-in for local Cognito users, but does not support OAuth 2.0 authorization code flow (hosted UI/social logins), client credentials, or federated SAML/OIDC sign-ins via VPC endpoints. It is available in all Regions where Cognito user pools exist except AWS GovCloud (US); creating VPC endpoints will incur AWS PrivateLink charges.

🔔 The Amazon Web Services Advanced .NET Data Provider Driver is now generally available for Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and MySQL-compatible databases. The driver reduces RDS Blue/Green switchover and database failover times to improve application availability and supports multiple authentication mechanisms including Federated Authentication, AWS Secrets Manager, and IAM token-based authentication. Built on top of Npgsql, native MySql.Data and MySqlConnector, it integrates with NHibernate and supports Entity Framework for MySQL, and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.

🔐 AWS Key Management Service (KMS) now supports the Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) using the Ed25519 curve. You can create asymmetric KMS keys or data key pairs to sign and verify EdDSA signatures, benefiting from 128-bit security equivalent to NIST P-256, faster signing, and compact 64‑byte signatures and 32‑byte public keys. This capability is available in all AWS Regions, including GovCloud and China.

🔒 The Falcon platform automates executive exposure reporting by correlating telemetry from Falcon Exposure Management, Falcon Cloud Security, and Falcon Next-Gen SIEM into decision-ready summaries. Falcon Fusion SOAR schedules or triggers workflows, and Charlotte AI agentic workflows translate correlated data into plain-language, prioritized reports on demand. The result is near real-time, adversary-aware reporting that maps exploitable vulnerabilities to critical assets and suggests prioritized remediation actions, dramatically reducing manual analyst effort.

🛡️ Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) tools help organizations discover, classify and manage sensitive data across dynamic cloud environments. They focus on locating "shadow data" in known and unknown repositories and typically collect metadata via agentless or API-based scans to avoid moving raw data. DSPM dashboards catalog findings, map lineage and assess compliance, while remediation often integrates with SOAR, SIEM or CNAPP solutions. Many vendors now combine discovery with some automated "fix it" capabilities to streamline response.

🔖 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now lets administrators define custom tags that are applied to resources created by a SageMaker project. Administrators configure project profiles to supply tag key/value pairs or keys with default values that users can modify during project creation, helping enforce tagging standards and support SCPs and cost allocation. This initial release is API-only and available across all supported AWS Regions.

🚀Microsoft refreshed Azure Ultra Disk to deliver substantially lower tail latency, finer provisioning granularity, and faster snapshot-driven recovery for mission-critical workloads. Platform changes target an 80% reduction in P99.9 and outlier latency and a ~30% improvement in average latency. The update raises the IOPS/GiB ceiling to 1,000, introduces 1 GiB billing granularity, and sets minimums of 100 IOPS and 1 MB/s per disk to improve cost optimization. Instant Access Snapshot (public preview) enables disks from snapshots to hydrate up to 10x faster for rapid recovery and scale-out.

🔒 Kaspersky's new SD-WAN 2.5 delivers improved network reliability, performance, and operational efficiency through enhanced traffic rerouting, conditional DNS forwarding, and scheduled CPE configuration. The release automates complex tasks — from graphical BGP/OSPF debugging in the orchestrator to seamless CPE replacement — reducing downtime and lowering the load on regional IT staff. Additional capabilities such as LTE diagnostics, power-failure reporting, console-port security controls, and support for 2000+ CPEs further strengthen fault tolerance and manageability.

🛡️ Continuous purple teaming unites offensive and defensive functions into a collaborative, repeatable cycle that turns testing into measurable defense improvement. Using Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), teams automate emulations mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, safely execute simulated payloads, and instantly score prevention, detection, and response. That evidence-driven loop—attack, observe, fix, validate, repeat—reduces noise, prioritizes real risk, and accelerates remediation. With careful AI assistance and a curated BAS library, organizations can validate controls continuously and focus on the highest-impact gaps.

🔒 CloudWatch Application Signals is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West), extending automated application observability to government and regulated workloads. The service automatically collects telemetry from Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS and AWS Lambda to provide real-time health, dependency visualization and anomaly detection. By eliminating manual instrumentation, it helps teams meet compliance and monitoring requirements while improving incident detection and resolution. For pricing and setup, consult the CloudWatch pricing page and Application Signals documentation.

🔍 AWS announced AWS Capabilities by Region in Builder Center, a web-based tool to discover and compare service availability, features, APIs, and CloudFormation resources across AWS Regions. The interactive interface lets users explore Regions, run side-by-side comparisons, and view forward-looking roadmap details to support global deployment planning. AWS also enhanced the Knowledge MCP Server to expose regional capability data in an LLM-compatible format, enabling MCP clients and agentic frameworks to obtain real-time availability insights and suggested alternatives when features are unavailable.

🚀 Amazon has expanded Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS) to all availability zones in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), and Europe (Paris). EVS runs VMware Cloud Foundation on EC2 bare‑metal instances powered by AWS Nitro, and can be deployed via a step‑by‑step workflow or the AWS CLI in hours. The expansion delivers lower latency, improved data‑residency options, and additional resiliency and high‑availability choices for VMware workloads.

🚀 AWS announces that AWS B2B Data Interchange is now available in the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region, enabling customers to build scalable, cost-efficient EDI workloads locally. The service automates validation, transformation, and generation of EDI files such as ANSI X12, converting to and from JSON and XML to support modern integrations. The regional launch also brings the generative AI mapping capability to Ireland, simplifying mapping code development and accelerating trading partner onboarding.

🔒 AWS IoT Greengrass v2.16 adds a system log forwarder and a new nucleus lite (v2.3) with TPM 2.0 support. The system log forwarder uploads system logs to AWS CloudWatch to simplify debugging and centralize operational visibility for edge applications. The nucleus lite TPM integration provides a hardware-based root of trust for secure secrets storage and streamlined device authentication on resource-constrained devices. The update is available in all AWS Regions where Greengrass is offered.

🚀 Deadline Cloud now supports an expanded set of EC2 instance families — including C7i, C7a, M7i, M7a, R7a, R7i, M8a, M8i and R8i — plus additional 6th-generation types that were previously unavailable. The update broadens compute-optimized, general-purpose and memory-optimized options for visual effects and animation rendering workloads. Studios can better right-size resources for tasks ranging from compute-heavy simulations to memory-intensive scene processing, improving performance and cost-efficiency in the Regions where Deadline Cloud is offered.

🔐 AWS Backup now lets you encrypt logically air-gapped vaults with your own AWS KMS customer managed keys (CMKs). This gives organizations more control over key lifecycle, access policies, and compliance posture while preserving the security benefits of logically air-gapped backups. Support covers same-account and cross-account CMKs and is available in all Regions where air-gapped vaults are supported. You can enable CMK encryption when creating vaults via the console, API, or CLI.

🔐 Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports mounting Amazon EBS volumes to containers running as non-root users. ECS automatically sets file system permissions on the attached EBS volume so non-root processes can securely read and write while preserving root ownership. This removes the need for manual chown/chmod or custom entrypoint scripts, simplifying security-first container deployments. The capability is available across all AWS Regions for EC2, AWS Fargate, and ECS Managed Instances.

🚀 Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is now available in the Middle East (UAE) Region, enabling customers to run Cassandra-compatible applications with lower latency and keep data within the Region to meet data residency requirements. The fully managed, serverless service supports point-in-time recovery, Multi-Region replication, CDC streams, and IPv6, allowing teams to scale without operating Cassandra clusters. Customers pay only for resources used and can use familiar CQL to build high-throughput applications.