All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

AWS IoT Core: Retrieve Thing Registry Data via Rules

🔧 AWS IoT Core now supports dynamic retrieval of thing registry data directly within IoT rules using the new get_registry_data() inline rule function. You can access device attributes, device type, and group membership to filter, enrich, and route messages — for example, routing lifecycle events or enriching gateway messages with sensor thresholds. The feature is available in all AWS regions where AWS IoT Core is present and can be used immediately via the IoT developer guide and API.

Amazon CloudFront Adds mutual TLS Authentication Now

🔒 Amazon CloudFront now supports mutual TLS (mTLS), enabling both server and client authentication with X.509 certificates at AWS edge locations. Customers can require trusted client certificates to access distributions, reducing unauthorized access to APIs and applications. Typical uses include secure B2B API integrations and IoT device authentication. mTLS is available at no additional cost and configurable via Console, CLI, SDK, CDK, and CloudFormation.

AWS OpenSearch Service adds PPL and natural language

🔍 Amazon OpenSearch Service now makes Piped Processing Language (PPL) and natural language the default experience in the OpenSearch UI Observability workspace. The release introduces 35+ new commands for deep analysis, faceted exploration, and natural-language querying, and integrates OpenTelemetry ingestion pipelines to simplify onboarding. Users can run enterprise-grade queries, correlate events, and move directly from query to visualization to reduce mean time to detect and resolve issues.

Amazon EC2 Introduces Interruptible Capacity Reservations

🔁 Amazon EC2 now offers interruptible On‑Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs), allowing reservation owners to temporarily make unused reserved capacity available to other internal workloads while retaining the ability to reclaim it. Consumers using interruptible ODCRs receive an interruption notice to allow graceful shutdown or checkpointing. The capability targets flexible, fault‑tolerant tasks such as batch processing, data analysis, and machine learning training, is available at no additional cost, and CloudFormation support is coming soon.

SCCM and WSUS in Hybrid Environments: Adopt Cloud Patching

☁️ Legacy Windows patching tools like SCCM and WSUS are struggling to meet the needs of distributed workforces because they depend on LAN or VPN check‑ins. The piece highlights WSUS deprecation and frequent synchronization, database, and re‑indexing failures that stall remediation. Cloud‑native, SaaS patch management (for example, Action1) allows endpoints to check in securely over the internet, use global delivery networks, and deliver faster, more consistent compliance without on‑prem infrastructure.

Anthropic Claude Opus 4.5 Now Available in Amazon Bedrock

🚀 Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 is now available through Amazon Bedrock, giving Bedrock customers access to a high-performance foundation model at roughly one-third the prior cost. Opus 4.5 advances professional software engineering, agentic workflows, multilingual coding, and complex visual interpretation while supporting production-grade agent deployments. Bedrock adds two API features — tool search and tool use examples — plus a beta effort parameter to balance reasoning, tool calls, latency, and cost. The model is offered via global cross-region inference in multiple AWS regions.

Amazon Connect flow modules: custom IO and versioning

🧩 Amazon Connect flow modules now support custom inputs, outputs and branching logic, plus advanced versioning and alias management. You can define flexible parameters for reusable modules—for example, an authentication module that accepts a phone number and PIN and returns customer name and authentication status with branches like authenticated or not authenticated. Immutable version snapshots and alias mapping let teams update module implementations while flows referencing an alias automatically use the new version, simplifying maintenance and reuse.

Amazon Quick Suite Embedded Chat Now Generally Available

💬 AWS announced general availability of Amazon Quick Suite Embedded Chat, a ready-made conversational AI you can embed into applications via one-click embedding or API-based iframes. The agent unifies structured data and unstructured knowledge in a single conversation so users can reference KPIs, pull file details, check customer feedback, and trigger actions without leaving the app. Connectors include SharePoint, websites, Slack, and Jira, and enterprises retain control over data access and action scopes. Embedded Chat is available in select Regions with no additional charge beyond existing Quick Suite pricing.

AWS launches U7i-6tb EC2 high-memory instances in Jakarta

🚀 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances (u7i-6tb.112xlarge) are now available in Asia Pacific (Jakarta), offering 6TB of DDR5 memory and 448 vCPUs powered by custom Intel Sapphire Rapids processors. The instances support up to 100Gbps for EBS and networking and include ENA Express for lower-latency, consistent network performance. They are positioned for mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server, enabling higher transaction throughput and faster data loading and backups.

Amazon MSK Replicator Now in Five Additional Regions

🔁 Amazon has expanded availability of Amazon MSK Replicator, allowing customers to replicate streaming data across Amazon MSK clusters in five more AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Thailand), Mexico (Central), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Canada West (Calgary), and Europe (Spain). MSK Replicator offers automatic asynchronous replication, auto-scales underlying resources on demand, and replicates Kafka metadata such as topic configurations, ACLs, and consumer group offsets. You can configure replication from the Amazon MSK console or the AWS CLI.

AWS Lambda adds customizable error handling for Kafka

🔁 AWS Lambda now offers enhanced error handling for Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) and self-managed Kafka event sources, enabling developers to define custom retry configurations and route failed messages to a Kafka topic as an on-failure destination. The update extends Kafka event source mapping (ESM) in Provisioned mode to support retry limits, time-bound retry windows, automatic discards of exceeded records, and per-message failure reporting to optimize retries. Configure these settings via the ESM API, AWS Console, or AWS CLI.

AWS Glue: Catalog Federation for Remote Iceberg Catalogs

🔗 AWS announces general availability of AWS Glue catalog federation for remote Apache Iceberg catalogs. The feature enables analytics engines to query Iceberg tables stored in Amazon S3 and cataloged remotely without moving or copying data, with real-time metadata synchronization to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. It leverages AWS Lake Formation for fine-grained access controls and supports the Iceberg REST specifications; federation is available in the Lake Formation console and via SDKs/APIs.

Amazon Redshift Adds Federated Permissions for Warehouses

🔐 Amazon Redshift now supports federated permissions to centralize and enforce data access policies across multiple Redshift warehouses, reducing governance overhead for multi-warehouse deployments. Registered warehouses are auto-mounted account-wide and can be queried using existing workforce identities via AWS IAM Identity Center or IAM roles. Row-level, column-level, and masking controls are applied automatically, ensuring consistent fine-grained access control regardless of query location.

AWS MediaTailor Adds HLS Interstitials for Live Streams

🎥 AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports HLS Interstitials for live streams, enabling broadcasters and streaming services to insert interstitial ads using the HLS Interstitials specification. MediaTailor generates necessary metadata tags (EXT-X-DATERANGE with X-ASSET-LIST) for compatible players such as HLS.js, Shaka, Bitmovin and Apple devices, removing the need for custom client stitching. The capability integrates with MediaTailor's server-side ad insertion for frame-accurate, buffer-free transitions and preserves server-side beaconing for measurement. It supports pre-roll and mid-roll, can be toggled per playback session via a manifest query parameter, and is available in all Regions where MediaTailor operates on a pay-as-you-go basis.

WAF Payload Logging Improvements for Cloudflare Customers

🔍 Cloudflare describes enhancements to its Web Application Firewall (WAF) payload logging, which now records specific request fields and post-transformation values that triggered a rule. The feature disambiguates which branch of a rule evaluated true, logs partial matches with contextual slices, and reduces the amount of data written for large fields. Cloudflare also optimized regex compilation and memory usage, shrank median log sizes, and plans further work on binary formats and expanded WAF coverage.

Microsoft Tests File Explorer Preloading for Speed

⚡ Microsoft is testing an optional background preload for File Explorer on Windows 11 to reduce launch times and improve responsiveness. When enabled, the app loads automatically with no visible UI change; users can disable it by unchecking "Enable window preloading for faster launch times" in File Explorer's Folder Options under the View tab. The feature is rolling out to Windows Insiders on 25H2 in the Dev and Beta channels with preview build 26220.7271 (KB5070307). Microsoft also reorganized File Explorer's context menu into grouped flyouts to reduce clutter and has requested feedback via the Feedback Hub.

Microsoft to Remove WINS Support After Windows Server 2025

⚠️ Microsoft announced that WINS support will be removed from Windows Server releases after Windows Server 2025, with standard support for that final LTSC build continuing through November 2034. The legacy NetBIOS name registration and resolution service was deprecated in Windows Server 2022. Microsoft said WINS components, management snap-ins and automation APIs will be removed, and urged administrators to audit dependencies and migrate to DNS-based solutions to avoid disruptions.

Amazon OpenSearch Service: OpenSearch 3.3 Now Available

📢 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports OpenSearch 3.3, introducing search performance, observability, and agentic AI integration improvements. Vector search enhancements include agentic search for natural-language queries without complex DSLs, batch processing for the semantic highlighter to lower latency and improve GPU utilization, and optimizations in the Neural Search plugin. The release also makes Apache Calcite the default query engine for PPL, adds a broader PPL command library, and improves the approximation framework for more responsive pagination and dashboards. A new workload management plugin enables grouping of search traffic and tenant-level network isolation to prevent resource overuse.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Adds Dynamic Data Masking

🔒 Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports dynamic data masking using the new pg_columnmask extension, enabling column-level protection at query time. The extension complements PostgreSQL row-level security and column grants by letting administrators define SQL-based masking policies that alter how data appears to users without changing stored values. Policies can use built-in or user-defined functions to hide, partially mask, or transform data, and multiple policies can be applied with weighted precedence. pg_columnmask protects results across WHERE, JOIN, ORDER BY, and GROUP BY clauses and is available for Aurora PostgreSQL 16.10+ and 17.6+ in all regions.

Amazon SageMaker HyperPod Adds Spot Instance Support

⚡ Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports Spot Instances, enabling customers to reduce GPU compute costs by up to 90% compared with on-demand instances. The integration is available on HyperPod EKS clusters and works with Karpenter for intelligent autoscaling, automatic Spot capacity discovery, and interruption handling. You can enable Spot when creating instance groups via the CreateCluster API or the AWS Console, and the feature supports all HyperPod instance types across available regions.