All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔍 The episode of The Agent Factory reviewed practical AI agents for data engineering and data science, highlighting demos that combine Gemini, BigQuery, Colab Enterprise, and Spanner-based graph queries. It showcased a BigQuery Data Engineering Agent that generates pipelines, time dimensions, and data-quality assertions from SQL, and a Data Science Agent that runs end-to-end anomaly detection in Colab. The post also covered CodeMender for autonomous code security fixes and a creative Spanner+ADK comic demo illustrating multi-region concepts.

📣 Amazon Web Services has increased the maximum record size for Kinesis Data Streams from 1MiB to 10MiB and doubled the maximum PutRecords request size to 10MiB. You can update a stream's maximum record size to 10MiB via the AWS Management Console or the UpdateMaxRecordSize API using the AWS SDK or CLI, and continue using existing Kinesis APIs to publish and consume larger records. AWS Lambda now supports Kinesis payloads up to 6MiB; there are no additional charges beyond standard Kinesis fees. The feature is available in supported regions and AWS provides documentation describing region coverage and downstream handling guidance.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has made EC2 I7i storage-optimized instances available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East, US-West) Regions. These instances use 5th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs to deliver up to 23% better compute performance and more than 10% better price performance versus prior I4i instances, along with up to 45 TB of NVMe local storage. I7i is offered in eleven sizes (nine virtual up to 48xlarge and two bare metal) with up to 100 Gbps network and 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and supports torn write prevention up to 16KB to reduce database bottlenecks for I/O-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads.

🚀 Amazon EC2 Im4gn instances are now available in Europe (Milan). Built on the AWS Nitro System and powered by Graviton2 processors, these instances provide up to 30 TB of 2nd Generation Nitro SSD local instance storage for I/O‑intensive workloads. They deliver high compute performance, up to 100 Gbps networking, and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) support for demanding database, search, and analytics use cases. Get started via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDKs.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks presents a unified, AI-driven approach to network security that consolidates browser, AI, and quantum defenses into the Strata Network Security Platform. New offerings include Prisma Browser, a SASE-native secure browser that blocks evasive attacks and brings LLM-augmented data classification to the endpoint, and Prisma AIRS 2.0, a full-lifecycle AI security platform. The company also outlines a pragmatic path to quantum-readiness and centralizes control with Strata Cloud Manager to simplify operations across hybrid environments.

🔒 Prisma AIRS 2.0 is a unified AI security platform that delivers end-to-end visibility, risk assessment and automated defenses across agents, models and development pipelines. It consolidates Protect AI capabilities to provide posture and runtime protections for AI agents, model scanning and API-first controls for MLOps. The platform also offers continuous, autonomous red teaming and a managed MCP Server to embed threat detection into workflows.

🤖 Palo Alto Networks introduces Cortex AgentiX, an agentic AI platform designed to build, deploy and govern autonomous security and IT agents. The vendor says AgentiX extends the Cortex foundation and leverages 1.2 billion playbook executions to deliver end-to-end agentic workflows and drive up to a 98% reduction in Mean Time to Respond with 75% less manual work. It ships with prebuilt agents for threat intelligence, email, endpoint, network, cloud and IT, and highlights full transparency, role-based controls and human-in-the-loop approvals. AgentiX is embedded in Cortex XSIAM and Cortex Cloud today; a standalone platform and Cortex XDR integration are slated for early 2026.

🔐 Cloudflare is collaborating with Chrome to experimentally deploy Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs) to reduce the number of public keys and large post-quantum signatures transmitted during TLS handshakes. MTCs batch certificates into a Merkle tree with a single signed treehead and per-certificate inclusion proofs, dramatically shrinking handshake size and CPU work. The experiment will roll out to a subset of Cloudflare free customers while Chrome distributes validation landmarks and fallbacks to preserve existing trust.

🚀 At Partner Connect during the Google Public Sector Summit, Google announced expanded investments to deepen collaboration and accelerate AI adoption across the public sector partner ecosystem. Highlights include increased Rapid Innovation Team funding, doubled capacity for Partner Development Sprints, and boosted Deal Acceleration Funds to shorten sales cycles. Google also launched three new Public Sector Partner Expertise badges for Google Distributed Cloud, Infrastructure Modernization, and Gemini for Government, a standardized Services Subcontractor Program, and an expanded ISV ATO Accelerator offering up to $250,000 in GCP credits plus $500,000 in services reimbursements to speed FedRAMP/Impact Level readiness. Partner Demo Portal improvements, enhanced analytics, new labs, and bootcamps round out efforts to simplify co-selling and accelerate partner time-to-market.

🔍 Cloudflare announces an Open Beta for Workers tracing that provides automatic, out-of-the-box instrumentation with no code changes. Traces are visible in the Workers Observability dashboard alongside logs, and spans include timing, attributes, and error context. You can export OTLP-formatted traces and correlated logs to third-party providers like Honeycomb or Grafana. Enable tracing via wrangler.jsonc or the Cloudflare dashboard and join the beta to provide feedback.

🔒 Small security teams can harden Google Workspace by enforcing MFA, restricting admin roles, and tightening sharing and OAuth app permissions. The article stresses stronger email defenses — advanced phishing controls, DMARC/DKIM/SPF — and proactive monitoring for account takeovers through alerts and behavioral signals. It argues native controls form a solid foundation but leave gaps, and recommends augmenting them with Material Security for unified visibility and automated remediation.

🚀 Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) introduces PlannerVersion 2.0 for DocumentDB 5.0, delivering advanced query optimization and up to 10x performance improvements for indexed find and update operations. The new planner improves cost estimation, selects more optimal index plans, and adds index-scan support for negation operators such as $neq and $nin, as well as nested $elementMatch. Enabling PlannerVersion 2.0 requires a simple parameter change in your cluster parameter group and does not require a restart or incur downtime; you can revert to the legacy planner if needed.

🔍 AWS has expanded Resource Explorer to support 47 additional resource types across services including Amazon Bedrock, AWS Shield, AWS Glue, VPC Lattice, WAFv2, SageMaker, and S3. With this update, customers can search for and discover these resources centrally, improving inventory accuracy and operational visibility. The change aims to streamline compliance, incident response, and cross-service troubleshooting by making more resource types queryable from a single interface.

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8i and R8i-flex instances are now available in Europe (London), powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS. AWS reports up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based generations, and up to 20% higher performance compared to R7i for many workloads. R8i-flex introduces memory-optimized Flex sizing (large through 16xlarge) for applications that do not fully utilize compute, while R8i offers 13 sizes including two bare-metal options and a new 96xlarge and is SAP-certified. Instances can be purchased via On-Demand, Savings Plans or Spot.

🚀 Amazon announces general availability of Amazon Nova Multimodal Embeddings, a unified embedding model designed for agentic RAG and semantic search across text, documents, images, video, and audio. The model handles inputs up to 8K tokens and video/audio segments up to 30 seconds, with segmentation for larger files and selectable embedding dimensions. Both synchronous and asynchronous APIs are supported to balance latency and throughput, and Nova is available in Amazon Bedrock in US East (N. Virginia).

🚀 Amazon Web Services has made Amazon EC2 I7ie instances available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. I7ie instances, powered by 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, are designed for large storage I/O–intensive workloads and offer up to 120 TB of local NVMe, higher vCPU and memory densities, and up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth. AWS cites up to 40% better compute performance and 20% better price performance versus I3en, along with substantial improvements in storage throughput, latency, and latency variability for low-latency, high-random I/O use cases.

🔐 X is asking users who rely on passkeys or hardware security keys (for example, YubiKeys) to re-enroll their devices for two-factor authentication by November 10 or face account lockout. The requirement stems from X’s migration from the twitter.com domain to x.com, as existing keys are tied to the old domain. Users should visit x.com/settings/account/login_verification/security_keys to disable and then re-add keys; a password confirmation is required. Re-enrolled keys will be associated with the x.com domain and will continue to work after the migration.

🔍 Microsoft is testing a new feature in Windows 11 that prompts users to run a memory scan when signing in after a blue screen of death (bugcheck). If accepted, the system schedules an Windows Memory Diagnostic to run at the next reboot, typically taking five minutes or less, and will notify users post-reboot if issues are found and mitigated. Initially all bugcheck codes will trigger the prompt while Microsoft investigates correlations with memory corruption, with targeting to be refined over time.

🔐 AWS Payment Cryptography is now available in Canada (Montreal), Africa (Cape Town) and Europe (London). The fully managed service centralizes payment-specific cryptographic operations and key management for cloud-hosted payment applications and scales elastically to meet changing workloads. It is assessed as compliant with PCI PIN and PCI P2PE, reducing the need for dedicated payment HSMs. Customers can position cryptographic operations closer to latency-sensitive applications and pursue multi-Region high availability.

🛒 PayPal and Google Cloud announced a joint agentic commerce offering that integrates Google Cloud’s Conversational Commerce agent with payments powered by PayPal. The solution leverages the open Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)—which extends A2A and the Model Context Protocol—to enable agent-to-agent payment flows secured by Verifiable Digital Credentials. Merchants can deploy Google’s out‑of‑the‑box conversational agent or build custom agents with the Agent Development Kit (ADK), retaining control over tone, branding, and the customer relationship while benefiting from integrated payment and fraud controls.