All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Amazon Connect adds monitoring for queued callbacks

🔔 Amazon Connect now enables monitoring of contacts queued for callback, allowing supervisors and integrations to search queued callbacks and view details such as customer phone numbers and queued duration in the Connect UI and via APIs. Teams can proactively route contacts nearing promised callback windows to available agents and clear customers who have already been served to avoid duplicative work. This capability is available in all regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

Building the Largest Known GKE Cluster: 130,000 Nodes

🚀 Google Cloud engineers demonstrated an experimental GKE cluster running 130,000 nodes to validate extreme scalability for AI/ML workloads. The test sustained control-plane throughput near 1,000 operations per second, supported over one million datastore objects, and achieved a baseline of 130,000 Pods launching in 3 minutes 40 seconds. The project combined API-server caching KEPs, a Spanner-backed key-value storage backend, and job-level orchestration via Kueue to enable predictable admission, rapid preemption, and efficient utilization at massive scale.

BigQuery AI: Unified ML, Generative AI, and Agents

🤖 BigQuery AI consolidates BigQuery’s built-in ML, generative AI functions, vector search, and agent tools into a unified platform. It enables users to apply generative models and embeddings directly via SQL, perform semantic vector search, and run end-to-end ML workflows without moving data. Role-specific data agents and assistive features like a data canvas and code completion accelerate work for engineers, data scientists, and business users.

Google: Leader in 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CDBMS

📈 Google announces it was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems for the sixth consecutive year and positioned furthest in vision. The post presents the company's AI-native Data Cloud—a unified stack integrating BigQuery, Spanner, AlloyDB, Looker, and Dataplex—to support agentic AI. Google highlights embedded specialized agents, developer tooling (Data Agents API, ADK, Gemini CLI) and Agent Analytics in BigQuery to accelerate AI-driven applications while asserting cost and governance benefits on a single, open platform.

Flexible Cost Allocation for AWS Transit Gateway GA

💸 AWS has announced general availability of Flexible Cost Allocation (FCA) for AWS Transit Gateway, enabling organizations to distribute data processing and transfer charges more flexibly across accounts. FCA lets you assign usage to the source, destination, or the central Transit Gateway account and supports attachment-level or per-flow granularity. It also supports middle-box appliances such as AWS Network Firewall, allowing costs to be attributed to original source or destination owners. You can enable FCA via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDK with no additional charge.

Vertex AI Studio adds Gemini tools for faster builds

🚀 Vertex AI Studio now centers developer workflows around Gemini and introduces agents-as-tools to streamline prompt engineering and app creation. The Studio adds three core agent commands — /Prompt, /Evaluate, and /Build — to refine prompts, assess outputs with custom autoraters, and generate working code. Team features include cross-account prompt sharing, version history, and notes. Onboarding is simplified with one-click API keys, an /Ask helper, express mode, and loginless model trials.

Gemini CLI Adds Looker Extensions for Terminal Data Access

🚀 The Gemini CLI now includes Looker and Looker Conversational Analytics extensions, enabling direct terminal access to Looker data and dashboards. These additions let users ask complex questions, generate reports, and create dashboards without leaving the command line. Installation requires the Gemini CLI (npm), the two extensions, and configuration of Looker API credentials and optional Google Cloud settings. The update aims to streamline workflows and make data exploration more accessible from everyday development environments.

Microsoft Named Leader in Gartner Access Management

🔒 Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management for the ninth consecutive year. The post highlights Microsoft Entra as a unified IAM and CIAM solution that consolidates controls, telemetry, and administration while integrating generative AI in the Entra admin center to streamline workflows and threat response. Microsoft calls out rising threats—nation-state actors and organized cybercrime using generative AI—and stresses that multifactor authentication and agent identity controls are essential to protect both human and non-human identities.

Agentic AI Framework for Life Sciences R&D on Google Cloud

🔬 Google Cloud outlines an agentic AI framework to accelerate life sciences R&D by orchestrating specialized, fine-tunable models into modular workflows. It describes four agents—MedGemma for deep literature and data synthesis, TxGemma for in-silico preclinical prediction, Gemini 2.5 Pro as the cognitive orchestrator, and AlphaFold-2 plus docking tools for molecular design. The architecture maps data flows, tooling, and cloud services (Vertex AI, HPC, search) to move from target discovery through iterative Design→Dock→Predict→Refine cycles toward lab-ready lead nomination while preserving version control and compliance.

Amazon Athena adds per-query DPU controls for Capacity use

🔧 Amazon Athena now lets you control Data Processing Unit (DPU) allocation for queries running on Capacity Reservations at the workgroup or per-query level. You can set explicit DPU values so small queries consume less capacity while critical jobs receive guaranteed resources. The Athena console and API now report per-query DPU usage, improving visibility into consumption and supporting capacity planning. These controls reduce over-provisioning, manage concurrency, and improve predictability for business-critical workloads in supported AWS Regions.

AWS Security Incident Response Adds Agentic AI Investigator

🔍 AWS Security Incident Response now offers an agentic AI investigative capability that automatically gathers, correlates, and summarizes evidence across AWS data sources. The investigative agent assesses new cases, asks submitters clarifying questions for missing indicators or timeframes, and collects logs from AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon EC2, and AWS Cost Explorer. Findings are presented as clear, actionable summaries, and the feature is enabled automatically at no extra cost in supported Regions.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection accelerates anomaly detection

🔍 AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now uses an enhanced algorithm that analyzes spend in rolling 24-hour windows, comparing current costs to equivalent time periods from previous days whenever AWS receives updated cost and usage data. This removes delays from incomplete calendar-day comparisons and aligns analysis to similar times of day, improving accuracy for workloads with distinct morning and evening patterns. The result is faster, more precise anomaly identification with fewer false positives; the enhancement is available in all AWS Regions except the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the China Regions.

Amazon Location Service Adds No-Code Address Form Builder

🧭 AWS announced the Address Form Solution Builder for Amazon Location Service, a no-code tool that creates customizable address forms with predictive suggestions, autofill for fields like postal code, and an integrated map view. Developers can generate a ready-to-use application in minutes and download a developer package in React JavaScript, React TypeScript, or standalone HTML/JavaScript. The builder aims to speed address entry, reduce errors, and improve delivery and fraud outcomes for enterprise applications.

AWS Transfer Family Terraform Module Adds Custom IdP

🚀 The AWS Transfer Family Terraform module now supports provisioning Transfer Family servers with a custom identity provider (IdP), enabling integration with existing authentication systems and centralized access control. This update automates deployment of SFTP, FTPS, FTP, AS2 and browser-based endpoints using Terraform, removing repeated manual configuration. The module is built on the open source Custom IdP solution and includes an Amazon Cognito example to help teams get started quickly.

Amazon SageMaker One-Click Onboarding for Existing Data

✨ Amazon SageMaker now offers one-click onboarding of existing AWS datasets into Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, letting customers begin data work in minutes while retaining their current IAM roles and permissions. The feature provisions a pre-configured serverless notebook with a built-in AI agent that supports SQL, Python, Spark, and natural language. Users can start from SageMaker, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon S3 Tables consoles and the setup imports permissions from AWS Glue Data Catalog, Lake Formation, and S3 to accelerate first use.

Amazon SageMaker Data Agent for Analytics and ML Development

🤖 Amazon SageMaker Data Agent is a built-in AI agent in the new notebook experience that accelerates analytics and ML development. It translates natural-language prompts into detailed execution plans and generates SQL and Python code, while staying aware of notebook context and data catalog metadata. Available in multiple AWS regions, it speeds common tasks like data transformation, statistical analysis, and model prototyping.

Avast Makes AI-Driven Scam Defense Free for Users Worldwide

🛡️ Avast has integrated its new AI-powered Scam Guardian into Avast Free Antivirus, offering free, continuous protection against increasingly sophisticated, AI-enhanced scams worldwide. The feature analyzes website content, code, links, SMS and email context to flag deceptive intent and neutralize hidden threats. A premium Scam Guardian Pro in Avast Premium Security adds an Email Guard for contextual email scanning across devices. The rollout aims to democratize AI-based scam defense and give users clear, actionable guidance.

AWS CloudFormation StackSets Adds Deployment Ordering

🧭 AWS CloudFormation StackSets now supports deployment ordering in auto-deployment mode, allowing you to define the sequence in which stack instances deploy across accounts and regions. You can specify up to 10 dependencies per stack instance using the new DependsOn parameter in AutoDeployment to orchestrate foundational and dependent stacks. StackSets performs cycle detection to prevent circular dependencies and returns clear error messages to aid troubleshooting. This capability is available in all Regions where StackSets is offered and can be configured via the CLI, SDK, or CloudFormation Console at no extra charge.

AWS Compute Optimizer Adds Automation Rules for EBS

🛠 AWS Compute Optimizer introduces automation rules to optimize Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes at scale. The feature can automatically clean up unattached volumes and upgrade volumes to the latest-generation types on a recurring schedule, using filters such as AWS Region and Resource Tags. A new dashboard summarizes automation events, shows step history and estimated savings, and supports action reversal.

CloudWatch Database Insights: Cross-Account, Cross-Region

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now supports cross-account and cross-region monitoring, enabling teams to observe and manage database fleets across multiple AWS accounts and regions from a single console. The feature centralizes performance metrics and troubleshooting workflows so teams can correlate incidents across distributed environments. It is intended to reduce operational overhead and improve mean time to resolution by enforcing consistent monitoring standards.