All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🌐 Amazon WorkSpaces now supports IPv6 for WorkSpaces domains and external endpoints, enabling IPv4/IPv6 dual‑stack connectivity from compatible clients while excluding SAML authentication over IPv6. Dual‑stack reduces the need for address translation hardware, simplifies IP management, and supports PrivateLink VPC endpoints over IPv6 for private access. The feature is available in all AWS Regions, including GovCloud, at no additional cost; administrators must use the latest WorkSpaces clients to enable IPv6.

📊 Cloudflare announces support for aggregations in R2 SQL, enabling GROUP BY, SUM, COUNT, HAVING and ORDER BY over data stored in R2 Data Catalog. The release introduces two distributed strategies — scatter-gather for pre-aggregates and shuffling with deterministic hash partitioning for global grouping and sorting. Developers can now run large-scale analytical queries and top-K reports on Parquet data without moving it or managing separate OLAP infrastructure.

🚀 Amazon Neptune is now available in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region on engine versions 1.4.5.0 and later. You can create Neptune clusters using a broad set of instance types, including R5, R5d, R6g, R6i, X2iedn, T4g, and T3. Neptune is a fully managed graph database that supports Apache TinkerPop Gremlin, openCypher, and SPARQL, and provides enterprise features such as high availability, automated backups, and network isolation. Clusters can be provisioned via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or CloudFormation.

📣 AWS Lambda now offers durable functions in 14 additional Regions, enabling developers to build reliable multi-step applications and AI workflows closer to users and data. Durable functions add primitives such as "steps" and "waits" to checkpoint progress, recover from failures, and pause execution without incurring compute charges for on-demand functions. Activation is available for new Python (3.13, 3.14) and Node.js (22, 24) functions via the API, Console, SDK, or Infrastructure as Code tools like CloudFormation, SAM, and CDK.

🔐 Today, AWS Control Tower adds 176 additional AWS Security Hub controls to the Control Catalog, enabling you to search, discover, enable, and manage them directly from the Control Tower console. You can also call the ListControls, GetControl, and EnableControl APIs to automate governance across multi-account environments. New AWS Config rules are searchable in all Regions where Control Tower is available, including AWS GovCloud (US); check each rule's supported regions before deployment.

🔒 AWS announces that AWS Control Tower now includes 176 additional AWS Security Hub controls in its Control Catalog. You can search, discover, enable and manage these controls directly from the Control Tower console or via the ListControls, GetControl and EnableControl APIs. The new AWS Config rules are searchable in all Regions where Control Tower is available, including AWS GovCloud (US); check each rule's supported-region list before deployment.

🔔 Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) Express Brokers now support Apache Kafka v3.9, introducing KRaft (Kafka Raft) for metadata management. New Express Broker clusters created with Kafka v3.9 will default to KRaft, moving metadata storage and replication into broker-managed topics and removing the dependency on ZooKeeper. The ability to upgrade existing clusters to v3.9 is planned for a future release. Kafka v3.9 for Express Brokers is available in all regions where MSK Express is supported; create a new cluster via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDKs to get started.

🧪 AWS Direct Connect now integrates with AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) to run controlled resilience tests that deliberately disrupt Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions on Virtual Interfaces. You can simulate BGP session failures to validate that traffic fails over to redundant Virtual Interfaces and that applications remain operational. This capability helps teams proactively verify failover behavior, observability, and recovery procedures and is available in all AWS Commercial Regions where AWS FIS is offered.

🔁 Amazon ECS now supports defining weekly event windows to control when Fargate task retirements occur. This capability lets teams schedule infrastructure updates and automatic task replacements during off-peak periods, reducing disruption to mission-critical services. To use it, enable the account setting fargateEventWindows, create EC2 event windows with time ranges, and associate them to tasks using Amazon ECS-managed tags.

📧 Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) introduces email validation to help customers reduce bounce rates and protect sender reputation. The capability offers API-based address checks and detailed validation insights such as syntax verification and DNS record analysis. With Auto Validation enabled, SES can automatically review every outbound address at the account or configuration-set level via simple console toggles, requiring no code changes. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SES is offered and integrates with existing email workflows.

🔒 AWS Clean Rooms now supports change requests for existing collaborations, enabling participants to propose updates such as adding new members, adjusting member abilities, and modifying auto-approval behavior. All members must approve change requests before updates take effect, and every request is recorded in the collaboration change history for member review. This preserves existing privacy controls while reducing onboarding time and speeding time-to-insight—for example, a publisher can add an advertiser’s marketing agency to receive analysis results directly.

🕒 Amazon ECS now lets you define weekly event windows to control when AWS Fargate retires tasks for platform updates. Enable the account setting fargateEventWindows, create EC2 event windows with time ranges, and associate them to ECS tasks using managed tags like aws:ecs:clusterArn, aws:ecs:serviceArn, or aws:ecs:fargateTask. This allows precise timing (for example, weekend-only retirements) to avoid disruption during peak business hours and is available in all commercial AWS Regions.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has expanded EC2 R8i and R8i-flex instances to Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (Sao Paulo). These memory-optimized instances run on custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, delivering up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based instances. R8i offers 13 sizes including two bare-metal options and a new 96xlarge for the largest workloads, while R8i-flex provides common sizes (large to 16xlarge) for cost-efficient memory-heavy applications. Instances are available via Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot.

🔁 This post explains a Python-based solution to migrate automation rules from Security Hub CSPM (ASFF) to the new Security Hub that adopts the open OCSF schema. The toolkit discovers rules across specified Regions, evaluates each rule against predefined ASFF→OCSF field mappings, and converts compatible rules into a CloudFormation template preserving order and Regional context. Actions or criteria without OCSF equivalents are flagged or partially migrated; migrated rules are created in a DISABLED state by default to allow review and testing. The package includes discovery, transformation, and template-generation scripts plus a migration report to guide manual adjustments.

🚀 Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Application Development Platforms and is positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision. The post presents Microsoft Foundry as a unified platform to build, deploy, and govern agentic AI—emphasizing secure grounding, multi-agent orchestration, observability, and cloud-to-edge model deployment. It also describes an agent-driven submission process that automated evidence collection and validation to improve accuracy and efficiency.

🚀 AWS announced the general availability of the new Amazon EC2 M8gn and M8gb instances powered by AWS Graviton4. M8gn targets network‑intensive workloads and provides up to 600 Gbps of networking bandwidth with 6th‑generation Nitro Cards, while M8gb focuses on high block‑storage throughput with up to 150 Gbps of EBS bandwidth. Both families offer up to 768 GiB of memory, large instance sizes, and EFA support on selected sizes; initial availability is in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon).

🚀 AWS Databases including Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora DSQL, and Amazon DynamoDB are now generally available on the Vercel Marketplace, allowing developers to create and connect to managed databases directly from Vercel in seconds. You can provision a new AWS account from Vercel that includes access to these databases and $100 USD in credits usable for up to six months, and manage billing and usage via the AWS settings portal in the Vercel dashboard. Serverless options support scale-to-zero economics and are available in multiple Regions including US East, US West, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

🚀 Cluster Director is now generally available on Google Cloud, offering a managed, topology‑aware control plane for Slurm clusters to streamline AI and HPC operations. It automates Day 0 planning, Day 1 deployment, and Day 2 monitoring with health checks, Managed Lustre attachment, topology‑aware placement, and one‑click node remediation. There is no additional fee for Cluster Director — customers pay only for underlying Google Cloud resources. Google also announced a Preview of Slurm on GKE to combine Slurm's batch scheduling with Kubernetes' autoscaling and self‑healing.

📊 Administrators and support teams can now monitor the health and performance of Amazon WorkSpaces Applications fleets, sessions, instances, and users through a new set of Amazon CloudWatch metrics. These metrics can be enabled across fleets from the CloudWatch console and dynamically update to reflect current state, simplifying troubleshooting of end-user streaming sessions and performance investigations. To receive the metrics, fleets must use a WorkSpaces Applications image with the agent released on or after December 06, 2025, or be updated via Managed WorkSpaces Applications image updates released on or after December 05, 2025; metrics are available in AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions where the service operates.

🔐 The article introduces Access Fabric as a unified, adaptive approach that links identity, device, and network signals to make real-time, risk-based access decisions throughout every session. It warns that fragmented identity and network tools create visibility gaps that AI-empowered attackers can exploit. By being contextual, connected, and continuous, an Access Fabric closes seams, reduces complexity, and enforces consistent policies for users, devices, and AI agents.