All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Amazon EC2 I7i instances are now available in AWS Europe (Milan) and AWS US West (N. California). Powered by 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors with a 3.2 GHz all-core turbo and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, I7i delivers up to 23% better compute and more than 10% improved price-performance versus I4i. Storage scales to 45 TB of NVMe with up to 50% better real-time storage performance, up to 50% lower storage I/O latency, and up to 60% lower latency variability, and includes a torn write prevention feature supporting up to 16 KB block sizes. The family offers eleven sizes — nine virtual sizes up to 48xlarge plus two bare metal options — with up to 100 Gbps networking and 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth.

🚀 Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling is now available in ten additional AWS regions, including Africa (Cape Town), several Asia Pacific locations, Europe (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), Mexico (Central) and AWS GovCloud (US‑West). The feature elastically adds query processing capacity in seconds to maintain fast performance for thousands of concurrent users and hundreds of simultaneous queries. Customers with an active Redshift cluster earn up to one hour of free Concurrency Scaling credits and can control allocation, set cluster limits, and monitor usage through Amazon CloudWatch; enable it by setting the Concurrency Scaling Mode to Auto in the AWS Management Console.

🚀 Searce, a Google Cloud Premier partner, has completed over 1,000 migrations and highlights measurable gains in reliability, cost, and performance for enterprise customers. Using GKE, GKE Autopilot, GKE Gateway Controller and Google Cloud platform services, Searce reports improvements such as 25% better reliability, 50% lower TCO, and up to 30% performance gains, with significant reductions in downtime during migrations.

🔒 Many small and mid-sized businesses adopted EDR to address growing threats, but alert overload and limited context can overwhelm security teams. Kaspersky Next XDR Optimum groups related alerts, enables bulk responses, and lets operators block compromised users in Active Directory directly from alert cards. It also integrates a cloud sandbox for file analysis and embeds targeted security awareness training assignable from the alert. For teams struggling with volume or lacking context, migrating from EDR to XDR can improve containment and reduce response time without major redeployment.

🚀 The reimagined Microsoft Marketplace is a unified destination to find, try, buy and deploy cloud solutions, AI apps and agents, combining Azure Marketplace and Microsoft AppSource. It lists tens of thousands of offerings and more than 3,000 AI apps and agents with rapid provisioning into Microsoft environments using Model Context Protocol (MCP). Integrations with CSPs and channel partners support private offers, a resale-enabled preview and governance for enterprise deployment.

🚀 Amazon expanded availability of EC2 C8gn instances—powered by Graviton4—to Europe (Frankfurt, Stockholm) and Asia Pacific (Singapore), in addition to existing US Regions. C8gn delivers up to 30% better compute vs Graviton3-based C7gn, includes 6th-generation Nitro Cards, and offers up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth. Instances scale to 48xlarge with up to 384 GiB memory and 60 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and select sizes support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for lower-latency clusters optimized for network-intensive workloads.

🔐 AWS released enhanced default application-layer rules for AWS Network Firewall to better handle TLS client hellos and HTTP requests that are split across multiple packets. The update adds new default stateful actions — drop and alert established — enabling security teams to enforce controls without complex custom rules while supporting modern TLS implementations and large HTTP requests. Detailed logging preserves visibility. Available in all supported AWS Regions.

🚀 Research and Engineering Studio (RES) on AWS 2025.09 introduces fractional GPU support, simplified AMI management, and broader deployment flexibility to help teams run graphics‑intensive and compute workloads more efficiently. The release adds Amazon EC2 g6f support for GPU fractionalization and Systems Manager Parameter Alias support for AMI IDs. Integration with Amazon Cognito user pools and customizable CIDR ranges in the CloudFormation template streamline authentication and network planning, while regional expansion improves accessibility.

📧 Cloudflare announced the private beta of its Email Sending capability, integrated into Workers so developers can send transactional emails directly from serverless code using a simple binding. The service complements existing Email Routing to provide a unified Email Service for both inbound and outbound flows, automates SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup to boost deliverability, and offers local testing, observability, and low-latency global delivery.

🌐 Cloudflare argues that AI sovereignty should mean choice: the ability for nations to control data, select models, and deploy applications without vendor lock-in. Through its distributed edge network and serverless Workers AI, Cloudflare promotes accessible, low-cost deployment and inference close to users. The company hosts regional open-source models—India’s IndicTrans2, Japan’s PLaMo-Embedding-1B, and Singapore’s SEA-LION v4-27B—and offers an AI Gateway to connect diverse models. Open standards, interoperability, and pay-as-you-go economics are presented as central to resilient national AI strategies.

🔐 Cloudflare announced it will make nearly every feature available for direct purchase on any plan, removing the previous distinction of “enterprise-only” capabilities. The rollout begins today with dashboard SSO, which is now accessible to all customers and supports GitHub social login; many Zero Trust features are available at no cost for up to 50 users. Over the next year Cloudflare will extend this self-service approach to additional capabilities, simplify billing and packaging, and reduce the need to involve sales or solutions engineers, while noting a few region-specific exceptions such as its China Network.

🔒 Cloudflare describes recent security hardening applied to Cloudflare Workers, combining V8 runtime changes with CPU features to strengthen isolation of customer scripts. The post highlights use of memory protection keys (PKU) assigned per-isolate, adoption of V8's sandbox and compressed pointers to confine heap corruption, and custom memory placement to pack sandboxes efficiently. Together these mitigations improve defense-in-depth and reduce opportunities for cross-isolate data leaks.

⚡ R2 SQL is Cloudflare’s serverless query engine that runs SQL directly against Iceberg tables stored in R2, eliminating the need for Spark or Trino clusters. The Query Planner uses R2 Data Catalog metadata and multi-level stats to prune manifests, files, and Parquet row groups so only necessary bytes are read. Execution is distributed across Cloudflare’s network using Workers and query workers running Apache DataFusion, with results serialized via Apache Arrow. An ordered, streaming planning pipeline enables early termination for ORDER BY ... LIMIT queries; R2 SQL is currently available in open beta.

🚀 Cloudflare Workers can now connect directly to PlanetScale Postgres and MySQL databases through a dashboard integration that links accounts and provisions an optimal Hyperdrive configuration. Built on Hyperdrive, the integration keeps connections warm, places pooled connections near your database, and can cache frequent read queries to reduce latency and database load. Credentials are managed securely, including a one-click password rotation, and the integration is accessible from both Cloudflare and PlanetScale dashboards to simplify full-stack app development.

🚀 Cloudflare announced a broad set of developer platform upgrades designed to remove friction and scale modern workloads. Highlights include expanded Node.js API support, AI Search now supporting multiple model providers, and larger Container and Workers Build sizes. GA releases such as Remote Bindings, R2 Infrequent Access, Media Transformations, and Playwright-backed Browser Rendering aim to speed development and reduce costs.

🧭 Cloudflare announced the Cloudflare Data Platform, combining Cloudflare Pipelines, R2 Data Catalog, and R2 SQL to ingest, store, and query analytical tables directly on R2 object storage. Built on Apache Iceberg and open standards, the platform emphasizes engine interoperability and Cloudflare’s zero-cost egress. Pipelines offers exactly-once ingestion and SQL transforms today; stateful processing is planned. The products are open betas with usage-based pricing signals ahead of GA.

🔧 Over the past year Cloudflare has significantly expanded Node.js compatibility inside Workers, adding many core modules as native runtime features. The effort includes modules such as node:fs, node:crypto, node:http, node:net, and node:zlib, plus a virtual in-memory file system and native crypto via ncrypto. These changes reduce reliance on polyfills and tooling shims, improve performance and memory usage, and let popular npm packages and frameworks like Express run more seamlessly. Developers enable this with the nodejs_compat flag and can opt in or out of EOL-related APIs using granular compatibility flags.

🔔 AWS has announced general availability of new AWS Billing and Cost Management features that let customers create and share custom billing views across multiple AWS Organizations from a single account. Users can share views with accounts outside their organization and combine multiple custom views into consolidated perspectives. These consolidated views are accessible via AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, enabling cross-organization cost analysis and budgeting.

🚀 Google Cloud has launched Flex-start VMs, a Compute Engine consumption option powered by Dynamic Workload Scheduler that lets single VM instances wait in a managed queue for scarce GPUs. By setting request-valid-for-duration (90 seconds–2 hours) users keep capacity requests in PENDING and avoid custom retry logic. Flex-start VMs offer significant discounts versus on‑demand SKUs, consume preemptible quota, run uninterrupted for up to seven days, and integrate directly via the instances.insert API, gcloud CLI, or the Cloud Console. Instances support stop/start to pause billing and an instanceTerminationAction = STOP to preserve configuration when the seven‑day runtime expires.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch introduces tag-based telemetry so teams can monitor metrics and configure alarms using existing AWS resource tags. This lets DevOps and cloud administrators build dynamic monitoring views that follow organizational tagging, automatically adapting as resources change. Tag-based query filtering cuts manual dashboard and alarm updates, and can be enabled with one click or via the AWS CLI and SDKs.