All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 AWS has introduced Amazon EC2 X8aedz, a new memory-optimized instance family powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (Turin) that deliver up to 5 GHz maximum CPU frequency. X8aedz claims up to 2x higher compute performance and ~31% improved price-performance versus the prior X2iezn generation, combining high single-thread speed with a 32:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio and local NVMe storage. Instances come in eight sizes (2–96 vCPUs, 64–3,072 GiB), include two bare-metal variants, and offer up to 8 TB of local NVMe SSD. They are available now in US West (Oregon) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and can be purchased via On-Demand, Spot, or Savings Plans.

📊 S3 Storage Lens now provides three new capabilities: application performance metrics, expanded prefix analytics across billions of prefixes, and direct export of metrics to managed S3 Tables. The performance metrics include access pattern, request origin, and object access count metrics to surface inefficient requests, cross‑Region access, and hot object reads. Enable these features in your advanced dashboard to make metrics queryable via AWS analytics services.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 and Amazon Web Services have expanded their partnership to offer a no-cost Unit 42 Incident Response Retainer in AWS Marketplace for qualified customers. The retainer provides 250 hours of initial incident response, a 2-hour response SLA and 24/7/365 access to Unit 42’s incident response team. The offering is designed to accelerate containment, enable holistic investigations across cloud and enterprise environments, and reduce procurement overhead while providing preferred pricing for proactive services.

🔍 AWS announced an update to GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection that adds multistage attack detection for Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon ECS clusters running on Fargate or EC2. The release introduces two critical findings — AttackSequence:EC2/CompromisedInstanceGroup and AttackSequence:ECS/CompromisedCluster — that group related events into a single, high-priority alert. Findings include a summary, event timeline, MITRE ATT&CK mappings, and remediation guidance to speed response. Runtime Monitoring must be enabled for full coverage, and customers can try the feature free for 30 days.

🤖 AWS Support has restructured its support portfolio into three AI-driven plans: Business Support+, Enterprise Support, and Unified Operations. Each tier layers faster response times, proactive guidance, and AI-assisted operations while combining generative AI with AWS engineering expertise. Highlights include 24/7 contextual AI assistance, designated TAMs, integrated security incident response, and the preview AWS DevOps Agent for one-click context sharing and proactive incident prevention. These plans are available in all commercial AWS Regions.

⚡Amazon S3 Batch Operations now finishes jobs up to 10x faster and supports jobs that include up to 20 billion objects, accelerating large-scale storage tasks. S3 pre-processes objects, runs operations, and generates completion reports with no extra configuration or cost. Typical uses include copying between buckets, tagging for lifecycle policies, and computing checksums. The upgrade is available in all AWS Regions except China and GovCloud (US).

🛡️ Amazon Web Services' AgentCore introduces preview features — Policy and Evaluations — to help teams scale agents from prototypes into production. Policy intercepts real-time tool calls via AgentCore Gateway and converts natural-language rules into Cedar for auditability and compliance without custom code. Evaluations offers 13 built-in evaluators plus custom model-based scoring, with all quality metrics surfaced in an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard to simplify continuous testing and monitoring.

🚀 Today AWS introduced Database Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that offers up to 35% savings in exchange for a one-year commitment measured in $/hour with no upfront payment. Discounts apply automatically to eligible serverless and provisioned usage across engines, instance families, sizes, deployment options, and Regions. The offer supports Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune, Amazon Keyspaces, Amazon Timestream, and AWS DMS. Database Savings Plans are available now in all AWS Regions except China and can be purchased from the Billing console or via the AWS CLI.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now offers Mistral Large 3 and the Ministral 3 family alongside additional Mistral AI checkpoints, giving customers early access to open-weight multimodal models. Mistral Large 3 employs a granular Mixture-of-Experts architecture with 41B active and 675B total parameters and supports a 256K context window for long-form comprehension and agentic workflows. The Ministral 3 series (14B, 8B, 3B) plus Voxtral and Magistral small models let developers choose scales optimized for production assistants, RAG systems, single-GPU edge deployment, or low-resource environments.

🚀 Amazon S3 Vectors is now generally available, delivering native, purpose-built vector storage and query capabilities in cloud object storage. It supports up to two billion vectors per index, 10,000 indexes per vector bucket, and offers up to 90% lower costs to upload, store, and query vectors. S3 Vectors integrates with Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker Unified Studio, and OpenSearch Service, supports SSE-S3 and optional SSE-KMS encryption with per-index keys, and provides tagging for ABAC and cost allocation.

🔔Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle and SQL Server now supports up to 256 TiB of storage per database instance — a fourfold increase in per-instance capacity. Customers can attach up to three additional 64 TiB storage volumes alongside the primary volume and add, scale, or remove those volumes without application downtime. Administrators can mix high-performance Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volumes with cost-optimized gp3 volumes to balance performance and cost. Additional storage volumes can be created or managed via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDKs and are available in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced general availability of Nova Forge, a SageMaker AI service that enables organizations to build custom frontier models from Nova checkpoints across pre-, mid-, and post-training phases. Developers can blend proprietary data with Amazon-curated datasets, run Reinforcement Fine Tuning (RFT) with in-environment reward functions, and apply custom safety guardrails via a built-in responsible AI toolkit. Nova Forge includes early access to Nova 2 Pro and Nova 2 Omni and is available today in US East (N. Virginia).

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 C8a instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC (Turin) processors with up to 4.5 GHz frequency. AWS says C8a delivers up to 30% higher performance, up to 19% better price-performance versus C7a, 33% more memory bandwidth, and up to 57% faster GroovyJVM performance for Java workloads. The family includes 12 sizes, two bare-metal options, and is built on the AWS Nitro System for high-performance compute use cases such as HPC, batch processing, ad serving, multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. C8a instances are initially available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) and can be purchased via Savings Plans, On-Demand, or Spot.

🚀 AWS announced general availability of Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by the new 3nm Trainium3 AI chip designed to deliver improved token economics for agentic, reasoning, and video-generation workloads. Each Trainium3 chip provides 2.52 PFLOPs (FP8), 144 GB of HBM3e, and 4.9 TB/s memory bandwidth, and servers can scale to 144 chips or to hundreds of thousands via EC2 UltraClusters. The platform includes the AWS Neuron SDK with native PyTorch integration so developers can train and deploy without changing model code, while performance engineers gain deeper access to tune kernels and optimize at scale.

🎙️ Amazon announced Amazon Nova 2 Sonic, a speech-to-speech model for natural, real-time conversational AI available via Amazon Bedrock. The model delivers streaming speech understanding robust to background noise and diverse speaking styles, expressive polyglot voices, turn-taking controllability, asynchronous tool calling, and a one‑million token context window. Developers can integrate Nova 2 Sonic with Amazon Connect, leading telephony providers, open-source frameworks, and Bedrock’s bidirectional streaming API; it’s initially available in select AWS Regions.

🚀 AWS AI Factories are now available to deploy high-performance AWS AI infrastructure inside customer data centers, combining AWS Trainium, NVIDIA GPUs, low-latency networking, and optimized storage. The service integrates Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker to provide immediate access to foundation models without separate provider contracts. AWS manages procurement, setup, and operations while customers supply space and power, enabling isolated, sovereign deployments that accelerate AI initiatives.

🚀 Amazon Web Services is previewing Amazon EC2 M4 Max Mac instances, powered by the latest Mac Studio hardware to accelerate demanding Apple build and test workflows. These next-generation Mac instances target developers building for iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, and Safari. M4 Max offers a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and 128 GB unified memory, plus Nitro-based networking and EBS bandwidth to support large-scale CI/CD and testing.

🚀 AWS announced general availability of Amazon Nova Act, a service for building and managing fleets of reliable agents that automate production UI workflows. Powered by a custom Nova 2 Lite model, Nova Act can complete repetitive browser tasks, call APIs or tools, and escalate to human supervisors when needed. Developers can combine natural language with deterministic Python, prototype in the online playground, refine scripts with the Nova Act IDE extension, and deploy to AWS quickly. Nova Act is available today in US East (N. Virginia).

🔒 AWS announces general availability of AWS Security Hub, adding near real-time risk analytics, advanced trends, unified enablement, and streamlined pricing across AWS security services. Security Hub correlates and enriches signals from Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Security Hub CSPM to surface and prioritize active risks. Centralized deployment across AWS Organizations, attack-path visualization, and automated workflows reduce manual correlation and speed remediation at scale.

🚀 Amazon EMR Serverless now provides fully managed serverless local storage for Apache Spark workloads, removing the need to provision disk type or size per application. The service offloads intermediate operations such as shuffle to an auto-scaling, encrypted serverless storage with job-level isolation, so customers pay only for compute and memory consumed. This reduces disk-related job failures and can lower costs by up to 20%. It is generally available for EMR release 7.12 and later.