All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Amazon EMR and AWS Glue now include comprehensive audit context support for AWS Lake Formation credential vending APIs and AWS Glue Data Catalog GetTable and GetTables calls. Enabled by default, the feature logs platform type and identifiers (Cluster ID, Step ID, Job Run ID, Virtual Cluster ID) to AWS CloudTrail for enhanced security auditing and troubleshooting. It supports EMR 7.12+ and AWS Glue 5.1+ across all Regions that offer EMR, AWS Glue, and Lake Formation.

⚡ AWS Glue 5.1 is now generally available, upgrading core engines to Apache Spark 3.5.6, Python 3.11, and Scala 2.12.18 to deliver performance and security improvements. The release refreshes open table format support (Apache Hudi 1.0.2, Apache Iceberg 1.10.0, Delta Lake 3.3.2) and adds Apache Iceberg format 3.0 features such as default column values and deletion vectors. AWS Lake Formation now enforces fine‑grained write control for Spark DDL/DML, and Glue adds full‑table access control for Hudi and Delta tables in Spark.

🔍 Amazon Quick Research now integrates specialized third-party industry datasets from S&P Global, FactSet, and IDC, alongside public patent and PubMed collections. Users with existing subscriptions can combine these authoritative sources with enterprise data and real-time web search inside a unified AI workspace. The capability compresses weeks of data discovery and analysis into minutes and helps teams move more quickly from insight to action. The integration is available in select AWS Regions.

🔐 Amazon has extended AWS Lake Formation fine-grained access control to include write operations for tables registered with Lake Formation when used in Apache Spark jobs on Amazon EMR and AWS Glue. Administrators can now enforce table-, column-, and row-level permissions for DML actions (CREATE, ALTER, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE INTO, DROP) as well as read operations, enabling single-job read/write pipelines. The change reduces the need for separate clusters or applications and centralizes governance. The feature is available in all Regions where EMR, Glue, and Lake Formation are supported.

🔍 Amazon S3 Metadata is expanding to twenty-two additional AWS Regions, bringing automated, queryable object and custom metadata closer to more customers. The feature automatically populates metadata for both new and existing objects in near real-time and supports system-defined details (size, source) and user-defined tags such as product SKUs or transaction IDs. This expansion makes S3 Metadata generally available in 28 Regions and enables faster data discovery, curation, and analytics inside existing S3 workflows.

🔐 AWS Secrets Manager now supports managed external secrets, a new secret type that standardizes storage and enables automated rotation for third-party application credentials such as Salesforce, Snowflake, and BigID. The feature separates rotation metadata from secret values and integrates directly with providers to remove the need for custom rotation functions. It leverages existing IAM, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, and KMS controls and follows standard Secrets Manager pricing with no additional charge.

🔒 Black Friday 2025 brings a broad selection of verified promotions across security software, VPNs, password managers, antivirus suites, online training, and hardware from major vendors. Highlights include up to 86% off VPN subscriptions, up to 70% off antivirus products, deep discounts on password managers, and reduced pricing for privacy removal services and certification courses. Most offers run from late November through early December and include date-limited coupons; availability and exact savings vary by provider, so confirm terms before buying. BleepingComputer discloses some links are affiliate-supported; if a listed promotion fits your needs, act promptly while the offer remains live.

🔧 The Amazon SageMaker AI MCP Server now provides tools to set up and manage HyperPod clusters, allowing AI coding assistants to provision and operate clusters for distributed training, fine‑tuning, and deployment. It automates prerequisites and orchestrates clusters via Amazon EKS or Slurm with CloudFormation templates that optimize networking, storage, and compute. The server also delivers lifecycle operations — scaling, patching, diagnostics — so administrators and data scientists can manage large-scale AI/ML clusters without deep infrastructure expertise.

🔒 AWS has launched Network Firewall Proxy in public preview, providing centralized controls to block data exfiltration and malware injection across application traffic. In explicit proxy mode you can set up filters in just a few clicks to control outbound requests and the responses your applications receive, protect against domain or SNI spoofing, and restrict access to trusted domains or IPs. The service supports TLS inspection and granular HTTP header filtering, and emits detailed logs to Amazon S3 and AWS CloudWatch. Preview access is free in US East (Ohio).

🔍 AWS published behavioral guidelines for network scanning to help legitimate scanners distinguish themselves from malicious actors when probing AWS IP space. The guidance defines four pillars—observational, identifiable, cooperative, and confidential—and gives practical examples (non‑mutating checks, reverse DNS, meaningful user‑agents, opt‑out mechanisms). Conforming scanners should limit impact, secure collected data, and respect opt‑out requests to reduce abuse reports and improve internet security.

🔐 Tor has replaced its legacy tor1 relay encryption with a new design called Counter Galois Onion (CGO) to strengthen circuit traffic confidentiality and integrity. CGO is built on a Rugged Pseudorandom Permutation (RPRP) construction named UIV+ and provides wide-block encryption, tag chaining, per-cell key updates for immediate forward secrecy, and a 16-byte authenticator that removes SHA-1. The change is currently experimental in the C Tor implementation and the Rust client Arti, will be deployed transparently to Tor Browser users, and aims to block tagging and other malleability attacks with only modest bandwidth cost.

🔒 Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports minor PostgreSQL releases 17.6, 16.10, 15.14, 14.19, and 13.22. The update introduces Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) for versions 16.10 and 17.6, masking column values at query time via role-based policies without changing stored data. It also adds a shared plan cache and delivers improved performance, faster RTO, and better Global Database switchover behavior. These versions are available in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US); you can create new clusters or upgrade existing databases through the RDS console.

⚠️ Microsoft is investigating an Exchange Online outage (incident EX1189820) preventing customers from accessing mailboxes via the classic Outlook desktop client, with reports of server connection and login failures. The company says impact is specific to users in Asia Pacific and North America and has classified the event as an incident in the admin center. As a workaround, affected users are advised to use Outlook on the Web while Microsoft analyzes the issue.

🔁AWS Glue now supports zero-ETL for self-managed database sources, enabling no-code replication from Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL hosted on-premises or on EC2 to Amazon Redshift. The feature auto-creates ongoing integrations to simplify setup, reduce operational overhead, and eliminate much of the engineering work previously required to build ingestion pipelines. It is available in multiple AWS Regions and aims to save teams weeks of engineering effort.

🆕 AWS Lambda now supports creating serverless applications with Node.js 24, available as both a managed runtime and a container base image. AWS will automatically apply updates to the managed runtime and base image as they become available, and the runtime is offered in all Regions including GovCloud (US) and China. The release emphasizes modern async/await handlers and removes callback-based handlers; Lambda@Edge and Powertools for AWS Lambda (TypeScript) are also supported, and standard AWS deployment tools (Console, CLI, SAM, CDK, CloudFormation) can be used to deploy Node.js 24 functions.

⚡Microsoft will introduce a new Teams call handler, ms-teams_modulehost.exe, that runs as a child process to manage the calling stack separately from the main ms-teams.exe application, improving startup times and in-meeting performance. The change is transparent to end users and requires no retraining. Administrators should allowlist the new process in security and endpoint protection systems and notify helpdesk staff to avoid false positives during the rollout.

🔒 As year-end budgets close, organizations should prioritize security purchases that reduce real business risk and produce measurable outcomes. Skip vendor wish lists; focus on strengthening identity controls — expanding MFA, tightening privileged access, and auditing Active Directory — and on short, outcome-based engagements such as attack-surface reviews, tabletop exercises, and purple-team testing. Consolidate redundant tools, pre-buy continuity capacity, and document KPIs to justify future funding.

🔒 Check Point's CloudGuard WAF combines high prevention accuracy with reduced operational overhead to lower risk and total cost of ownership. In the WAF Comparison Project 2024–25 (1,040,242 legitimate requests across 692 sites, 13 vendors) it delivered ~99.4% detection and ~0.8% false positives. That accuracy, paired with less manual tuning and faster false-positive triage, cuts hidden expenses and breach exposure while protecting apps and APIs.

⚡ Amazon SageMaker AI now supports EAGLE (Extrapolation Algorithm for Greater Language-model Efficiency) speculative decoding to boost large language model inference throughput by up to 2.5x. The capability enables models to predict and validate multiple tokens in parallel rather than one at a time, preserving output quality while reducing latency. SageMaker automatically selects between EAGLE 2 and EAGLE 3 depending on model architecture and provides built‑in optimization jobs using curated or customer datasets. Optimized models can be deployed through existing SageMaker inference workflows without infrastructure changes, and the feature is available in select AWS Regions.

🚀 AWS announced general availability of automatic quota management in Service Quotas. The feature sends configurable notifications (email, SMS, Slack) via the Service Quotas console or API when usage approaches allocated limits and can automatically and safely adjust service quota values in response to observed consumption. This reduces operational overhead from tracking and requesting quota increases across accounts and Regions and helps prevent unexpected interruptions. The capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS commercial regions.