All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🎙️ Amazon SageMaker AI Inference now supports bidirectional streaming, enabling real-time speech-to-text transcription that returns partial transcripts while audio is still being captured. Using the new Bidirectional Stream API, clients open an HTTP/2 connection to the SageMaker AI runtime, which automatically creates a WebSocket to your model container so audio frames and interim transcripts flow continuously. Any container that implements a WebSocket handler per the SageMaker AI contract works out of the box, allowing real-time models such as Deepgram to run without modification. The feature eliminates weeks or months of custom streaming infrastructure work so teams can focus on model accuracy, latency tuning, and agent behavior.

🕒 Amazon Quick Flows now supports scheduled execution, allowing teams to automate repetitive workflows at specified times or custom intervals. You can configure flows to run daily, weekly, monthly, or on custom schedules and schedule any flow you can access—whether you created it or it was shared with you. Scheduling is set via the Quick Flows scheduling icon and is available now in IAD, PDX, and DUB. There are no additional charges beyond standard Quick Flows usage, and common use cases include recurring report generation, summarizing open items in external services, and producing daily meeting briefings.

🔖 AWS has made AWS Glue Data Quality rule labeling generally available, allowing teams to attach custom key-value labels to data quality rules for better organization and targeted reporting. Labels can represent business context, team ownership, compliance tags, or priority and can be authored in DQDL. Queryable in rule outcomes, row-level results, and APIs, labels enable focused reports and streamlined remediation workflows across all commercial AWS Regions where the service is available.

🛠️ AWS announces general availability of AWS Glue Data Quality preprocessing queries, enabling transformations before running data quality checks through the Glue Data Catalog APIs. The feature lets you create derived columns, filter datasets, perform calculations, and validate column relationships as part of the quality evaluation. This capability removes separate preprocessing steps, streamlines workflows, and tailors recommendations and rules to specific data subsets across commercial AWS Regions.

🔎 Amazon Web Services has introduced Agentic Search for OpenSearch Service, an agent-driven layer that interprets natural-language intent, orchestrates search tools, and generates OpenSearch DSL queries while providing transparent summaries of its decision process. The built-in QueryPlanningTool uses LLMs to plan and emit DSL, removing the need for manual query syntax. Two agent types are available: conversational agents with memory and flow agents optimized for throughput. Administrators can configure agents via APIs or OpenSearch Dashboards, and Agentic Search is supported on OpenSearch Service version 3.3+ across AWS Commercial and GovCloud regions.

🖼️ Cloudflare now hosts Black Forest Lab's FLUX.2 image model on the Workers AI inference platform. The licensed dev release builds on the popular FLUX.1 lineage with stronger physical-world grounding, improved fidelity for faces, hands and small objects, and advanced multi-reference editing to preserve character and product consistency. Workers AI exposes FLUX.2 via multipart form-data (up to four 512×512 inputs) and returns images up to 4 megapixels, while supporting JSON prompting, hex color controls, multilingual prompts, and a server-side binding for integration into production pipelines.

🔍 Amazon OpenSearch Service now makes Piped Processing Language (PPL) and natural language the default experience in the OpenSearch UI Observability workspace. The release introduces 35+ new commands for deep analysis, faceted exploration, and natural-language querying, and integrates OpenTelemetry ingestion pipelines to simplify onboarding. Users can run enterprise-grade queries, correlate events, and move directly from query to visualization to reduce mean time to detect and resolve issues.

🔁 Amazon EC2 now offers interruptible On‑Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs), allowing reservation owners to temporarily make unused reserved capacity available to other internal workloads while retaining the ability to reclaim it. Consumers using interruptible ODCRs receive an interruption notice to allow graceful shutdown or checkpointing. The capability targets flexible, fault‑tolerant tasks such as batch processing, data analysis, and machine learning training, is available at no additional cost, and CloudFormation support is coming soon.

🔒 Amazon CloudFront now supports mutual TLS (mTLS), enabling both server and client authentication with X.509 certificates at AWS edge locations. Customers can require trusted client certificates to access distributions, reducing unauthorized access to APIs and applications. Typical uses include secure B2B API integrations and IoT device authentication. mTLS is available at no additional cost and configurable via Console, CLI, SDK, CDK, and CloudFormation.

🔧 AWS IoT Core now supports dynamic retrieval of thing registry data directly within IoT rules using the new get_registry_data() inline rule function. You can access device attributes, device type, and group membership to filter, enrich, and route messages — for example, routing lifecycle events or enriching gateway messages with sensor thresholds. The feature is available in all AWS regions where AWS IoT Core is present and can be used immediately via the IoT developer guide and API.

🚀 Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 is now generally available on Vertex AI, delivering frontier performance for coding, agents, vision, and office automation at roughly one-third the cost of Opus 4.1. The model introduces advanced agentic tool use—programmatic tool calling (including direct Python execution) and dynamic tool search—plus expanded memory and a 1M-token context window to support long, multi-step tasks. On Vertex AI, Opus 4.5 is offered as a Model-as-a-Service on Google's high-performance infrastructure with prompt caching, efficient batch predictions, provisioned throughput, and enterprise-grade controls for deployment. Organizations can leverage the Agent Builder stack (ADK, A2A, and Agent Engine) and Google Cloud security controls, including Model Armor and Security Command Center protections, to accelerate production agents while managing cost and risk.

☁️ Legacy Windows patching tools like SCCM and WSUS are struggling to meet the needs of distributed workforces because they depend on LAN or VPN check‑ins. The piece highlights WSUS deprecation and frequent synchronization, database, and re‑indexing failures that stall remediation. Cloud‑native, SaaS patch management (for example, Action1) allows endpoints to check in securely over the internet, use global delivery networks, and deliver faster, more consistent compliance without on‑prem infrastructure.

🚀 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances (u7i-6tb.112xlarge) are now available in Asia Pacific (Jakarta), offering 6TB of DDR5 memory and 448 vCPUs powered by custom Intel Sapphire Rapids processors. The instances support up to 100Gbps for EBS and networking and include ENA Express for lower-latency, consistent network performance. They are positioned for mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server, enabling higher transaction throughput and faster data loading and backups.

🔁 Amazon has expanded availability of Amazon MSK Replicator, allowing customers to replicate streaming data across Amazon MSK clusters in five more AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Thailand), Mexico (Central), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Canada West (Calgary), and Europe (Spain). MSK Replicator offers automatic asynchronous replication, auto-scales underlying resources on demand, and replicates Kafka metadata such as topic configurations, ACLs, and consumer group offsets. You can configure replication from the Amazon MSK console or the AWS CLI.

🚀 Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 is now available through Amazon Bedrock, giving Bedrock customers access to a high-performance foundation model at roughly one-third the prior cost. Opus 4.5 advances professional software engineering, agentic workflows, multilingual coding, and complex visual interpretation while supporting production-grade agent deployments. Bedrock adds two API features — tool search and tool use examples — plus a beta effort parameter to balance reasoning, tool calls, latency, and cost. The model is offered via global cross-region inference in multiple AWS regions.

🔁 AWS Lambda now offers enhanced error handling for Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) and self-managed Kafka event sources, enabling developers to define custom retry configurations and route failed messages to a Kafka topic as an on-failure destination. The update extends Kafka event source mapping (ESM) in Provisioned mode to support retry limits, time-bound retry windows, automatic discards of exceeded records, and per-message failure reporting to optimize retries. Configure these settings via the ESM API, AWS Console, or AWS CLI.

🔐 Amazon Redshift now supports federated permissions to centralize and enforce data access policies across multiple Redshift warehouses, reducing governance overhead for multi-warehouse deployments. Registered warehouses are auto-mounted account-wide and can be queried using existing workforce identities via AWS IAM Identity Center or IAM roles. Row-level, column-level, and masking controls are applied automatically, ensuring consistent fine-grained access control regardless of query location.

🔗 AWS announces general availability of AWS Glue catalog federation for remote Apache Iceberg catalogs. The feature enables analytics engines to query Iceberg tables stored in Amazon S3 and cataloged remotely without moving or copying data, with real-time metadata synchronization to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. It leverages AWS Lake Formation for fine-grained access controls and supports the Iceberg REST specifications; federation is available in the Lake Formation console and via SDKs/APIs.

💬 AWS announced general availability of Amazon Quick Suite Embedded Chat, a ready-made conversational AI you can embed into applications via one-click embedding or API-based iframes. The agent unifies structured data and unstructured knowledge in a single conversation so users can reference KPIs, pull file details, check customer feedback, and trigger actions without leaving the app. Connectors include SharePoint, websites, Slack, and Jira, and enterprises retain control over data access and action scopes. Embedded Chat is available in select Regions with no additional charge beyond existing Quick Suite pricing.

🧩 Amazon Connect flow modules now support custom inputs, outputs and branching logic, plus advanced versioning and alias management. You can define flexible parameters for reusable modules—for example, an authentication module that accepts a phone number and PIN and returns customer name and authentication status with branches like authenticated or not authenticated. Immutable version snapshots and alias mapping let teams update module implementations while flows referencing an alias automatically use the new version, simplifying maintenance and reuse.