All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced general availability of EC2 P6-B200 instances for SageMaker notebooks. These instances include eight NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs with 1,440 GB of high-bandwidth GPU memory and 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, offering up to 2x the training performance versus P5en. They enable interactive development and fine-tuning of large foundation models in JupyterLab and CodeEditor, and are available in US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon).

🔍 AWS has introduced five new Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) metrics to improve network observability for AI/ML and HPC workloads. The counters track retransmitted packets and bytes, retransmit timeouts, impaired remote connections, and unresponsive remote receivers at the per-EFA device level. Available on Nitro v4+ instances with EFA installer 1.43.0+, metrics are exposed via sysfs and can be exported to Prometheus and tools like Grafana for monitoring and alerting.

🔗 AWS now enables remote connections from local VS Code to Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, allowing developers to use their personalized VS Code setups while running workloads on SageMaker-managed compute and accessing cloud-resident data. Authentication is provided via the AWS Toolkit extension for secure, streamlined access. The integration preserves existing development workflows for data processing, SQL analytics, and ML.

🎬 AWS Deadline Cloud is now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Europe (London). This fully managed service simplifies render management for teams producing computer-generated graphics and visual effects, enabling them to scale render farms near creative teams. Customers gain improved integration with existing AWS services and creative pipelines, and can now deploy Deadline Cloud across 10 AWS regions worldwide. Bringing the service closer reduces latency and streamlines collaboration across distributed production workflows.

🛡️ AWS has expanded GuardDuty Malware Protection for S3 scanning limits, raising the maximum file size from 5 GB to 100 GB and increasing archive processing to 10,000 files per archive (previously 1,000). These enhancements are automatically enabled in all supported AWS Regions. Customers gain broader coverage for large objects and dense archives stored in S3, improving pre-ingestion threat detection. This update strengthens protection for workloads and downstream processes.

🔐 Amazon RDS Proxy now supports end-to-end IAM authentication for Amazon Aurora and RDS database instances, allowing applications to authenticate through the proxy using AWS IAM without storing credentials in Secrets Manager. This reduces credential rotation overhead and simplifies credential management. The capability is available for MySQL and PostgreSQL in all Regions where RDS Proxy is supported.

🔔 Microsoft Teams will display warnings on private messages that contain URLs flagged as spam, phishing, or malware for customers using Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and enterprise Teams. The feature enters public preview for desktop, Android, web, and iOS in September 2025 and is slated for general availability in November 2025. Admins can enable the preview via the Teams Admin Center messaging settings; warnings will be enabled by default at GA and can be managed through the Teams Admin Center or PowerShell.

🚀 This Cloud blog post from Google Cloud Consulting presents a practical three-part framework to quantify the business value of AI initiatives. It asks teams to define success across four value-driver categories, transparently specify Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), and state an explicit ROI. A worked example — an e-commerce customer-service chatbot — shows quantified monthly benefits versus estimated managed-service costs, demonstrating rapid payback and sustained positive cash flow.

🛡️ Google Cloud's Network Connectivity Center provides a centralized, hub-and-spoke model to simplify and scale enterprise connectivity across VPCs, on-premises data centers, and other clouds. Architected with distinct management, control, and data planes, it employs a fail-static design so existing traffic continues during control-plane issues. The service supports up to 250 VPC spokes per hub and reduces operational overhead by automating full-mesh connectivity.

🔐 Google Cloud has launched the Professional Security Operations Engineer (PSOE) certification to validate hands‑on skills for detecting, investigating, and responding to cloud threats. The exam focuses on practical use of Google Security Operations, Security Command Center, and threat intelligence across domains such as detection engineering, incident response, and threat hunting. Google recommends candidates have ~three years in security with at least one year of Google Cloud security tooling experience, and provides online training, hands‑on labs, and an official exam guide to prepare.

🤖 Amazon ECS now offers generative AI assistance from Amazon Q Developer to streamline task definition creation and updates in the AWS Management Console. Developers can use an inline chat to generate, explain, or refactor task definition JSON, inject suggestions at any point, and accept or reject proposed edits. Inline suggestions are enhanced to let Amazon Q Developer autocomplete whole blocks of sample code in addition to property-based hints. The capability is available where Amazon Q Developer is offered and can be enabled or disabled via the console code editor settings or controlled with IAM permissions.

🔒 Browser extensions present a significant, often unmonitored enterprise risk: they can run privileged code, inject scripts into web apps, access cookies and local storage, and persist via background processes. Keep Aware offers a Buyer’s Guide to Browser Extension Management that outlines these technical attack surfaces and illustrates how to reduce exposure. The guide compares common controls — GPO/MDM, EDR, enterprise browsers — with purpose-built browser security extensions to show trade-offs between visibility, enforcement, and user experience.

🔒 AWS now offers VPC endpoints for Amazon CloudWatch Observability Access Manager (OAM), enabling private, in-region connectivity between your VPCs and CloudWatch OAM without traversing the public internet. The endpoints support both IPv4 and IPv6 and leverage AWS PrivateLink controls such as security groups and VPC endpoint policies. Available in all commercial regions, AWS GovCloud (US), and China Regions, this lets teams manage cross-account observability links and sinks from VPCs that have no internet access.

🔐 Security leaders often struggle to show boards how cyber risk affects revenue, governance and growth. The sponsored course Risk Reporting to the Board for Modern CISOs was created to teach practical skills for framing risk in business terms: concise dashboards, high-impact presentations, and building financial and strategic business cases. It also introduces Continuous Threat Exposure Management as a forward-looking reporting model.

🔍The Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector — an agentless, fully managed Prometheus metrics collector — now vends logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, improving visibility into target discovery, authentication, scraping, and ingestion. These logs surface details such as timeouts, remote-write failures, and other errors to aid troubleshooting. The feature is generally available in all regions where the service is offered; review CloudWatch logs pricing and the collector monitoring user guide to get started.

🔔 Amazon EventBridge now provides its API destinations capability in the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) and AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Regions. API destinations allow event buses to invoke HTTPS endpoints as rule targets and support flexible authentication methods such as API key and OAuth, while storing credentials securely in AWS Secrets Manager. This expansion reduces call latency for local workloads and simplifies secure, managed integrations. To get started, consult the EventBridge documentation for configuration guidance.

🧰 AWS has added a LocalStack integration for Visual Studio Code that enables developers to test and debug serverless applications locally from the IDE. The integration connects VS Code to a LocalStack-emulated environment without manual port configuration or code changes, exposing emulated services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, Amazon API Gateway, and DynamoDB. Available through the AWS Toolkit for VS Code (v3.74.0+), a guided walkthrough installs the LocalStack CLI, creates a LocalStack profile, and lets developers switch profiles and deploy to the LocalStack environment at no additional AWS cost.

🛡️ Falcon Complete Hub delivers a unified interface inside the Falcon platform that consolidates Falcon Complete Next‑Gen MDR activities, escalations and expert guidance into a single operational view. It prioritizes critical actions, provides step‑by‑step remediation links and centralizes subscription status, announcements and knowledge resources to reduce decision latency. Backed by a 37‑minute mean time to respond and a four‑minute mean time to detect, the Hub converts MDR visibility into clear operational tasks and faster response.

🔐 Amazon Athena now supports single sign-on for its JDBC and ODBC drivers using AWS IAM Identity Center’s trusted identity propagation. With updated drivers (JDBC 3.6.0 and ODBC 2.0.5.0), analysts can connect from third‑party BI tools and SQL clients using corporate credentials while Lake Formation permissions are enforced and actions are logged. This removes the need for embedded credentials, simplifies identity‑based data governance, and streamlines access management across tools.

🛡️ This post explains how organizations can use AWS security services while keeping data within Dedicated Local Zones. It describes the AWS Nitro System for hardware-enforced isolation, AWS KMS with an external key store option, and continuous protection from Amazon Inspector and GuardDuty. It also covers certificate management via ACM, DDoS mitigation with AWS Shield, and centralized auditing through CloudTrail.