All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights now supports Neuron UltraServers on Amazon EKS, enabling aggregated observability for multi-instance ML servers. The update adds a new UltraServer ID filter that presents consolidated metrics across all instances in a logical UltraServer group while retaining per-instance visibility. Available in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US), this simplifies monitoring and troubleshooting for Trainium and Inferentia workloads.

📢 Amazon RDS for Oracle now offers Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) License Included on R7i and M7i instances in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) region. Launched Nov 21, 2025, these License Included instances remove the need to purchase separate Oracle Database licenses and are available through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, and SDKs. There are no separate license or support charges. Review the Rethink Oracle Standard Edition Two on Amazon RDS for Oracle blog and Amazon RDS pricing for cost and regional availability.

📞 Amazon Connect now supports multi-skill agent scheduling to optimize workforce allocation across departments, languages, and customer tiers. Using forecast-driven, skill-based matching, administrators can schedule agents who hold multiple specialties and reserve multi-skilled staff for high-value interactions when demand peaks. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where agent scheduling is offered and aims to raise utilization while reducing staffing gaps.

🔁 Amazon Athena now provides an auto-scaling solution for Capacity Reservations that adjusts reserved DPUs automatically based on workload utilization. The solution uses AWS Step Functions to monitor Amazon CloudWatch metrics and add or remove DPUs when utilization crosses configured high and low thresholds. You can set measurement frequency, utilization thresholds, and capacity limits, and customize behavior via the provided CloudFormation template. The feature is available in Regions where Capacity Reservations is supported.

⚡ AWS announces enhancements to Lambda's Provisioned mode for Kafka event source mappings, enabling grouping of ESMs and higher density of event pollers to reduce costs by up to 90% for low-throughput workloads. Each Event Poller Unit (EPU) still provides 20 MB/s but now defaults to 10 pollers per EPU and supports shared capacity via the new PollerGroupName parameter. Changes are available today across AWS Commercial Regions and can be configured via API, CLI, Console, SDK, CloudFormation, or SAM.

🌐 Amazon Route 53 now exposes a dual-stack API endpoint at route53.global.api.aws, allowing clients to connect over IPv6, IPv4, or dual-stack. The existing IPv4-only endpoint remains available for backward compatibility. IPv6 support is available in all Commercial Regions at no additional cost and can be enabled via the AWS CLI or Management Console. This reduces IPv4 translation complexity and helps organizations meet IPv6 compliance.

🌐 AWS Security Token Service (STS) now supports IPv6 via new dual‑stack endpoints, allowing connections over IPv6, IPv4, or both. Dual‑stack access is supported over the public internet and privately from Amazon VPCs using AWS PrivateLink, so STS APIs can be invoked without traversing the public internet. This capability is available in all Commercial, GovCloud (US), and China Regions. Configure STS clients using the IAM user guide to enable dual‑stack endpoints.

🔧 AWS Control Tower v4.0 introduces a controls-focused experience that gives customers direct access to more than 750 AWS managed controls without requiring a full Control Tower deployment. Customers can review the Control Catalog and deploy selected controls into their existing AWS Organization within minutes while retaining their current account structure. The release also separates S3 buckets and SNS notifications for cleaner operations and improved cost attribution.

🗣️ Amazon Lex now supports Wait & Continue in ten additional languages — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan, and German. The feature enables deterministic voice and chat bots to pause while customers gather information and then resume the interaction seamlessly. It enhances natural, multilingual self-service experiences and is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Lex operates.

🚀 Amazon Lightsail now offers a new Nginx blueprint that includes IMDSv2 enforced by default and supports IPv6-only instances. With a few clicks you can provision a Lightsail VPS of your chosen size with Nginx preinstalled, using Lightsail instance bundles that combine OS, storage, and monthly data transfer. This blueprint is available in all AWS Regions where Lightsail runs; consult Lightsail documentation for supported blueprints and pricing details.

🚀 Amazon has expanded EC2 Image Builder with flexible AMI distribution features that let you distribute existing AMIs, retry failed distributions, and create custom distribution workflows. Distribution workflows introduce sequential steps—such as AMI copies, wait-for-action checkpoints, and attribute modifications—to support staged rollouts and approval gates with the same step-level visibility as build and test workflows. These capabilities work across regions and accounts and are available at no extra cost.

🚀 AWS Glue zero-ETL integrations now support AWS CloudFormation and the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), enabling creation and management of zero-ETL integrations using infrastructure as code. This lets teams ingest data from DynamoDB and enterprise SaaS sources (Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Zendesk) into Amazon Redshift, S3, and S3 Tables. CloudFormation and CDK support makes it easier to deploy, update, and version-control zero-ETL configurations consistently across multiple AWS accounts.

📧 Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Malaysia) and Canada West (Calgary) AWS Regions. This expansion lets customers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails from local AWS infrastructure, helping reduce latency and address data sovereignty and residency needs. Amazon SES, a scalable and cost-effective cloud email service, is now offered across 29 AWS Regions worldwide.

🔒 AWS Security Incident Response introduces a metered pricing model that charges per ingested security finding and includes a free tier for the first 10,000 findings per month. After the free tier, the per-finding rate is $0.000676 with tiered discounts at higher volumes. The consumption-based approach removes upfront commitments and minimum fees, enabling teams to scale response capability as needs evolve. Customers can monitor finding counts via Amazon CloudWatch at no extra cost, and the new pricing automatically applies in supported Regions starting November 21, 2025.

🔍 AWS announced general availability of a new Application Observability for AWS GitHub Action and enhancements to the CloudWatch Application Signals MCP server that embed observability into developer workflows. Developers can now request trace-aware diagnostics inside GitHub — for example by mentioning @awsapm in Issues — and receive intelligent, observability-based responses without switching consoles. The MCP server updates also let AI coding agents (such as Kiro) identify the exact file, function, and line causing latency or errors and provide or modify OTel-based instrumentation guidance for CDK or Terraform across ECS, EKS, Lambda, and EC2.

🔁 AWS Network Firewall now supports flexible cost allocation through AWS Transit Gateway native attachments, enabling automatic distribution of data processing charges across different AWS accounts. Administrators can create metering policies to apply inspection charges to application teams or business units instead of consolidating expenses in the firewall owner account. This preserves centralized security controls while automating chargeback based on actual usage. Flexible cost allocation is available in all AWS Commercial and Amazon China Regions where supported, with no additional fees beyond standard service pricing.

📊Amazon QuickSight now lets dashboard viewers customize tables and pivot tables directly in dashboards. Users can sort, reorder, hide or show, and freeze columns without requiring updates from dashboard authors. These per-view adjustments support cross-team collaboration and tailored analysis — for example, sales teams sorting by revenue or finance freezing account columns to retain context. The features are available in Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition across supported regions; see the product documentation and blog for guidance.

🚀 Amazon ECS Managed Instances is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) and GovCloud (US-West) Regions, bringing a fully managed EC2 compute option to government-focused accounts. Managed Instances dynamically scales and optimizes EC2 capacity, supports task-level requirements (vCPU, memory, CPU architecture), and lets you select instance families including GPU, network-optimized, and burstable types. AWS initiates security patching every 14 days; management fees apply in addition to EC2 costs.

🔗 AWS announced integration of AWS Lambda Kafka event source mapping directly in the Amazon MSK Console, allowing you to connect MSK topics to Lambda functions without switching consoles. The MSK Console now requires only a topic and target function while automatically creating and configuring the event source mapping (ESM), applying optimized defaults and optional IAM role generation. The integration defaults to Provisioned Mode to improve latency and throughput, and is generally available in most AWS Commercial Regions with a few regional exceptions.

🚀 AWS Glue now includes a new Amazon DynamoDB connector that natively supports Apache Spark DataFrames. This enables developers to reuse existing Spark DataFrame code across AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, and other Spark environments with minimal modification, replacing prior reliance on Glue-specific DynamicFrame objects. The connector exposes the full range of DataFrame operations and current Spark performance optimizations and is available in all AWS Commercial Regions where Glue runs.