All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Amazon Redshift Serverless is now generally available in the AWS Europe (Milan) and Africa (Cape Town) regions. With Redshift Serverless, users—data analysts, developers, and data scientists—can run analytics without provisioning or managing clusters, benefiting from automatic provisioning, intelligent scaling, and per-second compute billing. You can query data via Query Editor V2 or existing BI tools, load data from Amazon S3 (including Apache Parquet), use Redshift data shares, restore provisioned snapshots, and take advantage of unified billing for queries across these sources.

🔒 Signal has introduced an opt-in secure cloud backups feature that creates end-to-end encrypted archives of users' messages and recent media. The capability is available now in the Android beta and will be rolled out to iOS and desktop after testing completes. The free tier stores messages and up to 45 days of media within a 100 MiB limit; a paid $1.99/month plan raises storage to 100 GB and extends media retention. Backups occur daily, exclude soon-to-disappear and view-once messages, and are protected by a 64-character recovery key generated on-device that Signal never receives.

🛡️ AWS WAF is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, allowing customers to deploy web application firewall protections closer to their users. The service helps protect web applications from common exploits and automated bots that can affect availability, security, or resource consumption. Note that AWS WAF Bot Control with targeted inspection and the Anti-DDoS managed rule group are not currently available in this region.

🔍 BigQuery's new Column Metadata (CMETA) index is an automated, highly scalable metadata index that improves query pruning and reduces compute for extremely large tables. CMETA stores snapshots of block- and column-level statistics and is maintained transparently by BigQuery with no user intervention. Early adopters report up to 60x faster queries and up to 10x lower slot usage for selective filters, particularly on clustered columns.

🎖️ Google Public Sector is opening registration for a no-cost, three-week virtual program, Google Launchpad for Veterans, offering foundational generative AI training and a path to the Gen AI Leader certification. The Gen AI Leader training includes a two-day kickoff on November 13–14, optional exam prep sessions, and a complimentary exam voucher. Participants will learn core LLM concepts, how to navigate the AI ecosystem, and practical business applications using Gemini and NotebookLM to drive organizational transformation.

📣 AWS WAF now includes a free allocation of Vended Logs ingestion to CloudWatch: 500 MB for every 1 million WAF requests processed, provided at no additional cost. The allocation is applied automatically across WAF vended logs to CloudWatch, S3, and Firehose and is reconciled on your AWS bill at month end. Usage beyond the included allowance is charged at standard AWS WAF Vended Logs CloudWatch rates. This change helps reduce logging costs while preserving comprehensive security visibility and analytics.

⚡ Amazon Web Services has announced general availability of managed tiered checkpointing for Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a hybrid checkpointing capability that caches frequent checkpoints in CPU memory and periodically persists them to Amazon S3 for durability. The approach reduces model recovery time and minimizes training progress loss on large-scale clusters. It integrates with PyTorch Distributed Checkpoint (DCP) and is enabled via a CreateCluster/UpdateCluster API parameter; customers can use the sagemaker-checkpointing Python library to adopt it with minimal code changes. Currently available for HyperPod clusters using the EKS orchestrator.

⚙️ This sponsored comparison contrasts Action1, a cloud-native patch management platform, with Microsoft's legacy WSUS. It examines installation, ongoing maintenance, patch coverage, remote delivery, automation, troubleshooting, and reporting. The piece argues that Action1 reduces infrastructure overhead, patches third-party apps, and supports remote endpoints without VPN. It concludes that Action1 better fits modern, hybrid environments and audit-driven compliance needs.

🚀 Cloudflare has added support for the node:http client and server APIs in Workers, enabling developers to deploy existing Node.js HTTP applications at the edge with minimal code changes. This change makes frameworks like Express and Koa runnable on Workers with zero cold starts, automatic scaling, and reduced latency for global users. The client APIs are implemented on top of Workers' native fetch(), and server integration uses an internal bridge that registers listen(port) rather than binding TCP sockets. Some Node-specific features remain limited or unsupported (the Agent is effectively a no-op; trailers, early hints, 1xx responses, and TLS-specific options are not available).

🔧 AWS announced general availability of Custom Blueprints in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, enabling customers to supply their own managed IAM policies when creating project roles. Teams can replace or augment the default service-managed policies and use custom AWS CloudFormation templates to define infrastructure and parameters for resources such as Amazon EMR on EC2, AWS Glue Data Catalog, and Amazon Redshift. Sample templates are available in the SageMaker documentation, and the capability is offered in all AWS Commercial Regions where the next-generation SageMaker is available.

🚀 NetworkX now supports Amazon Neptune Analytics as a graph store, enabling developers to use familiar NetworkX APIs while transparently offloading heavy graph-algorithm workloads to Neptune’s scalable analytics engine. The integration provides Zero-ETL data handling, automatic provisioning and teardown for a serverless-like experience, and preserves existing Python workflows without refactoring code.

🔧 Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports the now() and uuid() functions in SELECT clauses, extending prior support in WHERE, INSERT, and UPDATE. It also introduces a native Duration data type to represent elapsed time between timestamps, removing the need to store intervals as strings or bytes. These updates improve Apache Cassandra compatibility and simplify time-based operations and identifier generation across AWS Commercial and GovCloud regions.

🌐 Amazon CloudFront now supports IPv6 connectivity to origin servers, enabling end-to-end IPv6 content delivery for web applications. Customers can configure custom origins as IPv4-only (default), IPv6-only, or dual-stack; in dual-stack mode CloudFront will automatically balance requests across IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. IPv6 origin support is available in all supported AWS Commercial Regions and excludes Amazon S3 and VPC origins. This capability can improve performance for native IPv6 users and reduce pressure from IPv4 address exhaustion for origin infrastructure.

🚗 Horizon is an open-source, cloud-native software factory developed by Google and Accenture to standardize platform development for Android Automotive OS (AAOS) and related embedded vehicle software. It promotes a virtual-first workflow using high-fidelity cloud devices, VHAL, virtio, and scalable Cuttlefish instances to enable elastic testing and rapid developer feedback. Innovations such as the Android Build File System (ABFS), containerized reproducible builds, and integrated code tooling have produced 10x–50x faster feedback in early deployments, reducing build times and supporting high-frequency, higher-quality releases.

🤖 Amazon Web Services announced enhancements to the Amazon Q Developer chat experience within SageMaker Unified Studio Jupyter notebooks and added a command-line interface for use in notebooks and the Code Editor. By integrating with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, the assistant becomes aware of project resources—data, compute, and code—and provides personalized, context-aware help. These updates aim to speed tasks like code refactoring, file edits, and troubleshooting while preserving transparency around assistant actions. The capabilities are available at no additional cost via the Amazon Q Developer Free Tier where SageMaker Unified Studio is offered; customers can enable Amazon Q Developer Pro for expanded functionality.

🔐 Microsoft has completed a global rollout enforcing multifactor authentication (MFA) for Azure Portal sign-ins across 100% of tenants as of March 2025. The rollout follows an initial enforcement announcement in May 2024 and prior warnings to Entra global admins to enable MFA to avoid access disruptions. Microsoft says this step strengthens account defenses and will be followed by mandatory MFA for Azure CLI, PowerShell, SDKs, and APIs in October 2025. The company cites internal research showing MFA dramatically reduces account takeover risk.

🎬 AWS Elemental MediaConvert now integrates with Time-Addressable Media Store (TAMS), enabling customers to reference and extract precise, time-bound media segments as inputs to encoding workflows. The integration requires customers to operate their own TAMS servers—MediaConvert does not host or manage TAMS—and supports quick-turnaround use cases like live-event highlight clipping, near-real-time social publishing, and archive repurposing. This capability is aimed at media operations teams modernizing archives, automating editorial workflows, and connecting broadcast infrastructure and CMS directly into high-performance encoding pipelines.

🔐 Amazon CloudFront now supports hybrid post-quantum key establishment across all existing TLS security policies for client-to-edge connections, enabling quantum-resistant key exchange without customer configuration. CloudFront also introduces a new TLS1.3_2025 policy that enforces TLS 1.3 only. Both features are enabled by default at all edge locations and incur no additional charges. These updates help organizations strengthen long-term in-transit protection and simplify compliance planning.

🛡️ AWS announced general availability of Amazon GuardDuty custom threat detection using entity lists, extending support beyond IP-only lists to include malicious domains and IP addresses. GuardDuty introduces a new finding type, Impact:EC2/MaliciousDomainRequest.Custom, triggered when activity related to a listed domain is observed. Entity lists also allow suppression of alerts from trusted sources and simplify cross-region permission management, avoiding IAM policy size limits. The feature is available in all GuardDuty Regions except China and GovCloud (US).

🔔 Google Cloud has expanded its Compute Flexible Committed Use Discounts (Flex CUDs) to cover additional VM families and serverless offerings, delivering broader savings and greater deployment flexibility. The update adds enhanced discounts for memory‑optimized M1–M4 instances and HPC‑optimized H3 and H4D families, and extends coverage to Cloud Run request-based billing and Cloud Functions. A new spend-based billing model applies discounts directly to eligible usage rather than issuing credits, and introduces changes to the Billing UI, Cloud Billing export to BigQuery schema, and Cloud Commerce Consumer Procurement APIs. Customers can opt in immediately; those who do not will be auto-transitioned to the new model on January 21, 2026, while new Billing Accounts created on or after July 15, 2025 will default to the updated model.