All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Amazon EC2 C8i instances are now available in the Europe (Stockholm) region. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, offering up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based instances. C8i delivers up to 20% higher performance than C7i and provides larger sizes, including a new 96xlarge and two bare metal options. Purchase options include Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot.

🔒 Fortinet highlights World Economic Forum guidance showing how AI is transforming cybersecurity and why public-private cooperation matters. The piece notes that while 91% of organizations are using or testing AI security tools, skill shortages persist and create risk. The Forum’s “Empowering Defenders” paper, to which Fortinet contributed, emphasizes operational integration, governance, workforce readiness, and practical pilot-to-scale approaches for AI in security.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 C7i instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) are available in the Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. C7i instances offer up to 15% better price-performance than C6i, larger instance sizes up to 48xlarge, and two bare metal sizes with built-in Intel accelerators. They support Intel AMX, and permit up to 128 EBS volumes per instance to scale data-intensive workloads.

🛡️ Today AWS WAF introduced AI traffic monetization, a Bot Control feature that enables content owners to price, meter, and accept payments from AI bots and agents accessing content and APIs. Using the x402 protocol, AWS WAF returns a machine-readable HTTP 402 response with pricing, accepted methods, and license terms; upon proof of payment it verifies at the edge and issues scoped access tokens. Publishers can set differentiated pricing by agent identity and intent, view revenue analytics in the console, and receive payouts via third-party providers such as Coinbase’s x402 Facilitator, with Stripe and MPP support coming soon.

🔍 Today AWS announced the general availability of Amazon CloudWatch Query Studio, a unified querying and visualization experience inside the CloudWatch console. Query Studio supports PromQL and Metrics Insights to query OpenTelemetry and AWS-vended metrics across accounts and regions from a single workspace. It offers visual query builders, multiple visualization types, dashboard integration, Grafana import, and keyboard shortcuts.

📣 Amazon Web Services announced general availability of CloudWatch Metrics Centralization, enabling replication of CloudWatch and OpenTelemetry metrics cross-account and cross-region into a single destination account. Enterprise teams can use AWS Organizations to define centralization rules that automatically replicate metrics for unified querying, alarming, compliance, and governance. The feature supports Metrics Insights, dashboards, alarms, Metric Math, anomaly detection, Metric Streams, and PromQL and is available in multiple global AWS Regions.

🛠️ This post walks through converting a Node.js TypeScript CLI into a compact Go single-binary tool using Antigravity to automate translation, test generation, and platform mappings. The author set goals for zero dependencies, fast startup, and a zero-trust security posture, then used an agent-driven workflow to audit alternatives, scaffold code, and apply Test-Driven Development. The migration emphasized safety, explicit error handling, thorough testing, and modular subagents to parallelize large feature sets.

🔒 European enterprises tested sovereign cloud under regulatory pressure and found residency alone doesn’t equal control. Vendors offer sovereignty features, but practitioners at EIC 2026 emphasized that identity governance — not just data location — determines operational sovereignty for AI workloads. Weak identity controls, especially for non-human AI agents, undermine claims of control despite customer-managed keys or regional data centers.

🛰️ Starting today, Amazon GameLift Servers includes free inbound and outbound network bandwidth for all instance types from generation 6 and later, covering On-Demand and Spot instances with no commitment. Customers will only be charged for Amazon GameLift Servers instance hours, simplifying cost predictability for multiplayer game hosting. The change requires no enrollment or configuration and is effective immediately for eligible fleets in supported regions, excluding China. Existing customers receive the benefit automatically.

🔍 Amazon RDS for MariaDB now offers MariaDB 12.3 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, enabling evaluation of the new Long-Term Support release. The preview provides a sandbox to test applications and explore features like Oracle TO_DATE() compatibility, SQL IS JSON validation, a basic XML type, cursor support for prepared statements, and optimizer improvements. Preview instances are retained up to 60 days and snapshots are restricted to the preview environment.

🔧 Amazon RDS for MySQL now offers an Extended Support minor version, 5.7.44-RDS.20260521, addressing known security vulnerabilities and bugs. Amazon RDS Extended Support gives customers up to three additional years to upgrade past a major community support end date while receiving critical fixes. Review the Amazon RDS User Guide for upgrade guidance and Pricing FAQs for costs.

🔔 Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports community minor versions 10.6.27, 10.11.18, 11.4.12, and 11.8.8. AWS recommends upgrading to the latest minor releases to address known security vulnerabilities and to gain bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality from the MariaDB community. You can use automatic minor version upgrades during scheduled maintenance or RDS Managed Blue/Green deployments for safer and faster updates. See the Amazon RDS User Guide for details on upgrading, and consult pricing and regional availability in the Amazon RDS documentation.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon Lightsail is available in three additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), South America (São Paulo), and Europe (Spain). This expansion delivers lower latency and improved performance for customers in these geographies while supporting local data residency requirements. The new Regions provide access to Lightsail's full feature set, including instances (general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized), managed databases, container services, and load balancers with predictable pricing.

🔒 Check Point now integrates its Workforce AI governance with Claude’s Compliance API to close substantial visibility gaps in enterprise AI usage. The integration provides continuous, audit-grade records across web, desktop, and mobile surfaces, addressing a critical mobile blind spot that proxies, CASBs, and endpoint DLP cannot cover. It combines content-level exposure analysis, per-user adoption analytics, and unified policy enforcement to enable secure, frictionless AI adoption across the organization.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker AI now supports serverless customization for Nvidia Nemotron 3 Nano via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). This open-weight 30B-parameter model can be deployed and adapted to specific domains and workflows directly within SageMaker. Serverless customization handles infrastructure and training orchestration, enabling teams to focus on data and evaluation while paying only for usage. The feature is available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland), and can be launched from SageMaker Studio or via the SageMaker Python SDK.

⚙️ AWS has launched Storage optimized Amazon EC2 I7i instances in the Europe (Paris) region, powered by 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors and 3rd generation AWS Nitro SSDs. These instances deliver up to 23% better compute performance and over 10% improved price performance versus I4i, with up to 45TB NVMe storage and significant reductions in storage I/O latency and variability. I7i supports torn write prevention up to 16KB and comes in eleven sizes, including bare metal options, with up to 100Gbps network and 60Gbps EBS bandwidth.

🔎 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now offers Web Search generally available in US East (N. Virginia). The fully managed tool provides agents with current web knowledge, combining an Amazon-operated web index and structured knowledge graph data to return high-value excerpts, entity data, and verified facts. Web Search integrates with AgentCore via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and keeps data residency within your secured AWS environment with zero data egress.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks announced successful completion of a Cloud Medium security assessment by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, expanding PBMM coverage across Cortex®, Cortex Cloud and Strata. The assessment validates these cloud services for Protected B / Medium Integrity / Medium Availability environments, enabling organizations handling sensitive Canadian data to use a unified, AI-driven security architecture while maintaining compliance and operational resilience. This milestone highlights PBMM's growing relevance beyond government into critical infrastructure and private sector organizations.

🔍 Fortinet highlights its role as a research partner with the MITRE Center for Threat-Informed Defense (CTID), contributing threat intelligence, operational expertise, and research to practical R&D projects. The CTID impact report (2019–2025) demonstrates collaborative efforts to map adversary behavior to detection, controls, and cloud security. Fortinet’s contributions focus on operationalizing ATT&CK-based frameworks, improving detection quality, and advancing program maturity across cloud, identity, and AI-driven workflows.

🔒 Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) and AWS GovCloud (US-East), enabling government and regulated-industry customers to reserve GPU capacity for machine learning workloads. The service lets customers reserve GPU instances in advance for defined durations, providing assured access to accelerated compute for pre-training, fine-tuning, rapid prototyping, and surge inference. Reservations can be made up to eight weeks ahead for durations up to six months, in clusters of one to 64 instances, and can be shared across accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager.