All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

📦 Amazon Web Services announced a new Amazon ECR Archive storage class to lower costs for large volumes of rarely accessed container images. Lifecycle policies can now archive images by last pull time, age, or count, and archived images are excluded from repository image limits. Archived images are inaccessible for pulls but can be restored via Console, CLI, or API within about 20 minutes, and all operations are logged to CloudTrail; the feature is available in AWS Commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions.

📌 Amazon SageMaker Catalog now enforces glossary-term metadata during asset publishing. Administrators can require data producers to tag assets with approved business vocabulary from organizational glossaries, and enforcement rules will block publication if required terms are missing. This standardizes metadata, aligns technical schemas with business language, and improves discoverability and governance. Available in all regions where Amazon SageMaker Catalog operates; policies can be managed via the console, CLI, or SDKs.

🛡️ AWS now lets administrators enforce a centralized IP allocation strategy using VPC IPAM policies, ensuring public IPv4 addresses for resources like NAT Gateways and Elastic IPs are allocated from specified IPAM pools. The centrally defined policy cannot be overridden by individual teams, improving compliance and simplifying network and security management. Available in all AWS commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions, this feature works with both Free and Advanced IPAM tiers and enables cross-account, cross-region policy control when using the Advanced tier.

🔐 AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) introduces temporary delegation, enabling time-limited, delegated access to Amazon and AWS Partner products for tasks like initial deployments, ad-hoc maintenance, and feature upgrades. The capability eliminates the need for persistent IAM roles, improves auditability, and reduces setup and operational burden. It is available in all AWS commercial Regions and is being adopted by partners such as Archera, Aviatrix, Databricks, HashiCorp, Qumulo, Rapid7 and others.

🔒 AWS Directory Service now supports AWS PrivateLink, enabling you to route all Directory Service API and Directory Service Data API traffic through private VPC endpoints. This removes the need for internet gateways or NAT devices and reduces latency by creating requester-managed ENIs in enabled subnets. The feature covers directory management and user operations and is available in all Regions where AWS Directory Service is supported.

🔔 AWS announced general availability of AWS Data Exports supporting the FOCUS 1.2 schema, enabling customers to export standardized cost and usage data to Amazon S3. The release preserves the four-cost-column structure (ListCost, ContractedCost, BilledCost, EffectiveCost) from FOCUS 1.0 while adding fields for broader enterprise use cases. Key capabilities include invoice reconciliation, capacity reservation tracking to find unused reservations, and virtual currency support for multi-cloud and SaaS cost scenarios. The export is available in US East (N. Virginia) and covers all AWS Regions except AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS China Regions.

📺 AWS has announced the general availability of Elemental MediaConnect Router, a managed capability that dynamically routes live video between sources and destinations across the AWS network. The service reduces transport latency and improves packet delivery reliability compared with standard transport methods, and supports routing across regions as well as between private and public endpoints. It is accessible via the MediaConnect console, API, or AWS CDK, works alongside existing MediaConnect flows, and integrates with the broader AWS Elemental media services to simplify live-video operations and reduce unused capacity and reconfiguration overhead.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon EC2 M7i instances in the Europe (Zurich) region, powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) available only on AWS. M7i delivers up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors and up to 15% improved price-performance versus M6i. Instances scale to 48xlarge and include two bare-metal sizes with built-in Intel accelerators that offload data operations and optimize CPU-bound workloads.

🔁 AWS introduces Billing Transfer, enabling a single management account to centrally collect invoices, process payments, and run detailed cost analysis across multiple AWS Organizations while preserving each management account’s security autonomy. The feature integrates with AWS Billing Conductor to protect proprietary pricing and support advanced cost allocation strategies. AWS offers a free trial through May 31, 2026; starting June 1, 2026 organizations using a Customer managed pricing plan will incur a $50 per-organization fee. Billing Transfer is available in all public AWS Regions except GovCloud and China (Beijing, Ningxia).

🔧 Amazon API Gateway now offers Portals, a fully managed, AWS-native developer portal for discovering, documenting, governing, and monetizing REST APIs across accounts. Portals automatically discover existing APIs, generate documentation with a "Try It" experience, and support custom content, branding, access controls, and analytics via CloudWatch RUM. This reduces onboarding time and keeps API configurations within AWS boundaries to reduce third-party security risks.

🔐 Amazon API Gateway now supports enhanced TLS security policies for REST APIs and custom domain names, giving customers more granular control over encryption, cipher selection, and endpoint access. Policy options include TLS 1.3-only, Perfect Forward Secrecy, FIPS-compliant cipher suites, and Post Quantum Cryptography choices. The update, available in many AWS commercial Regions, aims to simplify compliance with stricter regulations and strengthen cryptographic posture.

📣 Amazon SageMaker Catalog now supports custom column-level metadata forms and markdown-enabled rich text descriptions so data stewards can attach business-specific key-value metadata and formatted documentation directly to individual columns. Form values and rich text are indexed in real time and become immediately searchable alongside column names, descriptions, and glossary terms. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where SageMaker is supported.

🔁 Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports scheduled Logs Insights queries that run automatically on a recurring cadence and deliver results to Amazon S3 or Amazon EventBridge. This capability lets teams automate log analysis, track trends, and detect anomalies without manually re-running queries. Administrators can configure schedules via the Console, AWS CLI, AWS CDK, or SDKs, and store results for reporting or trigger incident workflows. The feature is available in multiple AWS regions across the US, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America.

🔍 Amazon OpenSearch Service now includes Cluster Insights, a unified monitoring dashboard that consolidates logs and metrics to give operators comprehensive operational visibility across nodes, indices, and shards. The feature automates correlation of critical data, highlights performance metrics and top‑N query analysis, and surfaces targeted remediation steps to speed troubleshooting. Built into the OpenSearch UI, Cluster Insights retains monitoring resilience during cluster unavailability and provides account‑level summaries for managing multiple deployments. It is available at no additional cost for OpenSearch 2.17 or later in regions where the OpenSearch UI is offered.

🔒 Amazon S3 now provides a bucket-level default encryption configuration to enforce SSE-S3 or SSE-KMS for all write requests, allowing organizations to standardize server-side encryption types across buckets. The PutBucketEncryption API update lets you disable SSE-C on specific buckets or in CloudFormation templates. This capability is available in all AWS Regions and configurable via Console, SDK, API, or CLI. It helps simplify compliance and reduce misconfiguration risk.

🔁 AWS Organizations now supports direct transfers of accounts between organizations, removing the prior need to convert an account to a standalone entity during moves. The simplified transfer preserves governance controls, consolidated billing, and account settings and uses the same console and APIs (invite and accept). This capability is available in all commercial AWS Regions and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

📱 Amazon CloudWatch RUM now supports iOS and Android apps, extending real user monitoring beyond web applications. Using the OpenTelemetry (OTEL) standard, it captures mobile spans such as application startup time, screen load time, and backend network calls, and records events including crashes and ANRs/AppHangs. Developers and SREs can perform impact analysis for errors or crashes, drill into correlated telemetry, and filter by location, device type, OS, and app version. Mobile telemetry integrates with application metrics, traces, logs, web RUM, and synthetic monitoring in CloudWatch Application Signals, and is available in all AWS Commercial Regions where web monitoring is provided.

🔒 Amazon Route 53 now supports AWS PrivateLink for the route53.amazonaws.com API, enabling private, regional connectivity from VPCs to the Route 53 API without traversing the public internet. This allows workloads to manage hosted zones, records, and health checks over the AWS backbone and simplifies networking by removing the need for complex private connectivity. Support is global except in AWS GovCloud and China, and cross-region interface VPC endpoints enable native multi-region access.

📞 Amazon Connect now routes calls between instances in the same AWS account over the AWS global backbone, avoiding the Public Switched Telephony Network when both numbers are provisioned or ported into Amazon Connect. Calls between instances, whether within a region or across regions, gain improved audio quality, simplified billing, and preserved call context for transfers. This capability is available in all commercial regions where Amazon Connect is offered except Africa (Cape Town).

🛠️ AWS Marketplace now supports Agent-to-Agent (A2A) servers and streamlined deployment for third-party AI agents built for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime. The update pre-populates required environment variables in the AgentCore console and adds AWS CLI instructions within Marketplace listings so customers can procure and deploy A2A servers directly. AWS Partners can list A2A and MCP servers and containerized AgentCore Runtime products, define vendor launch configurations, and enable flexible pricing (including free API-based SaaS) to accelerate onboarding. These capabilities reduce deployment complexity and add protocol flexibility to meet diverse customer needs.