All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

⚙️ Amazon launches the RDS Switchover Read Replica execution block for ARC Region switch to automate recovery orchestration for Amazon RDS databases using Oracle Data Guard in multi-Region workloads. The feature automates role reversal or promotion between primary and read replica to enable zero data loss in planned failovers and rapid recovery in unplanned events. It includes native cross-account support for centralized recovery management.

🚀 Google has integrated Antigravity into eligible Gemini Enterprise subscriptions, providing built-in administrative, spend, and security controls alongside new IDE extensions for VS Code and other editors. Administrators can manage pooled quotas, granular spend thresholds, overage options, and centralized usage metrics from the Gemini Enterprise console. The offering aligns Antigravity with Google Cloud's security, audit logging, and data privacy protections while supporting Workforce Identity Federation and ADC for seamless developer access.

🚀 SageMaker AI Studio now offers Generative AI Inference Recommendations, providing a guided low-code/no-code workflow to identify optimal inference configurations for generative workloads. The feature builds on an April 2026 API launch and benchmarks candidate setups on real GPU infrastructure using NVIDIA AIPerf, applying techniques like speculative decoding and kernel tuning. Users pick a use-case profile, optimization goal, and model source, then receive ranked, production-ready recommendations that can be deployed directly to SageMaker endpoints, with only standard compute costs for benchmarking.

🔒 Cloudflare announced task-based OAuth consent to let client owners mark specific scopes as optional, enabling users to grant a narrower subset of requested access during authorization. The change builds on OAuth's existing ability to grant fewer scopes than requested and keeps existing client behavior by default. Developers must check granted scopes after the token exchange and can opt in when configuring a client.

🔍 Amazon Aurora DSQL introduces a CloudWatch Database Insights metric that provides per-statement, cluster-level performance monitoring. The feature captures sampled wait states and normalized SQL statements for active sessions, helping diagnose performance issues and identify resource-heavy queries. Metrics are collected at 1-minute intervals, available by default at no additional cost, and usable with CloudWatch Database Insights, CloudWatch PromQL, and the Aurora DSQL system diagnostics AI skill.

🚀 Google Cloud was recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms for the third consecutive year, reflecting its focus on developer-centric, application-first capabilities. The platform unifies serverless, containerized, and agentic deployment options and integrates generative AI tools for rapid prototyping, one-click deployments, and managed MCP servers. Google highlights features like the Gemini Enterprise Agent Runtime, Application Design Center, Antigravity orchestration, and Cloud Run enhancements for secure, scalable agent and app hosting.

🔒 Google Cloud announced the preview of quantum-safe key import for software-based keys in Cloud KMS, extending its post-quantum offerings including quantum-safe digital signatures and KEMs. The feature uses hybrid public key encryption (HPKE) to wrap keys in a quantum-resistant envelope during transit, mitigating store-now, decrypt-later risks. The import workflow integrates with existing Cloud KMS APIs and supports client-side wrapping via libraries like Tink and OpenSSL, with options for X-Wing, ML-KEM-768, or ML-KEM-1024 and AES-256-GCM for symmetric wrapping.

🔍 This post outlines ten essential questions startups must address when moving from AI prototype to production on Google Cloud. It contrasts Google AI Studio for rapid prototyping with the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform for enterprise controls, and emphasizes sequencing migration before you have real users. The article highlights operational pitfalls—API key leaks, IAM ownership gaps, and quota 429s—and provides practical checklist items, role guidance, and mitigation strategies including regional endpoints, retries, and consumption models.

🔍 AlloyDB's ScaNN index now supports a four-level tree (preview) to scale vector search to over 10 billion vectors while preserving low latency and high recall. As a managed PostgreSQL-compatible service, AlloyDB pairs Google's infrastructure with an analytical engine optimized for agentic AI workloads. The new architecture reduces compute intensity through hierarchical partitioning and improves memory efficiency via balanced tree shapes and sampling optimization, targeting <= 51 ms p95 latency at 95% recall.

📌 Amazon Redshift now supports long-term retention of system table data through native integration with Amazon S3 Tables in Apache Iceberg format. This eliminates the prior 7-day limit and removes the need for custom ETL pipelines by automatically writing, partitioning, compacting, and retaining system table data in S3. The stored data can be queried via Redshift, Athena, or any Iceberg-compatible engine for cross-warehouse observability and auditing.

⚙️ AWS Direct Connect announced inbound prefix controls that let customers allocate and manage inbound route-prefix allocations for private and transit virtual interfaces (VIFs) based on workload needs. You can now assign up to 1,000 prefixes each for IPv4 and IPv6 on dedicated and hosted connections, up from a 100-prefix limit. New prefix capacity pools exist at the dedicated connection and Direct Connect gateway (DXGW) levels, and allocations are configurable via the console or CLI/API. This feature is available at no extra cost in all commercial AWS Regions, AWS GovCloud, and the China Regions operated by Sinnet and NWCD.

🎮 Microsoft is investigating reports that August 2026 updates may prevent some games from launching or cause crashes on affected Windows 11 systems. Affected users report freezes, unexpected closures, EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION errors, and random restarts after installing KB5121003. The company confirmed it is probing the issue and asked impacted gamers to submit Feedback Hub reports while it works to determine if Microsoft is the cause.

🔒 Airlock Digital announced completion of an independent IRAP assessment at the PROTECTED classification, conducted by an ASD-endorsed assessor against the Australian Government ISM. The assessment gives Australian organisations additional independent evidence of Airlock Digital’s security controls and alignment with expectations such as the ISM and PSPF. Airlock Digital supports flexible deployment across cloud, on-premises and constrained environments and positions allowlisting as a governance-led, organisation-owned control.

🔴 OpenAI confirmed a global ChatGPT outage that began around 8:00 PM ET on Wednesday, August 19, preventing users from signing in, creating accounts, or loading chats. Affected users encounter loading animations and "too many concurrent requests" errors, and new signups and logins on chatgpt.com fail. The incident also impacts the OpenAI API, with up to 12 endpoints reported as problematic on the status page, and the company is implementing a mitigation.

📣 Partners can now configure category-based notifications and multi-channel delivery for AWS Marketplace through AWS User Notifications. Previously, notifications went only to the AWS account root email or custom aliases, without category routing. Partners can now assign contacts and delivery channels for four categories: Product listings, Offers and agreements, Payments and disbursements, and Account management. Notifications can be delivered by email, the AWS Console Mobile App, or chat via Amazon Q Developer in Slack and Microsoft Teams.

🔎 Today AWS expanded Amazon Bedrock's Web Search to support an external_web_access parameter, allowing models to fetch live public web content while preserving control over data egress. Grant the bedrock-websearch:ExternalWebAccess IAM permission to enable live fetches; leaving the parameter false restricts results to Amazon's in-AWS index. The capability is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon).

🔎 Amazon Bedrock's AgentCore Web Search now supports per-request domain filtering and published-date filtering, letting agents control which sites and time windows they search. Runtime domain filtering enables include/exclude lists for trusted or blocked sources without admin reconfiguration, while published-date filtering constrains results to specific inclusive date ranges. Admins gain gateway-level allowlists and an increased domain cap of up to 100 domains per list, and the Web Search Tool is expanding availability to eu-west-1 and ap-northeast-1.

🔔 Amazon EC2 now allows creation of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) using local snapshots from instances running on AWS Outposts. Customers may store snapshots on the Outpost or in the parent AWS Region, helping meet data residency needs. EC2 auto-selects the target Outpost based on the instance location, eliminating the need to specify an Outpost ARN. This feature integrates with existing backup and lifecycle workflows and is available where Outposts supports local snapshot storage.

🔔 Amazon CloudWatch Centralization now copies log group tags from source accounts to destination log groups created by centralization rules. Tag propagation preserves cost, ownership, and compliance tags so teams can scope access and report spend centrally. The feature syncs tags based on propagation behavior chosen in the centralization rule and is available in all Regions where CloudWatch Centralization is offered.

🔒 Amazon DynamoDB Streams now supports attribute-based access control (ABAC), allowing tag-based conditions in IAM policies to control stream access. You can attach up to 50 tags per stream and use them to permit or deny actions, enabling environment and team segregation without proliferating IAM policies. Stream tags are independent from table tags, available in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US), and there is no additional cost to use this feature.