All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🌐 AWS announced a new AWS Direct Connect location at East African Data Centres NBO1 near Nairobi, Kenya. The site is the first Direct Connect location in Kenya and offers dedicated 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps connections with MACsec encryption available. From this location customers can establish private, physical connections to all public AWS Regions (except China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones, providing a more consistent network experience than the public internet.

🕒 Amazon Web Services now enables customers to query CloudWatch metrics up to two weeks in the past using the Metrics Insights query source. Metrics Insights delivers fast, SQL-based metric queries and this enhancement expands the prior ~3-hour visualization window to 14 days for dashboards, alarms, and investigations. The capability is available now in commercial AWS regions and is automatically enabled at no additional charge, though standard pricing still applies for alarms, dashboards, and API usage.

🆕 Amazon RDS for Oracle and Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle now support a range of bare metal instance types, with pricing at about 25% below equivalent virtualized instances. Supported families include M7i, R7i, X2iedn, X2idn, X2iezn, M6i, M6id, M6in, R6i, R6id, and R6in. Using the Multi-tenant feature you can consolidate multiple databases onto a single bare metal instance to reduce infrastructure cost, and you may also be able to lower commercial Oracle licensing and support fees because bare metal provides full visibility into CPU cores and sockets. Bare metal is available with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) for Oracle Enterprise Edition; consult RDS pricing and your licensing partner for region and configuration availability.

🔔 AWS Config now supports five additional AWS resource types, expanding its ability to discover, assess, audit, and remediate resources across your accounts. The new types — AWS::CodeArtifact::Domain, AWS::Config::ConformancePack, AWS::Glue::Database, AWS::NetworkManager::TransitGatewayPeering, and AWS::RolesAnywhere::TrustAnchor — are tracked automatically if you record all resource types and are available for Config rules and aggregators. Support applies in all Regions where these resources are available, enabling broader compliance and operational visibility. This update simplifies monitoring and remediation workflows.

🔧 Azure AI Foundry aims to accelerate the path from IDE prototypes to enterprise-grade AI agents. It emphasizes local-first prototyping, a single, consistent Model Inference API, and one-click deployment from VS Code and GitHub so developer code runs unchanged in production. Foundry supports popular frameworks like Semantic Kernel and AutoGen, embraces open protocols (MCP, A2A), and supplies prebuilt connectors, observability, and enterprise guardrails to scale agents securely.

🔁 Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 is now available with Global cross‑Region inference in Amazon Bedrock, allowing inference requests to be routed to any supported commercial AWS Region for processing. The Global profile helps optimize compute resources and distribute traffic to increase model throughput. It supports both on‑demand and batch inference and is intended for use cases that do not require geography‑specific routing.

🔒 Cloudflare framed AI Week 2025 around products and controls to help organizations adopt AI while retaining safety and visibility. The company emphasized four core priorities: securing AI environments and workflows; protecting original content from misuse; enabling developers to build secure AI experiences; and applying AI to improve Cloudflare’s services. Key launches included AI Gateway, Infire, AI Crawl Control, expanded CASB scanning, and MCP Server Portals, with a continued focus on customer feedback and ongoing investment.

🔒 AWS Clean Rooms now lets collaboration owners add new data provider members to existing collaborations, enabling partners to contribute data without creating a separate collaboration. New members can be configured to only supply data while inheriting the collaboration’s existing privacy controls and access rules. Invitations and member additions are recorded in the collaboration change history for transparency and auditability. This reduces onboarding time for multi‑party workflows such as publisher–advertiser measurement and third‑party enrichment.

🔒 AWS Clean Rooms ML collaborators can now configure a privacy control to send redacted error log summaries to selected collaboration members. Summaries include exception type, error message, and the line in the code where the error occurred. When associating a model with a collaboration, parties decide which members receive summaries and whether detectable PII, numbers, or custom strings will be redacted. This helps teams debug models while protecting sensitive data and intellectual property.

🔒 Amazon SageMaker Catalog now supports governed classification using Restricted Classification Terms, enabling catalog administrators to mark sensitive glossary terms so only authorized users or projects can apply them to assets. Administrators grant usage through explicit policies and group membership, allowing centralized governance teams to control labels like Seller-MCF or PII. The capability is available in all regions that support SageMaker Unified Studio; consult the user guide to get started.

🔍 Unit 42 highlights two threat intelligence interns, Sakthi Vinayak and Gabrielle Calderon, who completed a 12-week program contributing to practical research and automation projects. Sakthi concentrated on mechanizing data ingestion, implementing a fidelity scoring framework, and building dashboards to surface trends and gaps in the knowledge repository. Gabrielle focused on malware ticket analysis and developing an automation tool to identify malware families and extract indicators of compromise. Both interns credited Unit 42’s collaborative mentorship and cross-team exposure for accelerating their technical growth and real-world impact.

🚀 Amazon announced the general availability of Amazon Bedrock in the Asia Pacific Jakarta region, enabling customers to build and scale generative AI applications closer to end users. The fully managed service exposes a selection of high-performing foundation models via a single API and includes capabilities such as Guardrails and Model customization. These features are designed to help organizations incorporate security, privacy, and responsible AI into production workflows while accelerating development and deployment.

🔒 Today, AWS announced the ability to manage access to AWS Regions and AWS Local Zones from a single location in the AWS Management Console. The new AWS Global View Regions and Zones page lets customers view infrastructure location details, opt-in status, and parent Region relationships across multiple Regions. This centralizes monitoring and access control and is available in all AWS commercial Regions.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports Firefox in addition to Chrome, enabling cross-browser canary tests. You can run the same canary script across Chrome and Firefox for Playwright-based and Puppeteer-based canaries. CloudWatch Synthetics collects browser-specific performance metrics, success rates, and visual monitoring while maintaining an aggregate health view to help teams detect and resolve browser compatibility issues. Multi-browser support is available in all commercial AWS Regions.

📥 Agents can now manually prioritize and assign the next important task, email, or chat in their queue within Amazon Connect, enabling frontline staff to claim related customer work discovered during calls and resolve issues immediately. Supervisors and managers enable manual assignment by updating agent configuration in routing and security profiles. Agents then use the new worklist application in their agent workspace to claim items. This capability is available in all commercial regions.

🚀 AWS has opened a new Direct Connect location at the Spark Digital Mayoral Drive Exchange (MDR) near Auckland, New Zealand. The site offers dedicated 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps connections with MACsec encryption available and enables private, physical network links from customer datacenters, offices, or colocation facilities. Customers can establish private access to all public AWS Regions (except China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones from this point, delivering a more consistent network experience than the public internet.

🔔 Amazon RDS for Oracle now offers Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) License Included R7i and M7i instances in Asia Pacific (Thailand) and Mexico (Central) regions. These License Included instances let customers run Oracle databases without separate license purchases or support fees; instances can be launched via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDKs. Review AWS blog guidance and RDS for Oracle pricing for regional availability and cost details.

🔒 AWS expanded 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps Direct Connect dedicated links with MACsec encryption at the Rack Centre LGS1 data center near Lagos, Nigeria. From this location, customers can now establish private, direct network access to all public AWS Regions (except China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. Direct Connect provides a private, physical network connection that delivers a more consistent experience than the public internet. AWS directs customers to its Direct Connect product pages, locations list, and getting-started guidance for purchasing and deployment.

🌐 AWS Control Tower and the Control Catalog APIs now accept IPv6 addresses through dual‑stack public endpoints, enabling connections over IPv6, IPv4, or both. The existing IPv4-only endpoints remain available for backwards compatibility. Support is available in all Regions where Control Tower and Control Catalog are offered, helping reduce overlapping address space in Amazon VPCs as IPv6 adoption grows. Customers should consult AWS guidance and the IPv6 on AWS whitepaper for configuration and best practices.

🔧 AWS has published an open-source collection of scenario-focused AWS CLI scripts and tutorials that demonstrate end-to-end shell workflows across more than 60 AWS services. Each example is tested and includes patterns for error handling, resource tracking, and automated cleanup to reduce mistakes and resource leakage. The project also provides guidance to generate and contribute new scripts using generative AI tools like the Amazon Q Developer CLI, enabling an iterative test-and-improve workflow that can produce working scripts rapidly for well-documented use cases.