All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🤖 Microsoft today introduced Mico, a new avatar for its AI-powered Copilot designed to feel more personal, supportive, and empathetic. The optional visual presence listens, adapts its expressions and color to interactions, and will respectfully push back when presented with incorrect information. The Copilot Fall Release also adds features such as Copilot Groups for up to 32 collaborators, long-term memory, Deep Research Proactive Actions, and a Learn Live voice-enabled tutor. These updates begin rolling out in the United States with broader regional availability planned.

🚀 Amazon Aurora DSQL is now available in Europe (Frankfurt), expanding AWS’s global footprint for its serverless distributed SQL engine. The managed service provides active-active high availability, multi-Region strong consistency, and automatic, virtually unlimited scaling so teams can build always-on applications without infrastructure management. Aurora DSQL is advertised as offering the fastest distributed SQL reads and writes, and is already available across US, Asia Pacific, and European Regions. Customers can trial it via the AWS Free Tier.

📞 Amazon Connect outbound campaigns introduces a preview dialing mode that gives agents customer context—name, balance, and prior interactions—before placing calls. Campaign managers can set review time limits, optionally remove contacts, and use new dashboards to monitor agent behavior, discard rates, and engagement trends. By reserving an agent prior to dialing, teams gain operational control and help support TCPA and OFCOM compliance.

🔒 Amazon Connect now offers granular UI permissions for conversation recordings and transcripts, enabling administrators to control access to playback, copying and downloads separately. Administrators can allow users to listen to calls while preventing transcript copying, and set download rules that permit redacted recordings but block unredacted downloads. The capability supports complex scenarios where sensitive conversations remain redacted while other interactions remain fully available.

🔒Microsoft outlines expanded Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) capabilities designed for modern, hybrid environments. The post highlights general availability of unified identity and endpoint sensors, broad on‑premises sensors for Domain Controllers, AD FS, and AD CS, and native integration with Microsoft Entra ID. It emphasizes an identity‑centric approach that correlates accounts across platforms, integrates with PAM, and links identity signals into Defender XDR to enable contextualized alerts, coordinated response, and automatic attack disruption across devices and sessions.

🔗 Google Cloud announced that Cross-Site Interconnect is now generally available, providing a cloud-delivered, transparent layer 2 connectivity overlay for global WANs. The service uses Google’s global backbone to deliver high-bandwidth, on-demand links with a 99.95% SLA, dynamic consumption pricing, and support for MACsec encryption and VLAN-based multi-destination handoffs. It exposes operational metrics via dashboards and APIs so teams can monitor latency, loss, and utilization while abstracting failover and resiliency management.

🔒 AWS now supports the Outposts 2U server in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and GovCloud (US-West). The fully managed, industry-standard 2U form factor delivers up to 128 vCPUs and extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to on-premises or edge locations with limited space. Customers can run Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and AWS IoT Greengrass locally while connecting to the parent GovCloud region for broader management and operations.

🚀 Azure Storage Mover is now generally available for direct cloud-to-cloud migrations from AWS S3 to Azure Blob Storage. The fully managed service performs high-speed, server-to-server parallel transfers without requiring self-hosted agents, preserving file metadata and supporting incremental syncs to minimize downtime. Integrated automation via the Azure portal, CLI, and REST API removes the need for custom scripts or third-party tools, while RBAC, Azure Active Directory, Multicloud Arc connectivity, and encryption in transit address security and compliance. Customers who tested the preview moved petabytes of data and reported reduced infrastructure overhead and faster access to Azure analytics and AI capabilities.

🔒 Google Cloud's Parameter Manager centralizes application configuration to avoid hard-coded credentials and fragile config files, supporting validated JSON and YAML payloads as well as arbitrary unformatted data. It integrates with Secret Manager using a __REF__ syntax to keep confidential values separate and uses versioned, immutable parameter versions to prevent accidental changes. The post walks through storing an API key in Secret Manager, granting the Parameter Manager IAM principal access, and calling renderParameterVersion from a Node backend. A sample React/Node weather app demonstrates runtime configuration, fallback dummy data, and advanced patterns such as regional parameters and feature rollouts.

🔁 The Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift is now available in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) region, enabling analytics on production DynamoDB tables without impacting operational workloads. Customers can run high-performance SQL, leverage built-in ML and Spark integrations, and use materialized views with automatic incremental refresh and data sharing. History mode provides built-in support for analyzing historical data and building Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD 2) tables without custom ETL code.

📊 Amazon QuickSight now provides a visual data preparation experience that enables business users to clean, transform, and combine data without writing code. The interface supports multi-step workflows—appends, aggregations, flexible joins—and records each transformation step to improve traceability and shareability. It increases dataset source depth from 3 to 10 levels and boosts cross-source join capacity 20× (1GB to 20GB), and is available to Author, Author Pro, and select Quick Suite Enterprise subscribers across multiple regions.

🚀 Google has released the Google Gen AI .NET SDK, bringing unified access to Gemini on Google AI and Vertex AI for C#/.NET developers. The SDK is available via NuGet (dotnet add package Google.GenAI) and supports client creation with an API key or with project/location settings for Vertex AI. Examples demonstrate unary and streaming text generation, image generation, and configurable response schemas and generation settings. Google provides the API reference, GitHub source (googleapis/dotnet-genai) and a DemoApp with samples to help developers get started.

🌐 This blog presents a reference architecture for deploying Network Virtual Appliances (NVAs) in a regional hub-and-spoke design using VPC Network Peering. It explains how Google’s Cross-Cloud Network and software-defined global backbone support any-to-any connectivity while preserving regional affinity for latency and data residency. The post details traffic flows and key services such as Cloud Interconnect, HA VPN, Internal Passthrough Network Load Balancers, policy-based routes, and Private Service Connect to integrate managed services and workload VPCs.

🚀 AWS today announced RTB Fabric, a fully managed service that connects publishers and buyers with AdTech partners such as Amazon Ads, GumGum, Kargo, MobileFuse, Sovrn, TripleLift, Viant, and Yieldmo over a private, high‑performance network delivering single‑digit millisecond latency. The service can reduce standard cloud networking costs by up to 80% and requires no upfront commitments. Built-in modules support containerized applications and foundation models and run inline to optimize traffic, improve bid efficiency, and increase bid response rates.

🔒 VirusTotal and Hugging Face have announced a collaboration to surface security insights directly within the Hugging Face platform. When browsing model files, datasets, or related artifacts, users will now see multi‑scanner results including VirusTotal detections and links to public reports so potential risks can be reviewed before downloading. VirusTotal is also enhancing its analysis portfolio with AI-driven tools such as Code Insight and format‑aware scanners (picklescan, safepickle, ModelScan) to highlight unsafe deserialization flows and other risky patterns. The integration aims to increase visibility across the AI supply chain and help researchers, developers, and defenders build more secure models and workflows.

💾 Amazon Web Services has made Amazon EC2 I8g storage-optimized instances generally available in Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and third-generation Nitro SSDs, I8g delivers up to 60% better compute performance and up to 65% improved real-time storage performance per TB versus the previous generation. These instances offer up to 45 TB of local NVMe storage, up to 100 Gbps networking, and are aimed at transactional databases, real-time analytics, and I/O-intensive AI pre-processing workloads.

📧 Amazon Connect now includes threaded email views and appends conversation history to agent replies, helping agents and customers preserve context and continuity across exchanges. The update provides a familiar, mail-like threading model and surfaces prior messages inline within Amazon Connect Email, making follow-ups and issue resolution faster. The capability is available in multiple AWS regions and streamlines agent workflows.

🔐 AWS outlines when to use Secrets Manager, Systems Manager Parameter Store, and AWS AppConfig to manage credentials, configuration values, and feature flags. The guidance recommends Secrets Manager for sensitive credentials that need rotation and multi‑Region replication, Parameter Store for simple or high‑volume key/value data, and AppConfig for validated, controlled deployments. The post compares encryption, access controls, replication, monitoring, and pricing to help architects select the best fit.

🔒 AWS announced the launch of AWS Secret-West, its second Secret U.S. region for handling mission-critical workloads at the Secret classification. The region offers multiple Availability Zones, an ICD-accredited security architecture, and authorized services under ICD 503 and DoD SRG IL6. It provides lower latency for western U.S. operations, multi-region resiliency, and geographic separation to support government mission requirements.

⚡ Google Cloud announced the H4D VM family (Preview), powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (Turin), aimed at delivering extreme performance for financial services workloads. The H4D series targets latency-sensitive use cases such as high-frequency trading, Monte Carlo risk simulations, backtesting, and derivatives pricing by offering faster core-to-core communication, larger memory capacity, and improved network throughput. AMD benchmarking with the open-source KX Nano test reported an average ~34% out-of-the-box performance gain over prior C3D VMs, with per-core and multi-threaded uplifts around 1.33–1.36x. Google Cloud will demonstrate H4D and complementary HPC solutions at STAC Summit NYC on October 28th and will have experts available to discuss performance, security, and compliance.