All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Amazon has launched MSK Connect in the Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region, offering a fully managed service for running Kafka Connect clusters alongside Amazon MSK. The service simplifies deploying, monitoring, and scaling connectors that move data between Apache Kafka and external systems, without provisioning infrastructure. It supports both Amazon MSK-managed and self-managed Kafka clusters and can be used via the console or CLI.

🔐 Amazon CloudFront now supports ECDSA for signed URLs and signed cookies, giving customers an alternative to RSA with improved performance and significantly smaller signature sizes. This reduces URL length and accelerates signature generation and verification, benefiting high-volume, mobile, and IoT workloads where CPU and bandwidth are constrained. ECDSA is available at all edge locations except the AWS China (Beijing and Ningxia) regions, with no additional charge to use the feature.

🚀 Google Cloud announced Dataproc multi-tenant clusters to let many data scientists share a single cluster for interactive notebook workloads while preserving per-user authorization. The feature maps individual Google identities to service accounts, externalizes mappings to a YAML file, and supports updates on running clusters. Jupyter kernels launch via the Jupyter Kernel Gateway across worker nodes, with optional Vertex AI Workbench integration and the BigQuery JupyterLab Extension. Administrators retain IAM-based least-privilege control and cluster hardening isolates credentials and OS users.

🔒 Google Cloud and its partners announced a range of partner-built AI security solutions now available in the Google Cloud Marketplace. These integrations embed Gemini and Vertex AI into partner products — including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and others — to protect models, data, applications, and agents. The collaborations emphasize automated detection, incident response, DLP, identity protection, and agent monitoring to reduce mean time to detect and respond, helping customers adopt AI securely.

🤖 Ask Ralph is a conversational AI styling companion built on Azure OpenAI, available in the Ralph Lauren app in the US. It uses natural-language prompts to interpret open-ended requests, asks clarifying questions, and returns curated, fully stylized, visually presented and shoppable outfit recommendations drawn from real-time inventory. Powered by agentic AI capabilities, the experience plans, reasons, and acts to deliver personalized looks at scale. Microsoft positions this as part of broader Azure AI solutions for retail innovation.

🤖 Fortinet has integrated its virtual AI assistant, FortiAI-Assist, into its web application security offerings, including appliance and virtual FortiWeb and the FortiAppSec Cloud WAAP service. The update also adds integrated client-side protection to monitor payment-page scripts for PCI DSS 4.0 compliance. These features aim to simplify operations, speed threat triage and remediation, and reduce false positives and analyst workload. FortiAppSec Cloud is available through major public cloud marketplaces.

🔎 External Attack Surface Management (EASM) continuously discovers, inventories, and monitors internet‑facing assets — domains, subdomains, cloud workloads, IPs, and third‑party exposures — to reveal shadow IT and misconfigurations before attackers can exploit them. EASM platforms deliver automated discovery, continuous monitoring, and risk‑based prioritization so teams can focus remediation on high‑impact threats. Integrated workflows and ticketing accelerate fixes and improve cross‑team visibility.

🔐 AWS Managed Microsoft AD now supports certificate auto-enrollment for LDAPS and Smart Card authentication by integrating with AWS Private CA through the AWS Private CA Connector for AD. The integration automates issuance, renewal, and lifecycle management of domain controller certificates, removing the need to maintain CA infrastructure on Amazon EC2. This capability is available in all Regions offering the connector and can be configured via the console or API.

🔒 Microsoft is addressing a known anti-spam issue that has caused its service to incorrectly block URLs in Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams, and to quarantine some messages. The engine erroneously flags URLs embedded inside other URLs as malicious, creating alerts and preventing users from opening links that were already confirmed safe. Engineers deployed a fix to stop further quarantines and are unblocking over 6,000 affected URLs, but additional impacted links and residual message recovery remain under active remediation while a root cause analysis continues.

🤖 Microsoft is testing new AI actions in Windows 11 File Explorer that let users manipulate images and interact with files without opening them. Currently supported edits for JPG, JPEG, and PNG files include background removal, object erasure, background blur, and a reverse image search via Bing. Insiders on Canary Channel Build 27938 can access these tools from the right-click contextual menu. A new privacy control also shows which third-party apps have used Windows' generative AI models and lets users manage access.

🤖Amazon Q in Connect now lets contact center administrators select different LLM model families directly from the Amazon Connect web UI. This no-code configuration enables quick switching between models to optimize for latency, cost, or complex reasoning. Administrators can choose Amazon Nova Pro for faster responses or Anthropic Claude Sonnet for complex reasoning, tailoring AI Agents to specific customer interaction types.

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8g instances are now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) and AWS Canada (Central). Powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and the AWS Nitro System, R8g delivers up to 30% better performance than Graviton3-based instances for memory‑intensive workloads. The family includes 12 sizes (two bare‑metal options), scales up to 48xlarge with 1.5 TB RAM, and offers up to 50 Gbps enhanced networking and 40 Gbps to Amazon EBS. AWS recommends the Graviton Fast Start program and Porting Advisor to help migrate workloads.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has expanded Amazon ElastiCache to support Graviton3-based M7g and R7g node families across multiple regions including Canada (Calgary), Middle East & Africa, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Graviton3 nodes deliver improved price-performance over Graviton2, yielding up to 28% higher throughput, up to 21% better P99 latency, and up to 25% more networking bandwidth. To adopt the new instances, create a new cluster or upgrade existing clusters via the AWS Management Console and review the ElastiCache documentation for supported node types.

🚀 Amazon Redshift Serverless is now generally available in the AWS Europe (Milan) and Africa (Cape Town) regions. With Redshift Serverless, users—data analysts, developers, and data scientists—can run analytics without provisioning or managing clusters, benefiting from automatic provisioning, intelligent scaling, and per-second compute billing. You can query data via Query Editor V2 or existing BI tools, load data from Amazon S3 (including Apache Parquet), use Redshift data shares, restore provisioned snapshots, and take advantage of unified billing for queries across these sources.

🔒 Signal has introduced an opt-in secure cloud backups feature that creates end-to-end encrypted archives of users' messages and recent media. The capability is available now in the Android beta and will be rolled out to iOS and desktop after testing completes. The free tier stores messages and up to 45 days of media within a 100 MiB limit; a paid $1.99/month plan raises storage to 100 GB and extends media retention. Backups occur daily, exclude soon-to-disappear and view-once messages, and are protected by a 64-character recovery key generated on-device that Signal never receives.

🛡️ AWS WAF is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, allowing customers to deploy web application firewall protections closer to their users. The service helps protect web applications from common exploits and automated bots that can affect availability, security, or resource consumption. Note that AWS WAF Bot Control with targeted inspection and the Anti-DDoS managed rule group are not currently available in this region.

🔍 BigQuery's new Column Metadata (CMETA) index is an automated, highly scalable metadata index that improves query pruning and reduces compute for extremely large tables. CMETA stores snapshots of block- and column-level statistics and is maintained transparently by BigQuery with no user intervention. Early adopters report up to 60x faster queries and up to 10x lower slot usage for selective filters, particularly on clustered columns.

🎖️ Google Public Sector is opening registration for a no-cost, three-week virtual program, Google Launchpad for Veterans, offering foundational generative AI training and a path to the Gen AI Leader certification. The Gen AI Leader training includes a two-day kickoff on November 13–14, optional exam prep sessions, and a complimentary exam voucher. Participants will learn core LLM concepts, how to navigate the AI ecosystem, and practical business applications using Gemini and NotebookLM to drive organizational transformation.

📣 AWS WAF now includes a free allocation of Vended Logs ingestion to CloudWatch: 500 MB for every 1 million WAF requests processed, provided at no additional cost. The allocation is applied automatically across WAF vended logs to CloudWatch, S3, and Firehose and is reconciled on your AWS bill at month end. Usage beyond the included allowance is charged at standard AWS WAF Vended Logs CloudWatch rates. This change helps reduce logging costs while preserving comprehensive security visibility and analytics.

⚡ Amazon Web Services has announced general availability of managed tiered checkpointing for Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a hybrid checkpointing capability that caches frequent checkpoints in CPU memory and periodically persists them to Amazon S3 for durability. The approach reduces model recovery time and minimizes training progress loss on large-scale clusters. It integrates with PyTorch Distributed Checkpoint (DCP) and is enabled via a CreateCluster/UpdateCluster API parameter; customers can use the sagemaker-checkpointing Python library to adopt it with minimal code changes. Currently available for HyperPod clusters using the EKS orchestrator.