All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔐 AWS released enhanced default application-layer rules for AWS Network Firewall to better handle TLS client hellos and HTTP requests that are split across multiple packets. The update adds new default stateful actions — drop and alert established — enabling security teams to enforce controls without complex custom rules while supporting modern TLS implementations and large HTTP requests. Detailed logging preserves visibility. Available in all supported AWS Regions.

🚀 Research and Engineering Studio (RES) on AWS 2025.09 introduces fractional GPU support, simplified AMI management, and broader deployment flexibility to help teams run graphics‑intensive and compute workloads more efficiently. The release adds Amazon EC2 g6f support for GPU fractionalization and Systems Manager Parameter Alias support for AMI IDs. Integration with Amazon Cognito user pools and customizable CIDR ranges in the CloudFormation template streamline authentication and network planning, while regional expansion improves accessibility.

🔐 Cloudflare announced it will make nearly every feature available for direct purchase on any plan, removing the previous distinction of “enterprise-only” capabilities. The rollout begins today with dashboard SSO, which is now accessible to all customers and supports GitHub social login; many Zero Trust features are available at no cost for up to 50 users. Over the next year Cloudflare will extend this self-service approach to additional capabilities, simplify billing and packaging, and reduce the need to involve sales or solutions engineers, while noting a few region-specific exceptions such as its China Network.

🌐 Cloudflare argues that AI sovereignty should mean choice: the ability for nations to control data, select models, and deploy applications without vendor lock-in. Through its distributed edge network and serverless Workers AI, Cloudflare promotes accessible, low-cost deployment and inference close to users. The company hosts regional open-source models—India’s IndicTrans2, Japan’s PLaMo-Embedding-1B, and Singapore’s SEA-LION v4-27B—and offers an AI Gateway to connect diverse models. Open standards, interoperability, and pay-as-you-go economics are presented as central to resilient national AI strategies.

🧭 Cloudflare announced the Cloudflare Data Platform, combining Cloudflare Pipelines, R2 Data Catalog, and R2 SQL to ingest, store, and query analytical tables directly on R2 object storage. Built on Apache Iceberg and open standards, the platform emphasizes engine interoperability and Cloudflare’s zero-cost egress. Pipelines offers exactly-once ingestion and SQL transforms today; stateful processing is planned. The products are open betas with usage-based pricing signals ahead of GA.

🔧 Over the past year Cloudflare has significantly expanded Node.js compatibility inside Workers, adding many core modules as native runtime features. The effort includes modules such as node:fs, node:crypto, node:http, node:net, and node:zlib, plus a virtual in-memory file system and native crypto via ncrypto. These changes reduce reliance on polyfills and tooling shims, improve performance and memory usage, and let popular npm packages and frameworks like Express run more seamlessly. Developers enable this with the nodejs_compat flag and can opt in or out of EOL-related APIs using granular compatibility flags.

🔔 AWS has announced general availability of new AWS Billing and Cost Management features that let customers create and share custom billing views across multiple AWS Organizations from a single account. Users can share views with accounts outside their organization and combine multiple custom views into consolidated perspectives. These consolidated views are accessible via AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets, enabling cross-organization cost analysis and budgeting.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch introduces tag-based telemetry so teams can monitor metrics and configure alarms using existing AWS resource tags. This lets DevOps and cloud administrators build dynamic monitoring views that follow organizational tagging, automatically adapting as resources change. Tag-based query filtering cuts manual dashboard and alarm updates, and can be enabled with one click or via the AWS CLI and SDKs.

🚀 Google Cloud has launched Flex-start VMs, a Compute Engine consumption option powered by Dynamic Workload Scheduler that lets single VM instances wait in a managed queue for scarce GPUs. By setting request-valid-for-duration (90 seconds–2 hours) users keep capacity requests in PENDING and avoid custom retry logic. Flex-start VMs offer significant discounts versus on‑demand SKUs, consume preemptible quota, run uninterrupted for up to seven days, and integrate directly via the instances.insert API, gcloud CLI, or the Cloud Console. Instances support stop/start to pause billing and an instanceTerminationAction = STOP to preserve configuration when the seven‑day runtime expires.

🔍 You can now preview Amazon S3 Tables directly in the S3 console without writing SQL. The console preview displays table schema, column types, and sample rows so you can quickly inspect structure and key data points without additional setup. Previews are available in all AWS Regions where S3 Tables are offered. You are charged only for the S3 requests used to read the sampled rows; consult S3 pricing and the S3 User Guide for details.

🔍 AWS X-Ray now supports adaptive sampling to automatically adjust trace sampling within user-defined limits. This feature offers two modes—Sampling Boost to temporarily raise sampling when anomalies are detected and Anomaly Span Capture to retain spans tied to anomalies even if the full trace isn't sampled. Adaptive sampling aims to reduce MTTR by capturing critical traces during incidents while keeping observability costs low. It is available in all commercial regions where X‑Ray is offered.

🔒 Amazon EC2’s account-wide Allowed AMIs setting now supports four new parameters — marketplace codes, deprecation time, creation date, and AMI names — to tighten AMI discovery and usage controls. Previously limited to account IDs and owner aliases, administrators can now define additional criteria to block Marketplace images, filter out outdated AMIs, and enforce naming patterns. These parameters integrate with Declarative Policies and are available in all regions, including AWS China and AWS GovCloud (US), enabling centralized AMI governance across your organization.

🆕 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 18.0 is now available in the RDS Database Preview Environment, enabling evaluation of new PostgreSQL capabilities within a fully managed sandbox. PostgreSQL 18.0 introduces multicolumn B-tree skip scan, improved WHERE handling for OR/IN conditions, parallel GIN builds, updated join behavior, and UUIDv7 support. The preview preserves instances for up to 60 days, restricts snapshots to the preview environment, and supports database import/export via dump/load; pricing follows the US East (Ohio) Region.

🔒 CrowdStrike has been named an innovation and growth leader in the 2025 Frost Radar: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, ranking highest on the Innovation Index. Falcon Cloud Security provides unified, AI-native protection across pre-runtime and runtime, combining agent-based and agentless coverage, shift-left CI/CD policy enforcement, continuous posture management, and runtime defenses. Integration with the Falcon platform’s XDR and MDR and a single sensor for hybrid environments enables faster cross-domain detection and response.

🔒 Ineffective recovery processes and increasingly sophisticated ransomware are driving adoption of Cyber Recovery approaches that isolate and validate backups before restoring systems. Modern platforms combine immutable snapshots, sandboxed restores, and automated forensics with AI/ML-based detection to identify safe restore points and reduce downtime. Vendors highlighted include Acronis, Cohesity, Commvault, Dell, Druva, Rubrik, Veeam, Zerto.

🔐 AWS Lambda now supports code signing in AWS GovCloud (US-West and US-East) through the managed AWS Signer service. Lambda validates signatures at deployment to ensure code has not been altered and that it originates from trusted signers. Administrators can create Signing Profiles, bind allowed profiles to functions, and configure whether failed signature checks produce warnings or reject deployments. Access and permissions are controlled via IAM, and there is no additional charge to use this capability.

🔧 Kali Linux 2025.3 delivers ten new tools and expanded Wi-Fi and NetHunter capabilities. Notable additions include Caido (client and server), Detect It Easy, Gemini CLI, krbrelayx, ligolo-mp, and vwifi-dkms for dummy Wi‑Fi networks. Nexmon support is restored for Broadcom/Cypress chips and Raspberry Pi devices, while NetHunter gains Samsung S10 support and CARsenal updates. Users can upgrade via the Kali rolling repository or download the new ISOs.

🚀 Google Cloud has extended core Autopilot capabilities to qualified Standard GKE clusters, enabling access to the new container-optimized compute platform via built-in compute classes. Available initially to clusters in the Rapid release channel running 1.33.1-gke.1107000 or later, these features include the autopilot and autopilot-spot compute classes and a provisioning mode that supports gradual adoption. Benefits include rapid horizontal and vertical scaling, pay-for-request billing, efficient bin-packing, and support for GPUs and TPUs for AI workloads.

🔁 Amazon Web Services has made the Application Recovery Controller Region switch feature available in the Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region. Region switch lets teams orchestrate and execute cross-account and cross-Region recovery steps while providing real-time dashboards and consolidated data collection to support regulator and compliance reporting. The feature supports failover/failback for active/passive designs and shift-away/return for active/active architectures, and automatically replicates plans to all Regions where the application runs.

🔐 Fortinet’s Veterans Program, in partnership with VetSec, provides veterans and spouses free access to training, hands-on labs, and certification vouchers to accelerate entry into cybersecurity. Participants progress from foundational courses through associate-level credentials, including structured offerings such as the Networking Fundamentals Bootcamp. Graduates like Jeramiah Poff and Derek Zobler reported direct job placements—roles ranging from security architect to cyberthreat hunter—demonstrating measurable workforce impact.