All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔔 AWS CloudFormation Hooks now supports managed proactive controls, allowing teams to validate resource configurations against AWS best practices without writing custom Hook logic. Customers can select controls from the AWS Control Tower Controls Catalog and apply them during CloudFormation operations, and run them in warn mode for nonblocking evaluation before enforcing policies. A new Hooks Invocation Summary page provides a centralized historical view of control executions and outcomes to simplify compliance reporting and troubleshooting.

🆕 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 18 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, letting customers evaluate a fully managed pre-release. PostgreSQL 18 adds skip scan support for multicolumn B-tree indexes, parallel GIN index builds, improved OR/IN WHERE handling, and updated join behavior. Observability enhancements expose buffer usage counts, index lookup details during execution, and a per-connection I/O utilization metric. Preview instances are retained for up to 60 days, snapshots remain usable only within the preview, and pricing follows the US East (Ohio) region.

🔒 CrowdStrike has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services in Europe, Q3 2025, receiving the highest possible scores in 16 evaluation criteria spanning detection surfaces, managed response, threat hunting and analyst experience. Falcon Complete Next-Gen MDR combines AI-accelerated detection and investigation with expert-led response across endpoint, cloud, identity and third-party telemetry. The service uses CrowdStrike Charlotte AI to triage alerts and accelerate analysis, and emphasizes end-to-end remediation actions that remove persistence and contain intrusions without costly reimaging. CrowdStrike positions this recognition as validation of its platform-led, AI-plus-human approach to stopping breaches.

🧬 AWS HealthOmics private workflows are now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region, providing fully managed bioinformatics pipelines for healthcare and life sciences customers in Korea. The HIPAA-eligible service supports domain-specific languages such as Nextflow, WDL, and CWL and offers features like call caching, dynamic run storage, Git integrations, and ECR pull-through cache. These capabilities simplify pipeline migration, accelerate genomics development, and help maintain data provenance and compliance.

🔐 Amazon MQ now supports OAuth 2.0 authentication and authorization for RabbitMQ brokers, allowing client and user authentication via JWT-encoded access tokens in single-instance and Multi-AZ cluster deployments. You can enable OAuth 2.0 through the AWS Console, CloudFormation, CLI, or CDK, and the feature is available in all regions where Amazon MQ is offered. Compatibility with standard RabbitMQ OAuth 2.0 implementations helps ensure a smooth migration for existing deployments.

🔍 Target rebuilt its on-site search to combine lexical keyword matching with semantic vector retrieval, using AlloyDB AI to power filtered vector queries at scale. The engineering team implemented a multi-index architecture and a multi-channel relevance framework so hybrid queries can apply native SQL filters alongside vector similarity. The overhaul produced measurable gains — ~20% improvement in product discovery relevance, halved "no results" occurrences, and large latency reductions — while consolidating the stack and accelerating development.

🌐 Google Cloud introduces DNS64 and NAT64 for Cross‑Cloud Network to allow IPv6-only workloads to access IPv4-only services without dual‑stack. DNS64 synthesizes AAAA responses by embedding IPv4 addresses into the 64:ff9b::/96 prefix, and NAT64 translates traffic by extracting those addresses and initiating IPv4 connections on behalf of IPv6 clients. The blog post includes step‑by‑step gcloud commands to create VPCs, DNS64 policies, and a NAT64 gateway.

🔁 Soft failover in BigQuery Managed Disaster Recovery defers promotion of secondary compute and datasets until replication is confirmed, reducing the risk of data loss during planned disaster recovery tests. Unlike hard failover, which may promote immediately and accept RPO gaps to restore service, soft failover coordinates primary and secondary acquiescence to ensure data integrity. Available via the BigQuery UI, DDL, and CLI, it provides administrators with controlled, realistic DR drills without compromising production data.

🕒 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 CloudWatch now supports creating a single alarm that evaluates and acts on multiple individual metrics dynamically. By authoring a Metrics Insights (SQL) query with GROUP BY and ORDER BY clauses, the alarm automatically includes matching metrics as resources are created or removed, eliminating manual per-resource alarm management. You can configure these alarms via the CloudWatch console, AWS CLI, CloudFormation, or CDK; the capability is available in all commercial AWS regions, AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, and China Regions, and Metrics Insights query alarm pricing applies.

🌐 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 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.

🔧 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.

🔔 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.

🔁 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.