All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 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 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.

🔔 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 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.

🔧 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.

🔔 Google has disputed reports that it issued a blanket warning asking 2.5 billion Gmail users to reset passwords following a recent breach that allegedly affected some Workspace accounts. In a Monday blog post the company called those headlines false and emphasized that Gmail's protections block over 99.9% of phishing and malware. Google advised users to enable two-step verification and adopt passkeys, and it criticized the spread of unverified claims by media and security vendors.

🔍 Split Cost Allocation Data now supports accelerator-based workloads running in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), allowing customers to track costs for Trainium, Inferentia, NVIDIA and AMD GPUs alongside CPU and memory. Cost details are included in the AWS Cost and Usage Report (including CUR 2.0) and can be visualized using the Containers Cost Allocation dashboard in Amazon QuickSight or queried with Amazon Athena. New customers can enable the feature in the Billing and Cost Management console; it is automatically enabled for existing Split Cost Allocation Data customers.

🔎 AWS Resource Explorer is now available in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) AWS Region. With AWS Resource Explorer you can search and discover resources across AWS Regions and accounts using the console, the AWS CLI, the AWS SDKs, or the Management Console's unified search bar. Enable the feature via the AWS Resource Explorer console and follow the product documentation to configure indexing and permissions. This expansion improves operational visibility, asset inventorying, and governance for resources hosted in Taipei.

🧠 Amazon Web Services announced integration of Amazon Neptune with Zep, an open-source memory server for LLM applications, enabling persistent long-term memory and contextual history. Developers can use Neptune Database or Neptune Analytics as the graph store and Amazon OpenSearch as the text-search layer within Zep’s memory system. The integration enables graph-powered retrieval, multi-hop reasoning, and hybrid search across graph, vector, and keyword modalities, simplifying the creation of personalized, context-aware LLM agents.

🔍 AWS has expanded AWS Transform assessment to analyze on‑premises detached storage infrastructures, including SAN, NAS, file servers, object stores and virtual environments. The new capability maps existing storage to AWS targets such as Amazon S3, Amazon EBS and Amazon FSx, and delivers a comparative Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis. It also provides performance and cost optimization recommendations for compute and storage workloads, noting storage can represent up to 45% of migration opportunities. The assessment is available in US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (Frankfurt).

🔁 AWS Transform for VMware now supports VPC CIDR range modifications to prevent IP conflicts during migrations. The service automatically updates all associated resources — including subnets, security groups, routing tables, and target instances — when you change VPC CIDRs. You can preserve source IPs, apply adjusted addresses aligned to new VPC CIDRs, or choose DHCP-based assignment. Agentic AI automation speeds discovery, planning, and migration workflows and the feature is available in additional regions including US East (Ohio), Europe (Stockholm), and Europe (Ireland).

🔁 The AWS Deadline Cloud client now includes a command to automatically download outputs for completed jobs from a specified queue. The command detects output files that Deadline Cloud has stored in Amazon S3 and restores them to the local paths defined during job creation. It can be scheduled with cron or Task Scheduler to run periodically, enabling unattended retrieval for final review and delivery.

⚡Amazon Bedrock updated prompt caching for Anthropic’s Claude models—Claude 3.5 Haiku, Claude 3.7, and Claude 4—to simplify cache management. Developers now set a single cache breakpoint at the end of a request and the system automatically reads the longest previously cached prefix, removing manual segment selection and reducing integration complexity. By excluding cache read tokens from TPM quotas, this change can free up token capacity and lower costs for multi-turn workflows. The capability is available today in all regions offering these Claude models; enable caching in your Bedrock model invocations and refer to the Bedrock Developer Guide for details.

🔧 Microsoft published the optional KB5064081 preview cumulative update for Windows 11 24H2, moving affected systems to build 26100.5074 and rolling out thirty-six new features and fixes. The update standardizes CPU reporting in Task Manager so the Processes tab now uses the same calculation as Performance and Users: (Δ Process CPU Time) ÷ (Δ Elapsed Time × Logical Processors), making metrics consistent and aligning them with third‑party monitors. Users who want the legacy view can enable an optional CPU Utility column in the Details tab. The release also bundles UI, File Explorer, Taskbar, Windows Hello, backup, and numerous bug fixes, while Microsoft lists two known issues (CertEnroll errors and NDI streaming lag).

🔔 Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now sends alerts directly to PagerDuty, removing the need for custom Lambda functions or intermediary services. The native integration simplifies authentication and improves delivery reliability for incident notifications. It is available in all AWS regions where the service is generally available and can be configured from the Alert manager tab or via the AWS CLI, SDK, or APIs. Refer to the user guide for detailed setup instructions.

🔒 Google Cloud has expanded its Intel TDX-based Confidential Computing portfolio, now offering Confidential GKE Nodes, Confidential Space, and Confidential GPUs alongside broader regional availability. Creating an Intel TDX Confidential VM is exposed directly in the GCE Create an instance flow under the Security tab, with no code changes required. The C3 machine series supports Intel TDX across additional regions and zones, and NVIDIA H100 GPUs on the A3 series enable confidential AI by combining Intel CPU protection with NVIDIA Confidential Computing on the GPU.