All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Amazon EC2 R7g instances powered by Graviton3 processors are now available in AWS Africa (Cape Town). These instances deliver up to 25% better compute performance versus Graviton2 and can use up to 60% less energy for comparable performance, helping reduce cloud carbon footprint. They come in nine sizes, including bare metal, and offer up to 30 Gbps networking and 20 Gbps EBS bandwidth, running on the AWS Nitro System for secure, high‑performance isolation.

🔔 Google Cloud published a consolidated roundup of product releases and previews from early July through Aug 22, 2025, covering GA launches, public previews, and platform enhancements. Highlights include Earth Engine in BigQuery (GA), Vertex AI embedding scaling, new GKE features for NUMA alignment and swap, expanded NodeConfig controls, and Cloud Run with GPUs. Customers should review the linked documentation, request preview access via account teams where needed, and plan upgrades or migrations accordingly.

🔧 Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now allows you to select a custom Kubernetes namespace when installing both AWS and Community add-ons, giving operators finer control over object organization and isolation within clusters. You can install add-ons into a chosen namespace via the AWS Console, EKS APIs, AWS CLI, or infrastructure-as-code tools like CloudFormation. Note that to move an installed add-on to a different namespace you must remove and recreate it. This capability is available in all commercial AWS Regions.

🕒 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports delayed read replicas, allowing you to specify a minimum time period for a replica to intentionally lag behind its source. This configurable time buffer helps protect against human errors such as accidental table drops or unwanted data modifications by preserving a recoverable replica state. In recovery workflows you can pause replication before problematic changes are applied, resume replication to a specific log position, and promote the replica as the new primary to achieve faster recovery than lengthy point-in-time restores.

🔁 Amazon RDS for Db2 now supports read replicas, allowing customers to add up to three replicas per instance to offload read-only workloads and reduce load on the primary database. Replicas can be created in the same Region or across Regions and use asynchronous replication so read queries do not impact the writer. You can promote a replica for disaster recovery to enable read/write operations. Note that IBM Db2 licenses are required for all replica vCPUs; customers may use On‑Demand licenses from the AWS Marketplace or BYOL.

🔎 Microsoft recounts its transition from an early Linux contributor in 2009 to one of the largest open-source supporters in cloud and AI today. The post highlights Azure as a top contributor to the CNCF, the 2015 launch of VS Code, the 2018 GitHub acquisition, and the role of AKS and managed PostgreSQL in enterprise deployments. It also describes COSMIC, explains how OpenAI’s ChatGPT runs at global scale on Azure infrastructure, and lists projects Azure teams are building in the open.

🔁 Cloudflare announces the first Media over QUIC (MoQ) relay network, built on a modern transport to unify ingest and delivery for real-time media. MoQ — an open IETF protocol developed alongside vendors like Meta, Google, and Cisco — treats media as named, subscribable tracks and forwards immutable wire Objects via relays without transcoding. The design leverages QUIC features such as no head-of-line blocking, connection migration, and 0-RTT resumption to deliver sub-second latency at broadcast scale, while simplifying architectures that previously required many disparate protocols.

🧾 AWS has published an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for Billing and Cost Management, available in the AWS Labs GitHub repository. The server exposes AWS service APIs and a dedicated SQL-based calculation engine to produce reliable, reproducible cost calculations across large volumes of usage data. It integrates with any MCP-compatible AI assistant or agent — including Q Developer CLI, the Kiro IDE, Visual Studio Code, and Claude Desktop — enabling customers to analyze historical spend, find optimization opportunities, and estimate costs for new workloads with minimal configuration.

🔁 Pentesting remains a critical control for uncovering real-world vulnerabilities, but static PDF reports and spreadsheet handoffs create delays and inefficiencies. The piece advocates automating pentest delivery so findings are consolidated and routed in real time through rules-based workflows, enabling teams to act immediately and reduce churn. Platforms like PlexTrac are highlighted for centralizing manual and scanner outputs, automating ticketing into tools such as Jira and ServiceNow, and triggering retests to close the loop. The result is faster remediation, standardized processes, and measurable reductions in MTTR for both service providers and enterprises.

📂 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now offers a simplified S3-based file storage option for project collaboration. Customers can choose between Git integrations (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket Cloud) or Amazon S3 buckets, with S3 set as the default while Git remains fully supported. The S3 option gives a consistent view of files across Studio tools, uses a last-write-wins model, and supports basic versioning when administrators enable it.

🧮 The Count Tokens API is now available in Amazon Bedrock, enabling users to determine token counts for a prompt or input prior to performing inference. Anthropic’s Claude models are supported at launch and the feature is available in all regions where those models run. This improves cost projection, gives more control over token limits, and reduces the risk of unexpected throttling. It also helps ensure inputs fit within a model's context length for more efficient prompt optimization.

🔒 Amazon Verified Permissions now supports Cedar 4.5, introducing the new is operator to enable type-based access checks. Developers can write policies that grant or deny access based on a resource’s declared type—for example, allowing administrators to view a resource only when it is an invoice in a petstore app. The update enhances Cedar’s type system, helps catch type-related errors earlier in policy development, and is available in all AWS Regions where the service runs; new and backward-compatible accounts have been automatically upgraded.

🚀 AWS has released Neuron SDK 2.25.0, now generally available for Inferentia and Trainium instances, adding context and data parallelism support plus chunked attention to accelerate long-sequence inference. The update enhances neuron-ls and neuron-monitor APIs to show node affinities and device utilization, and introduces automatic aliasing (Beta) and disaggregated serving improvements (Beta). Upgraded AMIs and Deep Learning Containers are provided for inference and training.

🔔 Amazon Web Services has enhanced Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) with deeper Amazon CloudWatch alarm integration, bringing alarm visibility and management directly into the IPAM console. Alarms are now visible across IPAM pages and a new resource-level Alarms tab lists alerts associated with specific IPAM resources. You can create alarms from the console (which redirects to CloudWatch with relevant fields pre-populated) and receive proactive monitoring suggestions for resources without alarms. The feature is available in all Regions where IPAM is supported, including AWS China and AWS GovCloud (US).

🚀 Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms and is positioned furthest to the right in Completeness of Vision. The announcement highlights a developer-first approach across containers, functions, APIs, and web frameworks, with integrated tools such as GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio. Azure emphasizes AI-native capabilities through Azure AI Foundry and platform innovations designed to accelerate agentic applications for enterprise scenarios.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights now extends its natural language query result summarization to 15 additional AWS Regions, delivering AI-generated, concise descriptions of query outputs to speed troubleshooting. Additionally, natural language query generation is available in six more Regions for CloudWatch Logs Insights and Metrics Insights, while PPL and SQL query generation has been added in three Regions. These features let users express intent in plain English to produce queries and receive readable summaries without deep query-language expertise, reducing time to actionable insight.

🔒 CloudGuard WAF-as-a-Service is now available on the AWS Marketplace and verified as Deployed on AWS. This pay-as-you-go service simplifies web application and API protection for AWS customers and reduces procurement friction. The offering has been recognized in the Gartner Market Guide for WAAP and named a Leader in the GigaOm Radar. Independent testing reported a 99.4% threat detection rate and 0.81% false positives, underscoring strong efficacy with low noise.

🔐 AWS IoT Core now supports customer-managed keys (CMK) via AWS KMS, enabling encryption of data stored in IoT Core with customer-controlled keys. When CMK is selected, AWS automatically re-encrypts existing stored data and manages the transition to avoid operational disruption. The feature is available in all Regions where IoT Core is supported and enhances control over key lifecycle — creation, rotation, monitoring, and deletion.

🔒 Microsoft has restricted distribution of proof-of-concept exploit code to MAPP participants in countries where firms must report vulnerabilities to their governments, including China. Affected companies will receive a more general written description issued at the same time as patches rather than PoC code, Microsoft said. The change follows the late-July SharePoint zero-day attacks and concerns about a possible leak from the early-bug-notification program.

🛡️ AWS Security Incident Response now integrates with popular ITSM platforms like Jira and ServiceNow, offering bidirectional synchronization for issues, comments, attachments, and case updates. The connectors are provided as open-source projects on GitHub with sample code, deployment instructions, and implementation best practices. A modular design and technical documentation make it straightforward to extend support to additional ITSM targets and to leverage AI assistants for rapid customization.