All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔁 Amazon Connect now supports recurring activities in agent schedules, enabling managers to create repeating events such as daily stand-ups or weekly team meetings with a few clicks. You can configure recurring series for individual agents or share a single recurring series across multiple agents, removing the need to create each occurrence manually. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is offered and is designed to improve manager productivity and keep agent calendars up to date.

📡AWS announced a new AWS Direct Connect location at the Equinix BA1 data center near Barcelona, Spain, enabling private, direct connectivity to all public AWS Regions (excluding China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. This is the first Direct Connect site in Barcelona and the third in Spain, offering dedicated 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps circuits with MACsec encryption available. Direct Connect enables private physical connections between AWS and customer data centers or colocation facilities, delivering a more consistent network experience than the public internet.

📨 Amazon Connect now supports embedding Tasks and Emails directly into websites and applications via a new contact form option in the communication widget. Supervisors and managers can use a drag-and-drop editor to design customer-facing forms and generate code snippets for seamless site integration. These interactions continue to be managed through existing Amazon Connect workflows, enabling flexible callback requests and web-based email submissions.

🔒 Amazon announced that Amazon RDS io2 Block Express volumes are now available in AWS GovCloud (US‑West) and AWS GovCloud (US‑East) Regions. These volumes provide consistent sub‑millisecond latency and industry‑leading outlier latency control for mission‑critical database workloads. io2 Block Express supports up to 256,000 Provisioned IOPS, 4,000 MB/s throughput, 64 TiB volumes, and 99.999% durability. Customers can upgrade from io1 without downtime using the ModifyDBInstance API and modify existing io1, gp2, or gp3 volumes in the RDS Management Console.

🔎 Amazon QuickSight has increased calculated-field capacities: analyses can now include up to 2,000 calculated fields (previously 500) and datasets can include up to 500 calculated fields (previously 200). The expansion enables authors and data curators to build more transformations and extract richer, more complex insights from very large datasets and diverse end-user personas. In regions where Amazon Q is available, users can also construct calculations using natural language. The new limits are currently available across all supported QuickSight regions.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has designated Aurora MySQL 3.10 (compatible with MySQL 8.0.42) as a long-term support (LTS) minor release, effective immediately. Clusters that choose the LTS minor version can remain on that release for at least three years or until the major engine’s standard support ends, whichever is sooner. During the LTS lifecycle, AWS will publish only targeted patches addressing select high-severity security and operational issues and will not introduce new features. This LTS designation is available in all regions where Aurora MySQL is offered.

🔔 AWS Batch now offers two new default instance type categories: default-x86_64 and default-arm64. These options automatically select the most cost-effective EC2 instance types across generations based on your job queue requirements and will be expanded as new instance types become available in a region. You can enable them via the instanceType parameter for managed compute environments; the existing optimal option remains supported. Only Compute Environments in an ENABLED and VALID state will receive automatic updates.

🔒 Amazon Web Services has added a compute checksum operation to S3 Batch Operations, enabling large-scale verification of stored datasets without restoring or downloading objects. You can submit a manifest or target a bucket with prefix/suffix filters, select algorithms such as SHA-256, MD5, CRC32C and others, and receive a detailed integrity report when the job completes. This capability complements S3's built-in validation and simplifies compliance, preservation, and accuracy checks across all storage classes and object sizes.

🚀 AWS Marketplace has introduced a streamlined fulfillment experience for Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and AMI with CloudFormation products across both the website and console. The update combines configuration and purchase steps on a single page, clearly presenting fulfillment options, related AWS services, and seller-provided guidance. It also brings a new in-console launch experience for container products, providing a consistent multi-region, multi-language workflow.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now supports Batch inference for Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI GPT-OSS (120B, 20B), enabling asynchronous processing of large workloads at approximately 50% of on-demand inference cost. The update targets bulk scenarios such as document analysis, large-scale summarization, content generation, and structured data extraction, and is optimized to deliver higher overall batch throughput on these newer models. Batch progress and workload metrics — including pending and processed records, tokens per minute, and Claude-specific pending tokens — are exposed at the AWS account level via Amazon CloudWatch.

🛠 AWS now supports resilience testing for S3 Express One Zone using AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS), enabling simulated network disruptions that cause data plane requests to timeout for directory buckets. The FIS network disruption action is included in the AZ Availability: Power Interruption scenario and is available in all Regions where the storage class is offered. You can run experiments via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or the FIS API to validate monitoring, recovery procedures, and improve application resilience; consult FIS pricing for cost details.

🆕 Amazon Athena now supports CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS) statements targeting S3 Tables, enabling creation and population of a managed S3 Table from a single SQL query. The capability supports source data in Parquet, CSV, JSON and lake formats such as Apache Iceberg, Hudi, and Delta Lake. CTAS lets you partition data on the fly and the resulting tables can be queried, JOINed, and updated in Athena. This feature is available in AWS Regions where both Athena and S3 Tables are supported.

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4 are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region. R8g delivers up to 30% better performance versus Graviton3, offers larger sizes—up to 48xlarge and 1.5 TB memory across 12 sizes including two bare-metal options—and targets memory‑intensive workloads. Built on the AWS Nitro System, these instances provide up to 50 Gbps networking and up to 40 Gbps to EBS for databases, in‑memory caches, and real‑time analytics.

🔔 Amazon DynamoDB now emits more granular throttling exceptions together with matching Amazon CloudWatch metrics. The enhanced exception payloads include a list of reasons for the throttle event and the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the table or index affected, helping teams pinpoint what was throttled. CloudWatch metrics are available immediately; to receive the richer exception details you must upgrade to the latest SDK. This capability is available in commercial, GovCloud (US), and China Regions.

📈 DynamoDB now supports selectively emitting events for throttled keys to CloudWatch Contributor Insights, enabling you to monitor only throttled items rather than all accessed keys. By emitting exclusively throttled-key events, you reduce monitoring costs and noise while maintaining visibility into throttling and usage hotspots. This mode is available in all commercial AWS Regions, GovCloud (US), and China Regions.

🔒 AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now supports AWS PrivateLink, enabling access to ACM APIs from within an Amazon VPC without traversing the public internet. You can create interface endpoints to connect your VPC to ACM using the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS CloudFormation. This private connectivity is available in all Regions where ACM and PrivateLink are supported, including AWS GovCloud (US) and China Regions, and helps meet compliance requirements by keeping API traffic inside the AWS network.

🔒 Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports resource-based policies on workspaces, allowing owners to specify which IAM principals can ingest metrics or run PromQL queries from other accounts. This removes the previous need to assume an IAM role in the workspace owner account for cross-account access. Workspace owners can attach policies to allow-list non-owner principals for Prometheus-compatible API actions, and the capability is available in all regions where the service is generally available.

🧠 Amazon Neptune now integrates with Cognee to provide graph-native memory for agentic generative AI applications. The integration enables developers to use Amazon Neptune Analytics as the persistent graph and vector store behind Cognee’s memory layer, supporting large-scale memory graphs, long-term memory, and multi-hop reasoning. Hybrid retrieval across graph, vector, and keyword modalities helps agents deliver more personalized, cost-efficient, and context-aware experiences; documentation and a sample notebook are available to accelerate adoption.

🔒 AWS has renewed its PCI 3DS certification for Spring 2025 and expanded scope to include three additional services—Amazon Verified Permissions, AWS B2B Data Interchange, and AWS Resource Explorer—and three Regions: Asia Pacific (Thailand), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), and Mexico (Central). The compliance package includes an Attestation of Compliance (AOC) and an AWS Responsibility Summary to clarify shared responsibilities for handling payment card data. Coalfire served as the third-party Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) for the renewal. Customers can retrieve the detailed reports via the AWS Artifact self-service portal to support their audits.

🔐 PAN-OS 12.1 Orion delivers a framework for quantum-ready and multicloud security, combining automated asset discovery, continuous risk assessment and centralized management via Strata Cloud Manager. It introduces an industry-first cipher translation to make legacy applications quantum-safe, plus quantum-optimized fifth-generation NGFW hardware for high-scale PQC inspection. The release also expands AI-driven detections and one-click deployment across AWS/Azure/GCP.