All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔔 Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Bring Your Own Media (BYOM), enabling customers to migrate SQL Server workloads to a managed AWS service while reusing existing Microsoft SQL Server licenses and Software Assurance via Microsoft's License Mobility program. The capability integrates with AWS License Manager to help track license usage and maintain compliance. BYOM reduces the need to purchase additional SQL Server licenses or wait for existing agreements to expire when moving to RDS. It aims to simplify migrations from on‑premises, other clouds, or self‑managed EC2 deployments.

🔬 AWS HealthOmics now lets customers specify the Nextflow engine version at run time via the StartRun API, enabling explicit version pinning for controlled migration. Supported versions include 22.04, 23.10, 24.10, 25.10, and 26.04 via a new engine-settings parameter. This run-time override takes precedence over manifest.nextflowVersion, allowing testing across engine versions without changing workflow source. The feature is available in all AWS HealthOmics regions and supports HIPAA-eligible, production-regulated workflows.

🔬 AWS HealthOmics now supports Nextflow version 26.04, enabling customers to use new Nextflow features like record types, the strict syntax parser, workflow output summaries, and agent logging mode. The service is HIPAA-eligible and provides fully managed bioinformatics workflows for healthcare and life sciences. Nextflow v26.04 is available across all AWS HealthOmics regions, improving pipeline reliability, readability, and integration with downstream tools.

🔔 Amazon Connect Customer now automates placement of ad-hoc activities in agent schedules to minimize impact on service level goals. When scheduling events like training or meetings, supervisors can select placement within a shift, inside a specific time window, or relative to shift boundaries, and the system finds the optimal time within those constraints. This reduces manual scheduling effort and preserves consistent service levels across teams.

🔔 Amazon Connect Customer now supports scheduling up to 5,000 agents per schedule, simplifying workforce planning for large or multi-skilled agent pools. Additional limits include up to 350 agents per staffing group and 300 staffing groups per forecast group, enabling a forecast group capacity of up to 5,000 agents. The update removes the need to split schedules or maintain separate schedules for shared agent pools, reducing operational complexity and improving schedule optimization. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect Customer agent scheduling is offered.

🔒 Amazon Quick Research now supports encryption using customer-managed keys (CMKs) via AWS Key Management Service, enabling organizations to control encryption, auditing, and key lifecycle. Customers can use multiple CMKs with one default key per AWS account per region and must create CMKs in the same account and region as Quick resources. Only symmetric KMS keys are supported, and CloudTrail integration provides comprehensive audit trails and the ability to revoke compromised keys within 15 minutes. The feature is generally available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Quick is offered.

🔔 Amazon Connect Customer now supports automated schedule update notifications to reduce manual effort. You can define rules to send email or text notifications (via EventBridge) to supervisors and agents when schedules are published, updated, or when an agent’s leave request status changes. This capability helps ensure agents are informed without constantly checking their status and improves scheduler productivity. The feature is available in all Regions where Amazon Connect Customer agent scheduling is offered.

🔒 Oracle has issued its first monthly Critical Security Patch Update (CSPU), addressing 35 vulnerabilities that require more urgent attention than quarterly releases. The batch includes 11 critical, 18 high, and 6 medium severity flaws, with several affecting Oracle REST Data Services, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Payments. Some older supply-chain bugs have public proof-of-concept exploits, increasing patching urgency.

🔒 Amazon Quick now supports connecting privately hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers via Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). This enables organizations to integrate proprietary MCP servers running on Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Agentcore, or other private compute without exposing them to the public internet. During connector creation, choose your VPC and provide your MCP server URL so teams can interact with private MCPs in Quick while traffic remains routed securely through the VPC.

🔒 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports custom IAM permissions boundaries so organizations enforcing Service Control Policies (SCPs) can provision projects without changing their security posture. When creating a project, SageMaker provisions three IAM roles — a project user role, an Amazon Bedrock service role, and a Bedrock Lambda execution role — and administrators can specify a permissions boundary in the Tooling blueprint configuration. The boundary is attached to all three roles at creation, satisfying SCP requirements and limiting role capabilities while allowing automatic project provisioning across all supported AWS Regions.

🚀 After a firmware update, Cloudflare's Gen12 core servers experienced boots stretching from minutes to hours due to repeated network boot timeouts. The team traced the issue to UEFI probing every available network boot interface sequentially and fixed it by declaring the correct boot interface early in the PXE pre-boot stage. They implemented validation, vendor collaboration, and tooling enhancements (including regex matching and a uefi-same-hex flag) to enforce persistent settings. The result cut firmware upgrade automation from nearly four hours to about three minutes and subsequent boots from ~20 minutes to under a minute.

🔒 Amazon Web Services (AWS) released Spring 2026 SOC 1, 2, and 3 reports covering 188 services for the period April 1, 2025–March 31, 2026, providing customers a full year of assurance. Customers can download SOC 1 and 2 reports via AWS Artifact, while the SOC 3 report is available on the AWS SOC Compliance Page and AWS Artifact. AWS also published the SOC report package in NIST OSCAL (JSON) format to support machine-readable, standards-based compliance automation. AWS encourages customers to review services in scope and contact their account teams with questions or feedback.

🔧 AWS Parallel Computing Service (AWS PCS) now offers a PCS‑ready Deep Learning AMI, an AWS‑maintained Amazon Machine Image based on the Deep Learning Base GPU AMI (Ubuntu 24.04). It provides a production‑quality foundation for AI/ML training and HPC with preinstalled, compatibility‑tested infrastructure components such as NVIDIA drivers, CUDA, EFA, Lustre client, PCS Agent, Slurm for PCS, and EFS utilities. Multiple Slurm versions are supported and activate automatically based on cluster configuration, and AWS will regularly update the AMIs for security patches and driver updates. The AMI is available at no additional cost for x86_64 and arm64 in all Regions where AWS PCS is offered.

🛡️ The Remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server for AlloyDB is now generally available, providing a secure HTTP endpoint that lets AI agents access real-time operational data. This fully managed service simplifies production deployments by centralizing discovery, offering fine-grained IAM-based authorization, audit logging, and integration with Model Armor for prompt and response protection. Developers can join AlloyDB operational data with analytics in BigQuery and use built-in AI functions for low-latency agentic experiences.

🚀 Google announces GKE standby buffers to complement active buffers, providing low-cost suspended node capacity that resumes faster than cold node provisioning. Standby buffers store node state to disk, releasing compute and memory costs while keeping persistent disk and IP charges, enabling near-instant scheduling with only a small single-digit percent overhead. Together, active and standby buffers reduce pod scheduling latency, replace manual balloon-pod workarounds, and help balance performance and cost for spiky workloads.

🔐 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Identity now lets customers reference existing AWS Secrets Manager secret ARNs directly in Credential Providers. Previously, secrets were service-managed and created by AgentCore Identity, limiting tagging, CMK encryption, and governance controls. Customers can now create and manage secrets with their own policies and then reference the ARN without changing runtime behavior. This feature is GA in 14 AWS Regions.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8azn instances are available in Europe (Ireland). These general-purpose, high-frequency instances use fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors and deliver up to 5 GHz in the cloud, with up to 2x compute performance over M5zn and up to 24% higher performance than M8a. They provide higher memory bandwidth, larger L3 cache, and improved networking and EBS throughput, and come in nine sizes including bare metal options.

🔧 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now offers troubleshooting skills that deliver expert AI/ML cluster diagnostics into coding assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, and Kiro. These skills guide natural-language diagnostics for GPU hardware faults, NCCL communication issues, and performance bottlenecks across distributed clusters. They automate evidence collection via AWS Systems Manager and provide actionable recommendations without requiring infrastructure changes.

🚀Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i‑flex instances are available in Asia Pacific (New Zealand). Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, these instances deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel cloud processors. They provide up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based generations, plus up to 20% higher performance than M7i variants with specific workloads seeing larger gains. M8i‑flex targets common general-purpose sizes from large to 16xlarge, while M8i offers 13 SAP-certified sizes including bare metal and a new 96xlarge for large-scale applications.

🔧 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports EFA-only network interfaces for cluster instance groups, allowing dedicated Elastic Fabric Adapter devices without attaching Elastic Network Adapters for IP networking. This reduces IP address consumption in VPC subnets and enables larger-scale distributed training clusters. To enable it, set efa-only in the ClusterNetworkInterface when creating or updating a HyperPod cluster via the API.