All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🛠️ Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now supports monitoring of self-managed PostgreSQL instances alongside Amazon RDS and Aurora. Use the Amazon CloudWatch agent to collect health and performance metrics from PostgreSQL running on EC2, and view live database load, wait event analysis, query-level statistics, and host metrics in the Database Insights fleet view. This feature is available in all AWS Commercial Regions and uses the same Database Insights console and workflows familiar to AWS-managed database users.

🔔 AWS Marketplace now charges a 0% listing fee for professional services when they are sold as part of a qualifying multi-product solution. This builds on a prior reduction to a 0.5% fee and aims to lower costs for Partners transacting services through the Marketplace while preserving centralized billing benefits. The 0% fee applies to new subscriptions across all commercial AWS Regions when services are bundled with at least one paid subscription.

🔒 AWS Backup now supports protecting and restoring more than 1,000 Amazon S3 buckets per account, aligning with the Amazon S3 bucket quota set for each account. Previously limited to 1,000 buckets, this update enables protection of all general-purpose buckets without requiring changes to existing backup plans when using default AWS Backup managed policies. The feature is available across all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions; consult AWS Backup documentation for custom policy permissions.

📊 Compact mode for Amazon Connect Customer analytics dashboards increases data density so supervisors can view more operational information without scrolling. The feature reduces widget size, font, and minimizes filters to maximize screen space. Available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect Customer is offered, compact mode helps supervisors spot non-adherent agents faster on smaller displays.

🧭 TabFM is a new pre-trained foundation model in BigQuery for regression and classification on tabular data, now available in preview. Exposed through SQL functions AI.PREDICT and AI.EVALUATE, it delivers instant predictions and evaluation without explicit training or feature engineering. TabFM uses in-context learning and distributed inference to handle large-scale prediction workloads and outperforms many classic models on benchmarks.

🔒 Google Cloud introduces enhanced VPC Service Controls policy intelligence features — the Violation Analyzer and Violation Dashboard — to simplify perimeter management and reduce MTTR for access denials. BlackLine uses these tools to protect sensitive financial data, troubleshoot violations with a single token, and adapt perimeters via ingress/egress and access-level adjustments. The tools provide unified visibility, contextual reports, and filtering to support deployment, monitoring, investigation, and policy refinement.

🚀 Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) now supports Apache Airflow version 3.3.1. This update brings stateful tasks, multi-language task support via the experimental Language Task SDK (Java and Go), expanded asset partitioning, pluggable retry policies, and bulk actions for DAGs and task instances. Customers can launch new 3.3.1 environments or upgrade from 3.2+ through the AWS Console in supported regions.

🔒 Recent cyberattacks against U.S. water and wastewater systems show that OT impact extends beyond data loss to public health, environment, and community functions. Distributed architectures, legacy controllers, remote cellular sites, and accumulated third-party access increase the attack surface. Government advisories document exploitation of internet-facing PLCs and HMIs, while new legislation seeks to expand EPA cybersecurity authority. Fortinet recommends unified OT architectures, secure cellular connectivity, ZTNA, and IEC 62443-4-2–certified solutions for consistent protection.

🔔 AWS Marketplace now supports auto-renewals for private offers to help sellers and buyers maintain uninterrupted software and service subscriptions. Sellers set renewal terms and choose how pricing carries forward—no change, fixed change, or a defined range—while buyers can opt in or out and update preferences later. AWS notifies both parties before renewal, provides a comparison of terms, and allows either side to opt out before the deadline. This feature is generally available in all commercial AWS Regions for direct private offers with contract pricing and requires no additional onboarding.

🧩 Cloudflare prototyped Cache Transcoding to increase effective cache capacity by encoding eligible cache entries with Zstandard (zstd). The system encodes eligible responses on cache fill, stores them compressed on disk and transfers them compressed between tiers, then decodes before serving. In tests zstd level 3 reduced on-disk size to roughly one-third for eligible text assets while adding only a small CPU cost, improving storage density and inter-datacenter bandwidth efficiency.

🔧 OpenClaw released its largest update, a system-wide overhaul touching installation, runtime, memory, plugins, security and user-facing apps in version 2026.8.1. Built by hundreds of contributors, the release improves secret handling, runtime isolation and plugin lifecycle controls to reduce unintended data exposure. The update grew from usability fixes into a full rewrite to support scale and consistent controls across integrations.

🔐 As of Sept. 1, Microsoft made passkeys the default authentication method for Entra ID, and plans to retire Microsoft-provided SMS and voice authentication by Feb. 1, 2027. The change accelerates enterprise adoption of passwordless methods but leaves many organizations operating in a hybrid environment due to legacy applications, recovery and governance challenges. Experts praise the phishing resistance of passkeys while warning about device lifecycle, ecosystem lock-in, fragmented cross-platform support, and account recovery complexities that can keep passwords in place for specialized or older systems.

🔔 Amazon CloudWatch now supports a configurable warm-up period for metric and log alarms to delay alarm evaluation after creation. This reduces noise from missing data when new resources or services start up and begin publishing metrics. You set the warm-up via the WarmUpConfiguration parameter for 1–2,880 minutes, and by default evaluation can start early once sufficient data exists. Warm-up periods are available in all AWS Regions at no extra cost beyond standard CloudWatch alarm pricing.

🔔 Amazon DocumentDB now supports in-place major version upgrades directly from engine versions 3.6 and 4.0 to 8.0, preserving data, configurations, and cluster settings. The capability removes the need for intermediate upgrades and is available in all AWS regions where 3.6 and 4.0 are supported. Upgrading to 8.0 brings the latest security patches, performance improvements, and developer features. For detailed guidance, AWS points customers to the MVU documentation and the 8.0 announcement.

🔍 Partner Revenue Measurement's User Agent string now captures additional AWS services, expanding visibility into attributed revenue and product consumption. Partners who already embed the APN User Agent format (APN_1.1/pc_$) receive this expanded coverage automatically with no additional implementation required. The newly measured consumption appears in the Attributed Revenue Dashboard within Partner Analytics in AWS Partner Central. This complements Resource Tagging and AWS Marketplace Metering integrations and is generally available in all commercial regions.

📊 AWS Elemental MediaTailor now includes an in-console analytics dashboard that gives publishers a global, multi-region view of ad monetization and streaming performance. The dashboard allows comparison across regions and drill-down into individual playback configurations. It surfaces metrics such as fill rate, ad impression rate, video completion rate, and impression recovery, showing billable impressions recovered via server-side beacon retry logic. The dashboard is available in all Regions where MediaTailor is offered and leverages Amazon CloudWatch, with potential pricing for API usage beyond the free tier.

🔗 Amazon Quick now integrates with the AWS Agent Registry to let users discover, enable, and share MCP servers and agents directly within their Amazon Quick workspace. Connection details are pre-populated from the registry, enabling quick enablement and distribution for chat, agents, apps, flows, and research. The integration is available in all regions where Amazon Quick and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore are supported, and administrators can connect via Manage account > Permissions > AWS Agent Registry.

🔒 Amazon Redshift now supports AWS IAM Identity Center authentication for provisioned clusters and serverless workgroups configured with enhanced VPC routing (EVR). This enables single sign-on using corporate credentials while keeping traffic inside your Amazon VPC and on the AWS network, meeting data residency and network-isolation requirements. Redshift validates and exchanges IAM Identity Center tokens over AWS PrivateLink interface VPC endpoints inside the VPC and supports multi-Region Identity Center replication.

🆕 Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB is now available in eight additional AWS Regions including Cape Town, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Melbourne, Seoul, Zurich, and Tel Aviv. Timestream for InfluxDB provides fully managed InfluxDB databases with Multi-AZ high availability, read replicas, enhanced durability, and multi-node scaling to support real-time time-series applications. You can deploy and manage databases via the console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs.

🔁 Amazon Connect Global Resiliency now supports cross-region routing, enabling contacts arriving in one AWS region to be offered to the longest-available matching agent across two linked regions. Managers can view analytics and search contacts across both regions as a unified contact center, and both regions carry live traffic at all times to ensure configurations and integrations are continuously exercised. Customers retain control over traffic distribution and can shift new contacts and agents to a single region when needed.