All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports an ECC384 Certificate Authority and two new ECDSA cipher suites for SSL and OEM Agent options on Oracle Database 19c and 21c. The added cipher suites — TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 and TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 — offer security comparable to RSA with shorter keys and lower CPU usage. To enable them, select rds-ca-ecc384-g1 as the CA for your DB instances and follow the documented steps to add SSL or modify OEM Agent settings.

🚀 Firestore with MongoDB compatibility is now generally available on Google Cloud. This launch lets developers run existing MongoDB drivers, code, and tools against a MongoDB-compatible API implemented on Firestore's serverless database, combining MongoDB ecosystem compatibility with Firestore’s multi-region replication, strong consistency, and pay-as-you-go pricing. New capabilities include over 200 API and query features (including $lookup and unique indexes), Firestore Studio enhancements, and Eventarc triggers for change data capture. Enterprise functions such as Point-in-Time Recovery, database cloning, and managed export/import support production and compliance workflows.

🎉 Google marks the tenth anniversary of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) by simplifying pricing and expanding capabilities. Starting September 2025, GKE moves to a single paid tier, GKE Standard, which includes multi-cluster features such as Fleets, Teams, Config Management, and Policy Controller at no extra cost, with additional capabilities available à la carte. Google is also making Autopilot toggleable per cluster and per workload and promoting a container-optimized compute platform designed to increase efficiency and performance for AI and large-scale services.

🔄 You can now perform in-place minor Apache Airflow version downgrades on Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA). This feature lets administrators revert an MWAA environment to any other supported minor Airflow version without needing to recreate the environment. You can also launch new Airflow environments in all currently supported MWAA regions via the AWS Management Console with a few clicks. For details, see the Amazon MWAA documentation.

⚙️ Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Redo Transport Compression, which compresses redo data before it is transmitted to standby databases to reduce network traffic and improve redo transport performance. Because transport is faster, customers can achieve a lower Recovery Point Objective (RPO). Compression and decompression consume CPU on both primary and standby instances, so ensure adequate CPU capacity before enabling. Enable the feature by setting the redo_compression parameter in the instance Parameter Group; it supports mounted and read replicas and requires Oracle Enterprise Edition with Oracle Advanced Compression licensing.

📢 AWS announced general availability of AWS Elastic Beanstalk in Asia Pacific (Thailand), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), and Europe (Spain). The service automates application deployment, capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring so developers can focus on writing code. These region additions provide local access that can reduce latency, help address data-residency and compliance requirements, and broaden deployment options for customers in Southeast Asia and Spain. Customers can follow the Elastic Beanstalk developer guidance to begin deploying applications in the new regions.

🔬 This blog highlights how Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA combine cloud infrastructure and GPU-accelerated AI tooling to speed scientific discovery and commercial deployment. It profiles three startups—Pangaea Data, Basecamp Research, and Global Objects—demonstrating applications from clinical decision support to large-scale protein databases and photorealistic digital twins. The piece emphasizes measurable outcomes, compliance, and the importance of scalable compute and optimized AI frameworks for real-world impact.

🖼️ Google announced native image generation and editing in Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, now available in preview on Vertex AI. The model delivers state-of-the-art capabilities including multi-image fusion, character and style consistency, and conversational editing to refine visuals via natural-language loops. Built-in SynthID watermarking supports responsible, transparent use. Developers and partners report promising integrations and low-latency performance for real-time editing workflows.

🔒 The Hacker News summarizes SentinelOne’s positioning after Gartner named it a Leader in the 2025 Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms for the fifth consecutive year. The piece spotlights the Singularity Platform as an AI-first solution—featuring an AI analyst and unified EDR, CNAPP, Hyperautomation, and AI SIEM—asserting FedRAMP High authorization and single-console control. Customer-reported outcomes cited include 63% faster detection, 55% reduced MTTR, and a reported 338% three-year ROI. Product capabilities emphasized include Purple AI natural-language threat hunting, one-click rollback, Storyline correlation, OCSF integration, and alignment with MITRE ATT&CK and NIST 800-207.

🔧 Amazon announces that Aurora DSQL now integrates with AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) to enable controlled resilience testing for applications that depend on Aurora DSQL. Customers can simulate regional connectivity disruptions and full inaccessibility to validate failover, reconnection, and recovery behaviours across single-Region and multi-Region deployments. Experiment templates can be included in CI pipelines and FIS generates detailed reports that can be stored in Amazon S3 for auditing and compliance. The capability is available in multiple AWS Regions.

🔗 AWS Transform for .NET now supports Azure DevOps repositories alongside GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. You can connect Azure DevOps repos directly to AWS Transform to discover, assess, and transform hundreds of repositories in parallel and run unit tests as part of the modernization workflow. Dependencies hosted in Azure Artifacts (NuGet) are resolved automatically during transformation, simplifying migration of .NET Framework applications to Linux-ready, cross-platform .NET while preserving Azure DevOps workflows.

🎬 Starting today, AWS Deadline Cloud supports running Maxon Cinema 4D and Redshift render jobs on Linux service-managed fleets. Previously limited to Windows-only service-managed fleets, the new Linux option reduces worker compute costs and lets teams provision and elastically scale rendering capacity automatically. Service-managed fleets can be configured in minutes and the feature is available in all regions where Deadline Cloud is offered.

🔊 Amazon Polly announces general availability of seven new highly expressive generative voices in English, French, Polish, and Dutch. The release introduces one male-sounding voice (Canadian French - Liam) and six female-sounding voices, including US English - Salli and Polish - Ola and Ewa, bringing the Generative TTS roster to 27 voices. These generative voices are available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt), and leverage Polly’s GenAI-based polyglot capability to preserve a consistent vocal identity across languages.

🛡️ Google will require identity verification for all developers who distribute Android apps, including those that sideload software outside the Google Play ecosystem. Invitations begin October 2025, verification opens to all developers in March 2026, and enforcement starts September 2026 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The policy aims to curb impersonation, stop repeat malicious actors, and strengthen developer accountability while preserving user choice.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 has been named a Leader in the 2025 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Incident Response Services. Published 2025-08-26 by Sam Rubin, the announcement highlights Unit 42's threat-informed, tech-driven methodology combining telemetry from over 70,000 customers, tracking of more than 200 threat groups, and 150+ intel partnerships. Deep integration with Palo Alto Networks platforms, notably Cortex, plus AI and automation, is credited with faster detection, containment, and reduced dwell time. Unit 42 emphasizes post-incident transformation mapped to MITRE ATT&CK and NIST to help organizations not only recover but emerge more resilient.

📄 AWS B2B Data Interchange now supports custom validation rules for X12 EDI documents, allowing organizations to expand or modify the X12 ANSI standard to reflect trading-partner agreements. You can enforce element presence, length constraints, and allowed values while combining standard and custom checks. Validation results generate functional acknowledgments (997/999), emit EventBridge events, and include human-readable explanations stored with output files to support remediation workflows.

📣 Amazon Connect Contact Lens now supports external voice in five additional AWS Regions — Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London). The service integrates with other voice systems for real-time and post-call analytics, offering call recordings, contact transcripts, generative AI post-contact summaries, sensitive data redaction, contact categorization, theme detection, sentiment analysis, and real-time alerts. Customers can extend Contact Lens analytics across existing voice platforms, access interaction data streams and a data lake, or start with Contact Lens to evaluate performance before migrating agents.

🚀 Amazon has launched EC2 G6 instances powered by NVIDIA L4 GPUs in the Middle East (UAE) Region, expanding cloud GPU capacity for graphics and ML workloads. G6 instances offer up to 8 L4 GPUs with 24 GB per GPU, third-generation AMD EPYC processors, up to 192 vCPUs, 100 Gbps networking, and up to 7.52 TB local NVMe storage. They are available via On-Demand, Reserved, Spot, and Savings Plans and can be managed through the AWS Console, CLI, and SDKs.

📝 Unit 42 has launched Insights, a new article series that connects readers directly to researchers and consultants with candid, real-time thinking about threats and incident response. Unlike formal threat assessments, these pieces share early observations, theories, and the kinds of practitioner conversations that don’t fit a traditional research paper. The series complements Unit 42’s rigorously reviewed reports by exposing the messier, immediate judgments that shape investigations and client guidance.

🌍 BigQuery now integrates Earth Engine, enabling analysts to run raster analytics and join satellite-derived imagery with vector data using familiar SQL workflows. Initial capabilities include the ST_RegionStats() geography function plus a curated set of ~20 Earth Engine raster datasets for land cover, weather and climate analysis. With general availability, Google Cloud adds EU regional deployment, an Image Details tab for enhanced metadata visibility, usage and quota controls, and a preview map visualization in BigQuery Studio to render GEOGRAPHY query results on Google Maps for interactive exploration and stakeholder-ready outputs.