All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 AlloyDB for PostgreSQL introduces a Hot Standby HA architecture that keeps the standby node actively replaying WAL records, reducing failover time and preserving cache warmth. This change eliminates standby database startup delays and minimizes post-failover performance degradation, improving RTO and stabilizing application throughput. Hot Standby is rolling out for PostgreSQL 18 and will reach earlier versions in months, with no extra cost and retention of the 99.99% SLA.

🔌 AWS now offers a free 500 Mbps Interconnect - multicloud tier to simplify private connectivity between AWS and other public clouds. The open specification behind Interconnect is already adopted by Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with Microsoft Azure planned later in 2026. The free tier provides a fully managed, resilient path (one local Tier 1 Interconnect per customer per region) and includes an Amazon CloudWatch Network Synthetic Monitor at no additional cost. Other CSPs set their own charges for their side of the link, so customers should review third-party pricing before creating an Interconnect.

🟦 Amazon Redshift Serverless now supports a lower base capacity of 4 Redshift Processing Units (RPUs) in seven regions, including Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Seoul, Canada (Central), Europe (London), South America (Sao Paulo), and AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West). Each RPU equals 16 GB of memory and billing is per-second in RPU-hours; the new entry-level starts at about $1.50 per hour. Previously the minimum was 8 RPUs. The configuration supports up to 32 TB of managed storage, up to 100 columns per table, and a maximum of 64 GB memory, and capacity reservations are available for 1- and 3-year terms for predictable workloads.

🔒 Google has made the Chrome Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) feature generally available and is rolling it out to all users to prevent account takeovers. DBSC, in beta since April 2024, cryptographically binds session cookies to device hardware such as TPM and Secure Enclave, ensuring stolen cookies cannot be reused. The feature will be enabled by default for Google Workspace customers and cannot be disabled by administrators. DBSC aims to block previously exploited techniques that restored or reused expired authentication cookies.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks has completed its acquisition of Portkey and will integrate Portkey’s AI Gateway into Prisma AIRS to provide a centralized control plane that secures and governs AI agents at scale. The integrated Prisma AIRS AI Gateway will offer unified APIs, an agent registry, semantic routing, artifact scanning, automated red teaming and runtime security to identify, authenticate and authorize agent interactions in real time. This aims to give enterprises a single enforcement point to manage agent identity, least-privilege access and consistent policies across autonomous workloads.

🔔 Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports the Oracle April 2026 Release Update (RU) for 19c and 21c and the Supplemental Patch Bundle (SPB) for 19c. The SPB, formerly the Oracle Spatial Patch Bundle, contains additional patches for targeted features such as Oracle Spatial, Data Pump, and GoldenGate. You can apply the RU or SPB via the RDS Console, SDK, or CLI and enable Automatic Minor Version Upgrade or use AWS Organizations rollout policies to stagger updates across environments.

🟢 Oracle Database@AWS is now generally available in eight additional AWS Regions — Zurich, Milan, Spain, Paris, Osaka, Singapore, Melbourne, and Sao Paulo — enabling customers to access OCI-managed Oracle Exadata systems from within AWS data centers. This expansion brings the service to twenty regions total, supporting migrations of on-premises Oracle Exadata and Oracle RAC workloads and meeting in-region data residency requirements. Customers can request a private offer from Oracle via the AWS Marketplace and configure databases through the AWS Management Console.

🟦 Amazon S3 Tables are now available in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) and Asia Pacific (New Zealand) AWS Regions. S3 Tables provide an object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support, enabling scalable tabular data storage and making data queryable by AWS and third-party engines. They perform continual table maintenance to optimize queries and reduce storage costs, and integrate with the Intelligent-Tiering storage class for automated cost management without operational overhead.

📈 Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights now supports querying metrics data up to two weeks in the past, extending the previous 3-hour SQL query window. This enhancement lets you display, aggregate, and analyze older metrics for improved visualization and investigation. The feature is available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and GovCloud (US-West) at no additional charge, with standard CloudWatch pricing applying for related alarms, dashboards, and API use.

🔐 IBM and Red Hat announced Project Lightwell, a $5 billion initiative backed by 20,000 engineers to create an AI-powered enterprise clearinghouse for discovering and remediating open source vulnerabilities. Initially focused on Java/Maven and designed with 11 financial partners, the service will backport validated fixes into deployed dependency versions without requiring upgrades. The project emphasizes a secure intermediary model for embargoed disclosures, aims to return fixes upstream to communities, and will be offered as a commercial subscription.

🔐 This post explains AWS Network Firewall's new native attachment to Transit Gateway and how it replaces the traditional inspection VPC model. It outlines benefits such as simplified architecture, centralized control, and flexible cost allocation via Transit Gateway metering policies. The article summarizes preparation steps, two common centralized architectures, a phased migration approach, and best practices for testing, rollback, and preserving NAT Elastic IPs.

📊 AWS Billing and Cost Management (BCM) now supports Budgets widgets in BCM Dashboards, allowing teams to monitor budgets alongside Cost Explorer and Savings Plans reports. Budgets widgets show budget name, budgeted amount, actual spend, and forecasted amount, with filters for name, threshold, and budget type. Widgets can be added to any dashboard, included in exports, and are available in all AWS commercial Regions at no additional charge.

🔧 AWS IoT Core introduces two MQTT connection management APIs: GetConnection and ListSubscriptions. These APIs provide detailed visibility into device MQTT connections and subscriptions, including session details and optional socket-level data, controlled by granular IAM policies. They complement the existing DeleteConnection API to offer a fuller connection management capability available in all supported AWS regions.

🔒 AWS Network Firewall adds URL and domain category filtering to simplify policy management by using AWS-managed categories instead of manual allowlists and blocklists. This reduces administrative overhead and keeps policies current as new domains appear. The feature supports domain category filtering via SNI without decryption and URL filtering with TLS inspection, and includes options for exceptions, Suricata rule support, and integrated logging for monitoring and compliance.

🔧 The next generation of AWS Resilience Hub is now generally available, offering platform engineering and SRE teams a centralized console to assess and strengthen workload resilience. It introduces a three-level application model, automated dependency discovery, generative AI-powered failure mode analysis, modular resilience policies, and organization-wide reporting. Integration with AWS Organizations enables central policy definition and posture monitoring across accounts and regions, and existing customers can migrate at their own pace.

🔔 AWS Organizations now emits CloudTrail events to the management account when member accounts join or leave an organization, introducing two new events: AccountJoinedOrganization and AccountDepartedOrganization. The join event records method (Created or Invited) and timestamp, while the depart event records mode (Left, Removed, or Cleaned) and timestamp. Administrators can use these events with CloudWatch alarms or EventBridge rules to enable real‑time notifications and faster incident response.

🤖 Google SRE describes how agentic AI augments traditional Site Reliability Engineering across the software lifecycle, from design and deployment to incident response and postmortems. The team applies AI agents for anomaly detection, playbook maintenance, alert enrichment, and automated mitigation while enforcing strong controls for security, explainability, and business continuity. Their approach pairs Gemini-based models and internal platforms with existing observability and governance practices.

🧭 Google describes how innovations from its internal Flume platform power Dataflow, a fully managed batch and streaming service supporting large-scale ML workloads. The post outlines features like liquid sharding for dynamic rebalancing, global compute for cross-region scaling, automatic pipeline optimization, and rate-limiting for external API calls. It also highlights TPU-focused efficiencies such as heterogeneous worker pools, TPU-aware autoscaling, duty-cycle enforcement, and TPU fungibility. The article notes developer conveniences—multi-language SDKs, unified batch/streaming, ML framework integration, observability, and advanced workflows—and cites customer use cases and ongoing platform enhancements.

🛠️ App-centric maintenance visibility in Unified Maintenance shifts focus from infrastructure to business services. By integrating with App Hub, Unified Maintenance aggregates maintenance schedules for registered resources—GKE clusters, GCE VMs, AlloyDB instances—into a single application-aware dashboard. This reduces manual mapping, speeds triage of performance issues against planned updates, and helps platform teams predict operational impacts across many projects.

🛈 Amazon Connect Customer now offers generative AI-powered post-contact summaries in eight new language families — Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean — and extends support for non-US English locales such as British and Australian English. These summaries provide concise, structured overviews of voice, chat, and email interactions to help agents and managers review contacts without reading full transcripts. The new languages are available in all AWS Regions where post-contact summaries are supported, enabling global teams to generate summaries in the conversation language and maintain locally appropriate spelling and terminology.