All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Amazon DynamoDB Streams now supports AWS PrivateLink for FIPS endpoints in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. This enables private connectivity between VPCs and DynamoDB Streams FIPS endpoints, keeping traffic off the public internet for agencies and organizations with federal compliance requirements. The capability simplifies compliant architectures for real-time data processing, CDC, and event-driven applications while maintaining enhanced security and privacy.

🖥️ Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports Bring Your Own License (BYOL) for Windows Desktop operating systems, enabling customers to stream Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise and full desktop experiences on hardware dedicated to their AWS account. Organizations can reduce costs by avoiding OS fees and maintain a consistent user experience between local and streamed environments. Availability spans multiple AWS Regions and requires meeting Microsoft licensing rules plus minimum monthly streaming commitments.

🚀 The next generation of Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now generally available, offering a fully managed search and vector engine optimized for agentic workflows. It auto-scales up to 20x faster and provisions resources in seconds, supports scale-to-zero and pay-per-usage pricing, and can reduce costs by up to 60% versus provisioning clusters for peak loads. New features include a shared storage layer that decouples compute and storage, two resource-based endpoints for simplified network connectivity, and native integrations with AI development platforms and OpenSearch Agent Skills.

🔔 AWS IoT Core now supports direct point-to-point messaging to any connected device, enabling delivery acknowledgements and improved visibility into message status. The new SendDirectMessage API lets you send messages directly to a device and optionally receive delivery confirmations. Delivery acknowledgements produce detailed API response codes and Amazon CloudWatch Logs for diagnostics. Direct messaging is available in all regions where AWS IoT Core operates, including Amazon China and AWS GovCloud (US).

📈 Partners can now submit opportunities in AWS Partner Central using Total Contract Value (TCV), which the system converts to a forecasted monthly recurring revenue (MRR). When creating or updating opportunities, partners select an MRR estimation method — Forecast MRR from TCV, Forecast MRR, AWS Pricing Calculator, or Manual entry — and review the computed MRR before submission. The TCV-to-MRR conversion supports USD and EUR, accepts contract duration in months, and is available worldwide via the console and the AWS Partner Central API for Selling in US East (N. Virginia).

🤖 Amazon Connect Customer Assistant is integrated into the UI builder, allowing contact center managers to create and modify views using natural language. Managers can describe desired screens, like “Create a feedback form with rating and comment fields,” and the assistant generates UI components for review before publishing. This capability can reduce time and required expertise by up to 70% when building Views for Step-by-Step Guides and Workspace pages.

📊 Cloudflare built Town Lake, a lakehouse-style unified data analytics platform, and Skipper, an AI data agent, to make its vast telemetry and logs queryable and auditable. Town Lake combines Trino, Iceberg on R2, a metadata catalog, PII scanning, access control, and ELT tooling to provide fresh, accurate, and governed data. Skipper lets non-SQL users ask natural-language questions, produce correct SQL-backed answers, and create shareable charts and dashboards.

🛡️ Microsoft has criticized researchers for publicly disclosing six zero-day vulnerabilities before patches were available, calling such actions irresponsible and risky. The company said its security teams are working around the clock to investigate and mitigate issues including privilege escalation and bypass flaws in Defender and BitLocker. Microsoft urged adherence to industry-standard coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) practices, typically allowing a 90-day embargo for patch development. It cautioned that uncoordinated releases can place proof-of-concept exploit code into malicious hands and undermines efforts to protect customers.

🔍 ISC2 research of 796 cybersecurity professionals shows that leaders who've managed real, high-profile incidents gain greater credibility. Over three quarters agreed such experience boosts trust, with 35% strongly agreeing. The survey finds outcome or blame of the prior incident is less relevant than the experience itself. Respondents emphasised a blend of technical and strategic skills, plus clear communication and team development.

🚀 Amazon EC2 P4de instances are now generally available on SageMaker notebook instances in Asia Pacific (Tokyo). These instances feature 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs with 80GB HBM2e each, delivering 640GB total GPU memory and up to 60% better ML training performance versus P4d. Customers can expect reduced model training times, improved handling of high-resolution datasets, and about 20% lower training cost. See developer guides for setup details on SageMaker Studio and notebook instances.

🚀 Amazon announced the general availability of EC2 P6-B200 instances on SageMaker notebook instances in AWS US East (N. Virginia). These instances feature 8 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs with 1440 GB GPU memory and 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, offering up to 2x performance versus P5en for AI training. Customers can use them to develop and fine-tune large foundation models interactively in JupyterLab or CodeEditor on SageMaker Studio.

🚀 Amazon announces general availability of EC2 P5.48xl instances in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) for use with SageMaker notebook instances. These instances use NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs to accelerate deep learning and HPC workloads, promising up to 4x faster time to solution and up to 40% lower training costs versus previous GPU generations. Customers can leverage P5 instances to train and deploy complex LLMs and diffusion models for generative AI tasks. Developer guides provide setup instructions for JupyterLab and CodeEditor on SageMaker Studio and notebook instances.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock customers can now view inference quotas for the bedrock-mantle endpoint via AWS Service Quotas. This update surfaces per-model input-tokens-per-minute and output-tokens-per-minute limits, aligning visibility with existing bedrock-runtime and other AWS services. The feature is available in all Regions offering the endpoint and quota increases follow the standard Bedrock limit request process.

🎥 AWS Elemental Inference introduces Smart subtitles, an AI-driven capability that produces real-time TTML-formatted captions for live streams with low latency. The feature supports English (US, GB, AU), French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish and integrates natively with AWS Elemental MediaLive. Users can create custom dictionaries via the Elemental Inference API or console to improve accuracy for domain-specific terms. Smart subtitles co-exist with other Elemental Inference features and benefit from non-linear pricing when multiple features are applied to the same content.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker notebook instances now support EC2 P5.4xl instances powered by NVIDIA H100 GPUs. These instances boost deep learning and HPC workloads, offering up to 4x faster time-to-solution and up to 40% lower training cost versus prior GPU generations. P5.4xl is available in multiple AWS regions including US East, US West, Asia Pacific, and South America; see AWS developer guides for setup instructions.

🚀 Amazon Web Services announces general availability of Amazon EC2 P5en.48xl instances on SageMaker notebook instances. These P5en instances feature 8 H200 GPUs with increased GPU memory and bandwidth versus H100, paired with custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors and Gen5 PCIe for higher CPU–GPU bandwidth. They also include third-generation EFA via Nitro v5, offering up to 3200 Gbps and latency improvements over prior P5 instances. P5en.48xl is currently available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

🚀 Amazon announces GA of EC2 P5en.48xl instances for SageMaker notebook instances, delivering advanced H200 GPUs paired with 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors. These instances provide increased GPU memory and bandwidth compared to P5, Gen5 PCIe between CPU and GPU, and faster EFA/Nitro networking to boost distributed training and inference. P5en.48xl is available in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. Refer to the developer guides for setup and SageMaker Studio integration.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker notebook instances now support EC2 P5.4xl instances powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. These instances deliver up to 4x higher performance and up to 40% lower training cost versus prior-generation GPU instances, accelerating development of deep learning and generative AI models. P5.4xl is generally available across multiple AWS regions including US East, US West, Asia Pacific, and South America. Refer to developer guides for setup instructions in JupyterLab and CodeEditor on SageMaker Studio and notebook instances.

🚀 Amazon EMR now supports Apache Spark 4.0.2 across all deployment models, bringing ANSI SQL and VARIANT data types to simplify data pipeline development. The release enables fine-grained access control at row and column level and integrates Apache Iceberg v3 for stronger transaction guarantees and lineage. Enhanced streaming capabilities speed real-time application deployment and Spark 4.0.2 is available in all EMR regions.

🔧 AWS Glue now provides large and memory-optimized workers in the AWS Europe (Spain) Region, enabling customers to run more compute- and memory-intensive ETL workloads locally. The release introduces two general compute workers (G.12X, G.16X) and four memory-optimized workers (R.1X, R.2X, R.4X, R.8X). These options support heavier transforms, aggregations, joins, and caching in Spark jobs and can be chosen in AWS Glue Studio or via the Glue Job APIs.