All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔧 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.

🤖 Amazon Connect Customer now uses generative AI to automatically evaluate self-service interactions and surface aggregated insights to improve customer experience. Managers can create custom evaluation criteria in natural language within evaluation forms, such as "Were all of the customer issues resolved by the AI agent?", and the generative AI assesses interaction quality with detailed reasoning and reference points from transcripts. Insights are available both in aggregate and per contact, alongside recordings and transcripts for performance improvement. This feature is available in multiple AWS Regions including N. Virginia, Oregon, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Frankfurt.

🔔 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports minimum capacity requirements (MinCount) for Slurm clusters using continuous provisioning, ensuring that instance groups only enter InService when a specified minimum number of instances are provisioned. This is valuable for distributed training frameworks such as PyTorch FSDP, Megatron-LM, and NVIDIA NeMo that need a fixed node count, and for teams requiring baseline GPU counts to meet SLAs or cost targets. Specify MinInstanceCount in the CreateCluster or UpdateCluster API; groups remain in Creating or Updating until the threshold is met or a 3-hour rollback triggers. MinCount is available in all Regions supporting SageMaker HyperPod.

🚀 AWS announces Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition now integrates with Kiro Powers, enabling developers to build Aurora MySQL-backed applications faster using AI agent assistance. The integration bundles curated Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, steering files, and hooks validated by Kiro partners to provide immediate expertise in Aurora MySQL operations and schema design via natural language. Developers can execute data plane and control plane tasks conversationally, while task-specific guidance prevents information overload. The feature is available via one-click installation from the Kiro IDE and webpage across all Regions that support Aurora MySQL.

🔒 Google announces AI Threat Defense, an integrated, automated security system that uses Gemini, Mandiant, Wiz, and CodeMender to detect, prioritize, and remediate AI-powered threats. The platform combines multi-model scanning, live exposure mapping, and AI agents to validate exploitability, generate fixes, and accelerate remediation. It emphasizes machine-speed monitoring, autonomous response, and consolidated visibility across development and runtime environments to reduce attack surface and speed patching.

🔍 EvidenceForge is an open-source project from Cisco Talos that generates correlated, multi-source synthetic security logs using a single canonical event model, causal ordering, and realistic background noise. It outputs synchronized telemetry across 20+ log formats (Windows, Linux, network, and EDR) from a version-controllable YAML scenario file and includes AI-assisted scenario authoring. The tool emphasizes deterministic generation, sensor-aware visibility, and built-in validation to produce datasets suitable for training, testing, and exercises.

🔒 AWS Backup now requires one‑time password (OTP) verification when approvers vote on Multi‑party approval actions for logically air‑gapped vaults. Approvers must enter a six‑digit code sent to their registered email in AWS IAM Identity Center, ensuring only verified approvers can authorize protected vault operations. OTP verification is applied automatically to all existing and new Multi‑party approval sessions in supported Regions at no additional charge, with no setup required.

🔍 Data security posture management (DSPM) tools help security teams locate shadow data across cloud and on-premises systems to reduce data loss risk. These products focus on data discovery, classification, mapping, and risk assessment, complementing CSPM and other security platforms. The market has seen heavy M&A as vendors expand integrations and AI capabilities to address evolving cloud, AI, and hybrid data risks.

🛡️ Microsoft is previewing an automatic device isolation feature in Defender for Endpoint to help contain active cyberattacks by severing most network traffic while preserving connections to security services. The capability is part of its auto attack disruption tool within Defender XDR, and Microsoft says actions are time-limited and can be tuned or reversed by administrators. A new SANS Institute paper warns threshold-driven autonomous containment can be weaponized to disable user accounts, underscoring the need for careful configuration and governance.

🔔 Starting today, Amazon EC2 X8i instances are available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and are SAP-certified, offering up to 43% higher performance, 1.5x more memory capacity (up to 6TB) and 3.3x more memory bandwidth versus X2i instances. X8i targets memory-intensive workloads like SAP HANA, large databases, data analytics and EDA, with 14 sizes and two bare metal options.

🔒 Amazon Connect Customer now supports tag-based access controls for the agent login/logout report, allowing administrators to apply granular permissions to meet compliance and regulatory needs. Contact center admins can use resource tags to limit who can view login/logout data for specific agents—for example, tagging agents with Department:Customer Service to allow only that team's manager to view their login/logout details. The feature is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions where Amazon Connect Customer is offered.

🚀 AWS announces general availability of Neuron 2.30.0, delivering NKI 0.4.0 with Trainium3-specific hardware capabilities, 22 new NKI Library kernels, and expanded Neuron Agentic Development skills to aid model porting and validation. The release targets ML developers optimizing training and inference or porting models to AWS Trainium and Inferentia, and it is available in Regions supporting Trn1/Trn2/Trn3 and Inf1/Inf2 instances.

🔒 The AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) is a 24/7 global team that helps customers during active security events affecting the customer side of the Shared Responsibility Model. The team analyzes AWS service logs and the control plane using sources like AWS CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and GuardDuty, provides triage and containment guidance, and recommends follow-up actions. AWS also publishes tools, workshops, and the Threat Technique Catalog for AWS (TTC) to help customers prepare and detect recurring tactics and techniques.

🚀 Amazon RDS Multi-AZ instances now use ENA Express to accelerate cross-AZ replication traffic. ENA Express leverages AWS's Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol to deliver up to 25 Gbps single-flow bandwidth, improve congestion control and multi-pathing, and reduce latency variability for synchronous replication. This enhancement increases write throughput and lowers write latencies for write-intensive workloads and is available at no extra charge for several RDS engines across numerous regions. To enable on existing instances, perform a start-stop or scale compute action and consult the user guide for supported instance types.

🔒 This AWS Security blog post outlines best practices for defending against software supply chain attacks, motivated by recent npm incidents like Shai‑Hulud and axios. It emphasizes reducing long‑lived credentials by using temporary credentials (AWS CLI login, IAM Identity Center, OIDC) and centralizing secrets with AWS Secrets Manager or Systems Manager Parameter Store. The article advocates layered defenses including MFA, multi‑approver workflows, artifact signing with AWS Signer, central package repositories using CodeArtifact, image scanning with Amazon Inspector, and provenance attestations for npm packages.

📡 Google details how its global network and new data center fabrics are being redesigned for AI workloads, describing a vertically integrated stack anchored by an AI Hypercomputer. The post highlights Virgo Network, campus-scale and WAN innovations, and AI-native Cloud Interconnect to meet extreme bandwidth, low latency, and burst tolerance requirements. It emphasizes co-design with accelerators, autonomous reliability features, and global footprint benefits for inference and cross-site training.

🚀 Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i‑flex instances are now available in AWS GovCloud (US‑East). Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors unique to AWS, they deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5x memory bandwidth versus prior Intel‑based instances, and up to 20% better performance than M7i generations. M8i‑flex targets common general‑purpose sizes while M8i supports larger and SAP‑certified workloads including new 96xlarge and bare‑metal options.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 R8i and R8i‑flex instances are available in AWS GovCloud (US‑East), powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors unique to AWS. These instances deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel‑based generations, plus up to 20% higher performance than R7i instances. R8i‑flex provides memory‑optimized Flex sizes from large to 16xlarge for common memory‑heavy workloads, while R8i offers 13 sizes including bare metal and a new 96xlarge for very large or CPU‑intensive applications.

🛈 Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) now supports tags on IPAM pool allocations, letting customers organize, govern, and control access to individual IP address allocations using existing tagging workflows. Tags can be applied at creation or added to existing allocations and referenced in AWS Identity and Access Management and Service Control Policies for centralized governance. Administrators can enforce environment-based allocation controls and teams can search and filter allocations by tag across accounts. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where IPAM is supported at no additional cost.

🛡️ This update describes Check Point’s Frontier AI Models Readiness Program and the resulting Jumbo Security Release. It outlines an AI-driven, multi-repository code-scanning initiative called BLAST that provides contextual, architecture-aware analysis to find exploitable vulnerabilities. The release includes dozens of hardening improvements and targeted fixes for multiple CVEs, and customers are urged to update to benefit from the protections.