All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

AWS expands Graviton4 EC2 C8gd, M8gd, R8gd regions

🚀 Amazon EC2 C8gd instances are now available in Europe (London) and Canada (Central), while M8gd and R8gd sizes have expanded to South America (Sao Paulo) and Europe (London), respectively. Powered by AWS Graviton4, these instances deliver up to 30% better performance versus Graviton3 and offer up to 11.4 TB NVMe local storage and EFA on select sizes. Customers can also adjust network and EBS bandwidth by 25% via instance bandwidth weighting.

Amazon CloudWatch Adds Threshold-Based Composite Alarms

🔔 Amazon CloudWatch now lets teams create threshold-based composite alarms that trigger only when a specified subset of monitored resources meet a condition. Using the new AT_LEAST function, you can define fixed counts or percentages — for example, at least two of four volumes low on capacity or 50% of hosts with high CPU — to reduce alert noise. The capability is available in all commercial AWS regions, AWS GovCloud (US), and China Regions; composite alarms pricing applies.

Amazon EC2 C6id and R6id Instances Expand Regions Now

🚀 Amazon Web Services has made EC2 C6id instances available in Europe (Milan) and R6id instances available in Africa (Cape Town). Powered by 3rd-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Ice Lake processors (3.5 GHz all-core turbo) and up to 7.6 TB of local NVMe SSD, these Nitro-based instances deliver high compute, memory access, and low-latency storage. Use cases include media processing, distributed in-memory caches, in-memory databases, data logging, and real-time analytics. Customers can purchase capacity via Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot, and provision using the AWS CLI and SDKs.

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 Included in Amazon Linux 2023

🔧 Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is now included in Amazon Linux 2023, making it straightforward to install, update, and mount S3 buckets with a single command. Previously, users downloaded the Mountpoint package from GitHub, resolved dependencies, and managed updates manually; inclusion in AL2023 streamlines that workflow. The open source project is backed by AWS and offers 24/7 AWS cloud support for Business and Enterprise Support customers—consult the repository and documentation to get started.

Amazon EC2 U7i-6tb High Memory Instances in Europe

⚙️ Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i-6tb instances are now available in Europe (Stockholm and Ireland). The u7i-6tb provides 6TB of DDR5 memory and 448 vCPUs, with up to 100 Gbps for EBS and network bandwidth and support for ENA Express. Powered by custom 4th-gen Intel Xeon (Sapphire Rapids), these instances target mission‑critical in‑memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

Agent Sandbox: Kubernetes Enhancements for AI Agents

🛡️ Agent Sandbox is a new Kubernetes primitive designed to run AI agents with strong, kernel-level isolation. Built on gVisor with optional Kata Containers and developed in the Kubernetes community as a CNCF project, it reduces risks from agent-executed code. On GKE, managed gVisor, container-optimized compute and pre-warmed sandbox pools deliver sub-second startup latency and up to 90% cold-start improvement. A Python SDK and a simple API abstract YAML so AI engineers can manage sandbox lifecycles without deep infrastructure expertise; Agent Sandbox is open source and deployable on GKE today.

GKE: Unified Platform for Agents, Scale, and Inference

🚀 Google details a broad set of GKE and Kubernetes enhancements announced at KubeCon to address agentic AI, large-scale training, and latency-sensitive inference. GKE introduces Agent Sandbox (gVisor-based) for isolated agent execution and a managed GKE Agent Sandbox with snapshots and optimized compute. The platform also delivers faster autoscaling through Autopilot compute classes, Buffers API, and container image streaming, while inference is accelerated by GKE Inference Gateway, Pod Snapshots, and Inference Quickstart.

Amazon Keyspaces Adds Logged Batches for Atomic Writes

🔒 Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports Logged Batches, enabling multiple INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations to be executed as a single atomic transaction. This ensures that all writes in a batch succeed or none are applied, improving consistency across rows and tables for use cases such as finance, inventory, and multi-entity profile updates. The feature preserves Cassandra's atomicity guarantees, integrates with CQL, scales serverlessly with your workload, and is available today in all AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Customers pay only for the standard write operations processed within each batch.

AWS Adds EC2 I7i Storage-Optimized Instances in Regions

⚡ AWS announced that high-performance, storage-optimized Amazon EC2 I7i instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) and Canada (Central) regions. Powered by 5th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs and 3rd-gen AWS Nitro SSDs, I7i delivers up to 23% better compute and substantial NVMe storage improvements over I4i. Instances support torn-write prevention, real-time NVMe performance statistics, and sizes up to 48xlarge plus bare metal options.

Amazon EC2 M8a Instances Now in N. Virginia & Tokyo

🚀 Amazon EC2 M8a instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (code-named Turin) with up to 4.5 GHz, M8a delivers up to 30% higher performance, up to 19% better price-performance versus M7a, and 45% more memory bandwidth. They show workload gains up to 60% for GroovyJVM and 39% for Cassandra, are SAP-certified, come in 12 sizes including two bare-metal options, and run on sixth-generation AWS Nitro Cards. Customers can purchase M8a via Savings Plans, On‑Demand, or Spot.

Google Cloud Expands AI Infrastructure and Services in India

🤝 Google Cloud is increasing local AI compute in India with its AI Hypercomputer powered by Trillium TPUs, enabling training and serving of advanced Gemini models with data residency and sovereignty controls. New local offerings include batch support for Gemini 2.5 Flash, a preview of Document AI, and real‑time grounding using Google Maps for location‑aware responses. Google is also supporting Indic Arena at IIT Madras with cloud credits to benchmark Indian multilingual models and to help grow the local AI ecosystem.

Firefox 145 Adds Stronger Anti-Fingerprinting Defenses

🔒 Mozilla has rolled out enhanced anti-fingerprinting protections in Firefox 145, initially active in Private Browsing and Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) Strict mode. Phase 2 measures add targeted noise to background image reads, restrict reported fonts to standard OS sets with select language exceptions, coarsen touch reporting, report screen height minus 48 pixels, and always report two processor cores. After testing these changes will be enabled by default; users can disable them per-site for compatibility. The release also removes the 32-bit Linux build.

AWS Backup Adds Native Support for Amazon EKS Across Regions

🔒 AWS Backup now supports Amazon EKS, providing a fully managed, centralized solution for backing up cluster state and persistent application data. The agent-free integration replaces custom scripts and third-party tools with a native, policy-driven service that offers automated scheduling, retention management, immutable vaults, and cross-Region and cross-account copies. You can restore entire clusters, specific namespaces, or individual persistent volumes to support disaster recovery, compliance, or pre-upgrade protection.

AWS Releases 2025 H1 IRAP Report for Australian Customers

🔒 AWS announced the 2025 H1 IRAP report is now available on AWS Artifact for Australian customers. An ASD-certified IRAP assessor completed the evaluation in September 2025, and four services were newly assessed at the PROTECTED level: Amazon Application Recovery Controller, AWS Global Accelerator, Amazon Q Business, and AWS Resource Explorer. AWS also published an IRAP documentation pack aligned to ACSC guidance and the ISM (March 2025) to help customers assess and architect PROTECTED workloads. Customers can request inclusion of additional services via their AWS representatives.

Amazon MSK Express Brokers Add Intelligent Rebalancing

⚡ Effective today, all new Amazon MSK Provisioned clusters with Express brokers support Intelligent Rebalancing at no additional cost. The feature automates partition balancing when clusters scale up or down, maximizing capacity utilization and removing the need for manual or third-party partition management. AWS reports Intelligent Rebalancing runs up to 180× faster than Standard brokers and scales brokers without impacting client availability.

Microsoft Secure Future Initiative — November 2025 Report

🔐 Microsoft’s November 2025 progress report on the Secure Future Initiative outlines governance expansion, engineering milestones, and product hardening across Azure, Microsoft 365, Windows, Surface, and Microsoft Security. The update highlights measurable gains — a nine-point rise in security sentiment, 95% employee completion of AI-attack training, 99.6% phishing-resistant MFA enforcement, and 99.5% live-secrets detection and remediation. It also introduces AI-first security capabilities, new detections, and 10 actionable SFI patterns to help customers improve posture.

Gemini Code Assist adds persistent memory for reviews

🧠 Gemini Code Assist on GitHub now supports persistent memory that learns from merged pull request interactions to capture a team's coding standards, style, and best practices. The memory is stored securely in a Google-managed project specific to each installation and is applied selectively to relevant reviews. It infers reusable rules from review threads and uses them both to shape initial analysis and to filter draft suggestions so the agent adapts over time and reduces repetitive feedback.

Full-Stack Approach to Scaling RL for LLMs on GKE at Scale

🚀 Google Cloud describes a full-stack solution for running high-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) with LLMs, combining custom TPU hardware, NVIDIA GPUs, and optimized software libraries. The approach addresses RL's hybrid demands—reducing sampler latency, easing memory contention across actor/critic/reward models, and accelerating weight copying—by co-designing hardware, storage (Managed Lustre, Cloud Storage), and orchestration on GKE. The blog emphasizes open-source contributions (vLLM, llm-d, MaxText, Tunix) and integrations with Ray and NeMo RL recipes to improve portability and developer productivity. It also highlights mega-scale orchestration and multi-cluster strategies to run production RL jobs at tens of thousands of nodes.

Google Cloud N4D VMs with AMD EPYC Turin Generally Available

🚀 Google Cloud announces general availability of the N4D machine series built on 5th Gen AMD EPYC 'Turin' processors and Google's Titanium infrastructure. N4D targets cost-optimized, general-purpose workloads — web and app servers, data analytics, and containerized microservices — with up to 96 vCPUs, 768 GB DDR5, 50 Gbps networking, and Hyperdisk storage. Google cites up to 3.5x web-serving throughput versus N2D and material price-performance gains for general compute and Java workloads.

Zeotap cuts costs 46% migrating to Bigtable from ScyllaDB

🚀 Zeotap migrated its Customer Data Platform from ScyllaDB to Bigtable to address scaling challenges, operational overhead, and highly spiky workloads. The cloud-native stack—using Dataflow, a home-grown streaming engine, Memorystore as a cache, Bigtable as the hot store, and BigQuery for analytics—delivers predictable low-latency reads and writes at scale. The transition yielded a 46% reduction in TCO and a ~20% drop in operational tasks while enabling sub-second SLAs and faster ML deployment.