All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Google Named Leader in 2025 IDC MarketScape for GenAI

🏆 Google Cloud announced it was named a Leader in the 2025 IDC MarketScape for Worldwide GenAI Life-Cycle Foundation Model Software, spotlighting the Gemini model family and the Vertex AI platform. The post highlights Gemini 2.5’s expanded “thinking” capabilities and new cost controls such as thinking budgets and thought summaries for improved auditability. It also underscores native multimodality, creative variants like Nano Banana, developer tooling including the Gemini CLI, and enterprise features for customization, grounding, security, and governance.

Design Patterns for Scalable AI Agents on Google Cloud

🤖 This post explains how System Integrator partners can build, scale, and manage enterprise-grade AI agents using Google Cloud technologies like Agent Engine, the Agent Development Kit (ADK), and Gemini Enterprise. It summarizes architecture patterns including runtime, memory, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, and contrasts managed Agent Engine with self-hosted options such as Cloud Run or GKE. Customer examples from Deloitte and Quantiphi illustrate supply chain and sales automation benefits. The guidance highlights security, observability, persistent memory, and model tuning for enterprise readiness.

Dataproc 2.3 on Google Compute Engine: Lightweight Security

🔐 Dataproc 2.3 on Google Compute Engine provides a streamlined image that includes only the essential core components for Spark and Hadoop, reducing the attack surface and simplifying compliance. The image is FedRAMP High compliant and leverages both automated CVE remediation and manual engineering intervention for complex fixes. Optional tools like Flink, Hudi, Ranger, and Zeppelin are available on-demand during cluster creation, or can be pre-baked into custom images to speed provisioning while preserving the security benefits of the lightweight base.

Oklahoma Transforms Data Access, Strengthens Employer Trust

🔍 The Oklahoma Employment Security Commission modernized its 40‑year mainframe data architecture with a cloud-first data platform built on BigQuery and analytics delivered via Looker. Partnering with Google Public Sector and Phase2, OESC reorganized opaque, mainframe-mimicking schemas into a performant, intuitive model and enabled point-in-time snapshots previously impossible. Critical reporting moved from months to hours, stakeholders gained self-service access, and the agency unlocked employer insights that supported tax analysis, improved auditability, and accelerated fraud detection.

AWS US-EAST-1 Outage Disrupts Major Sites and Apps

🚨 An AWS outage in the US-EAST-1 region caused widespread disruptions across multiple consumer services, producing elevated error rates and higher latencies. Major platforms including Amazon, PrimeVideo, Fortnite, Perplexity, and Canva reported failures ranging from login and chat outages to impaired editing functionality. AWS acknowledged the incident on its Health page and said engineers were investigating and mitigating the issue. After roughly 45 minutes some services began recovering, though many users still experienced intermittent problems.

Major AWS Outage Disrupts Amazon, Prime Video, Fortnite

⚠️ AWS experienced a widespread outage affecting multiple services in the US-EAST-1 region, causing elevated error rates and latencies across key APIs. The disruption, tied to a DNS resolution issue for the DynamoDB API endpoint and subsequent network load balancer problems, interrupted login and content services for platforms such as Amazon, Prime Video, Fortnite, Canva and Perplexity. AWS reported mitigation steps and later declared services restored after extended recovery efforts.

AWS Parallel Computing Service Adds Support for Slurm v25.05

🚀 AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS) now supports Slurm v25.05, enabling PCS clusters to run the latest Slurm capabilities. The release introduces enhanced multi-cluster sackd configuration so login nodes can manage multiple clusters without requiring sackd reconfiguration or restarts, allowing administrators to preconfigure user access across clusters. It also implements improved requeue behavior that automatically retries failed instance launches during capacity shortages, increasing scheduling resilience and overall cluster reliability.

Securing Amazon Bedrock API Keys: Best Practices Guidance

🔐 AWS details practical guidance for implementing and managing Amazon Bedrock API keys, the service-specific credentials that provide bearer-token access to Bedrock. It recommends STS temporary credentials when possible and defines two API key types: short-term (client-generated, auto-expiring) and long-term (IAM-user associated). Protection advice includes using SCPs, iam and bedrock condition keys, and storing long-term keys in secure vaults. Detection and monitoring use CloudTrail, EventBridge rules, and an AWS Config rule, and response steps show CLI commands to deactivate and delete compromised keys.

Microsoft Removes Additional Safeguard Holds for Windows 11

✅ Microsoft removed two safeguard holds blocking Windows 11 24H2 installs. The April hold affecting systems using SenseShield's sprotect.sys driver—which could trigger BSODs—was lifted after a security.sys driver update; the feature update will be offered within 48 hours. The September 2024 hold for wallpaper customization apps that caused display and virtual-desktop issues was removed on October 15, 2025; affected devices may see a warning and must confirm before upgrading. Microsoft advises updating or uninstalling problematic apps or contacting their developers for support.

CloudWatch Database Insights Adds Tag-Based Access Control

🔐 Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now supports tag-based access control for database-level and per-query metrics powered by RDS Performance Insights. Instance tags defined on RDS and Aurora are now automatically evaluated to authorize Performance Insights metrics, enabling IAM policies to use tag-based access conditions across logical groups of databases. This reduces manual, resource-level permission management and improves governance and security consistency. The feature is available in all AWS regions where Database Insights is offered.

Mandiant Academy: Practical Network Enrichment Course

🛡️ Mandiant Academy and Google Cloud introduce Protecting the Perimeter: Practical Network Enrichment, a short-form training track to sharpen network traffic analysis and CTI operationalization. The curriculum covers five core methodologies—PCAP, netflow, protocol analysis, behavioral baselining, and historical review—and demonstrates how to enrich each with CTI and analytical tradecraft. It is aimed at practitioners who need focused, time-efficient skills to improve detection and investigation.

Use Gemini CLI to Deploy Cost-Effective LLM Workloads on GKE

🛠️ Google Cloud demonstrates how the Gemini CLI and GKE Inference Quickstart integrate via the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to streamline selecting, benchmarking, and deploying LLMs on GKE. The post outlines installation steps, example prompts to discover cost and performance trade-offs, and how manifests can be generated for target accelerators. This approach reduces manual tuning and provides data-driven recommendations to optimize cost-per-token while preserving performance.

Axion C4A and N4 VMs Now GA for Cloud SQL Enterprise

🚀 Google has made Axion-powered C4A and Intel-based N4 virtual machines generally available for Cloud SQL Enterprise Plus and Enterprise editions, promising substantial gains in throughput and price-performance. Hyperdisk Balanced storage is supported on both families to boost I/O, increase throughput, and allow independent configuration of capacity, throughput, and IOPS. Customer tests report lower costs, reduced latency, and large throughput gains. These machines are available in select regions; check Cloud SQL pricing and region documentation for details.

BigQuery Studio updated with streamlined console UI

🔧 BigQuery Studio unveils a simplified, organized console interface designed to help data analysts, engineers, and scientists work more efficiently. The update introduces an expanded Explorer view for easier resource discovery, a context-aware Reference panel that surfaces table schemas and lets you insert query snippets, and a decluttered layout including a dedicated Job history tab. These changes reduce context switching and tab proliferation so users can focus on analysis.

Moloco and Google Cloud Power AI Vector Search in Retail

🔎 Moloco’s AI-native retail media platform, integrated with Vertex AI Vector Search on Google Cloud, delivers semantic, real-time ad retrieval and personalized recommendations. The joint architecture uses TPUs and GPUs for model training and scoring while vector search runs efficiently on CPUs, enabling outcomes-based bidding at scale. Internal benchmarks report ~10x capacity, up to ~25% lower p95 latency, and a ~4% revenue uplift. The managed service reduces operational overhead and accelerates time-to-value for retailers.

VMware Certification and VMUG Advantage: Career Power Move

🔑 VMware certification is presented as a repeatable framework for mastering complex infrastructure and advancing careers, and VMUG Advantage is offered as an accelerator for that journey. The piece, authored by VMUG leadership, highlights survey data from Pearson VUE showing certification-driven promotions and confidence gains. It outlines tangible member benefits—discounts on training and exams, personal-use licenses, on-demand labs, and global community mentorship—and positions certification as a strategic investment for individuals and teams seeking secure, scalable IT practices.

Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager: Centralized Capacity View

📊 Amazon today announced general availability of Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager, a console and API capability that centralizes monitoring, analysis, and management of EC2 capacity across accounts and Regions. The tool provides dashboards and drilldowns for On-Demand, Spot, and Capacity Reservations, historical trends, optimization recommendations, and exportable data for integration. Available in all commercial AWS Regions at no additional cost.

Google's 2025 Cybersecurity Initiative: New Protections

🔒 Google is expanding protections during Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025 with new features and guidance to counter scams and AI-driven threats. The company outlines a cohesive strategy for securing the AI ecosystem and introduces six new anti-scam measures to help users stay safe. It also launches Recovery Contacts to simplify account recovery and debuts CodeMender, an AI agent that automates code security. Additional updates support safer learning through responsible tools and partnerships.

OpenSearch Service Adds Graviton4 EC2 Instance Support

🚀 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports Graviton4-based EC2 instance families — compute-optimized C8g, general-purpose M8g, and memory-optimized R8g/R8gd — across multiple regions. Graviton4 processors deliver up to 30% better performance compared with Graviton3 and are supported on all OpenSearch versions as well as Elasticsearch 7.9 and 7.10. The change is intended to improve price-performance for compute-, general-, and memory-intensive search and analytics workloads.

Amazon EC2 C8g Instances Expand to More AWS Regions

🚀 Amazon has made EC2 C8g instances available in AWS Europe (Milan) and AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Osaka, Melbourne). These Graviton4-powered instances deliver up to 30% better compute performance than Graviton3-based instances and are optimized for compute-intensive workloads such as HPC, batch processing, gaming, video encoding, distributed analytics, CPU-based ML inference, and ad serving. Built on the AWS Nitro System, C8g instances provide larger instance sizes (including bare metal), up to 50 Gbps enhanced networking, and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth to improve both performance and security.