All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🌐 Amazon Lightsail CDN distributions now support IPv6-only instances as origins. This enables customers to host websites and applications on cost-effective IPv6-only instances while delivering content through the Lightsail CDN with low latency and high transfer speeds worldwide. Previously, only IPv4 and dual-stack origins were supported. Lightsail CDN also accepts instances, containers, buckets, and load balancers as origins.

📢 Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) now supports up to 32 ESXi hosts per environment, doubling the previous 16-host limit. You can place hosts within VMware Cloud Foundation domains as a single large cluster, multiple smaller clusters, or combinations that match operational requirements, and submit a service quota increase to scale. This capability is available in all regions where Amazon EVS is offered and aims to reduce the overhead of managing multiple environments.

🛠️ AWS SAM CLI now processes AWS CloudFormation Language Extensions in-memory for local workflows, letting developers define repeating serverless resources once and iterate without deploying to the cloud. Commands such as sam build, sam local invoke, sam sync, and sam local start-api automatically expand Fn::ForEach loops and support several helper functions and conditional policies. Update to the latest SAM CLI and add AWS::LanguageExtensions to your template to begin.

🧊 Amazon Redshift now writes directly to Apache Iceberg tables via the auto-mounted awsdatacatalog and supports ALTER TABLE DDL to change schema, partitioning, and table properties. Supported operations include ADD/DROP/ALTER columns, RENAME COLUMN, SET TABLE PROPERTIES, and ADD/DROP/REPLACE PARTITION FIELD to evolve partition strategies and compression settings. Tables modified by Redshift remain interoperable with other Iceberg engines and respect AWS Lake Formation permissions.

🚀 Google Cloud announced streaming AI enhancements to its Agentic Data Cloud at Next ‘26, unifying Pub/Sub, Dataflow, BigQuery, Bigtable and Managed Service for Kafka to deliver real-time context and low-latency inference. These additions include Pub/Sub AI inference, BigQuery continuous queries for stateful stream processing, Pub/Sub→Bigtable subscriptions, and unified embedding sinks for immediate semantic search and agent memory. The platform also supports MCP and ADK integrations so agents can manage resources and run inside Dataflow pipelines, reducing context lag for use cases like fraud detection and autonomous supply chain actions.

🔒 AI is reshaping work and accelerating threats, with AI-automated phishing reported to be 4.5× more effective than traditional attacks. Growing businesses must balance speed, stability, and risk while often lacking dedicated security teams. Microsoft Security promotes simple, integrated protections for devices, identities, email, and cloud apps. Microsoft 365 Business Premium provides centralized, automated defenses so operations stay resilient and customer trust is preserved.

🔬 At Google, A/B experimentation extends beyond UI tweaks to critical infrastructure components like kernels, memory allocators, and schedulers. They run machine-level experiments on representative 1% subsets of the fleet to avoid selection bias and capture system-wide effects across colocated workloads. The framework enforces binary hermeticity and a strict two-step rollout so experiments can be activated and rolled back safely. Performance is assessed using application-defined productivity metrics, machine counters, and reliability signals.

🔒 This article outlines five architectural patterns for exposing enterprise data to autonomous systems on Google Cloud, using BigQuery examples and mocked CRM data as pedagogical blueprints. It contrasts deterministic, developer-authored SQL APIs with agentic approaches that use LLMs, platform-native reasoning like the Conversational Analytics API, and the vendor-neutral Model Context Protocol (MCP). It highlights trade-offs in trust, complexity, cost, latency, and maintenance.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker Studio IDEs, including JupyterLab and Code Editor, now support GPU capacity reservations via SageMaker Flexible Training Plans (FTP), offering predictable access to high-performance resources and up to 65% cost savings versus On‑Demand. FTP provides a self-serve procurement flow to select instance type, reservation length, and start date. Studio apps can be launched using the purchased plan from the Instance dropdown, with automatic provisioning and proactive expiration notifications to protect work.

🛠️ Microsoft has returned resizable taskbar and Start menu controls to Windows 11 with Insider Preview Build 26300.8493 in the Experimental channel. Users can choose smaller taskbar buttons and move the taskbar to the bottom, top, left, or right via Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar behaviors. The update also adds Start menu toggles to hide Recommended content, resize the menu, hide profile details, and improve file relevance. No restart is required.

🔒 The AWS Secrets Manager Agent now supports pre-fetching secrets at startup and assuming an IAM role for retrieval. With pre-fetching you can specify a list of secrets or a tag to retrieve and cache via BatchGetSecretValue, reducing application startup latency and API overhead. The agent can also assume a provided role ARN per pre-fetch or HTTP request to enable cross-account secret retrieval. These capabilities are available in all Regions where Secrets Manager is offered.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Logs now returns up to 100,000 query results when using the Logs Insights query language; customers can set the desired limit via the LIMIT command. The GetQueryResults API supports pagination, returning up to 10,000 results per call with a continuation token. This increase is available in all commercial AWS regions and supported via the console, AWS CLI, AWS CDK, and AWS SDKs.

🚀 Amazon has expanded availability of Amazon EMR Serverless to six additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Thailand), and Mexico (Central). EMR Serverless lets data engineers and analysts run Apache Spark and Apache Hive workloads without managing clusters, offering fine-grained automatic scaling, fast launch times, and customizable worker configurations. It supports batch, interactive, and streaming workloads for cost-effective petabyte-scale analytics.

💬 AWS announces that Partner Central agents let partners create sales opportunities via natural language conversation instead of multi-step forms. Released March 16, 2026 and built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, the agents ingest meeting notes, proposals, and transcripts (PDF, DOCX, Excel, TXT), extract details, and recommend improvements. Accessible through Amazon Q chat in the AWS Console and programmatically via Model Context Protocol (MCP), they aim to reduce data entry, improve pipeline hygiene, and shorten sales cycles across all commercial AWS Regions.

🔒 The AWS AI Security Framework presents a structured model that helps security and business leaders align the right controls to the right use case, at the right layer, and at the right phase so AI can move from prototype to production securely. Its core principle is that you build AI on top of security, not add security later. The post maps controls across three layers—infrastructure, identity and data, and AI application—and across four use cases from answering to agentic and physical AI. It highlights Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore as pillars that decouple model choice from security infrastructure.

🛠️ Agents can now edit and delete related items directly within the Amazon Connect Cases agent workspace, enabling updates to comments, unlinking misassociated contacts, and removing cases opened in error. The release also lets agents create, modify, and delete custom related items such as orders, returns, and invoices to enrich case context. The capability reduces dependency on administrators and accelerates case resolution across multiple AWS regions.

🔄 Amazon Managed Grafana now supports an in-place upgrade from Grafana 10.4 to 12.4 via the AWS Console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI. Version 12.4 introduces native Scenes-powered dashboards and queryless Drilldown apps for point-and-click exploration of Prometheus metrics, Loki logs, Tempo traces, and Pyroscope profiles. The Amazon CloudWatch plugin gains PPL/SQL support, cross-account Metrics Insights, and log anomaly detection, while the rebuilt table visualization improves performance and interactivity. The in-place upgrade is supported in all AWS regions where Amazon Managed Grafana is generally available.

🤖 The Gemini Live Agent Challenge drew 11,878 participants and 1,536 submissions from 151 countries, inviting developers to build next-generation multimodal AI agents with the Gemini Live API, the Agent Development Kit (ADK), and Google Cloud infrastructure. Entries competed across three categories — Live Agent, Creative Storyteller, and UI Navigator — producing winners like ORION, drone-copilot, and Sankofa. Two category winners presented their projects at Google Cloud Next 2026 and shared insights on stage and in interviews. The post lists all winners and highlights routes for developers to continue building, including GEAR and weekly livestreams.

🔔 AWS Organizations now supports higher quotas for service control policies (SCPs): the maximum number of SCPs that can be attached to a single node (root, OU, or account) has increased from 5 to 10, and the maximum SCP size has increased from 5,120 to 10,240 characters. These higher quotas let you write SCPs with finer-grained permissions and conditions and attach more SCPs per node to build more comprehensive security controls across your organization. The changes are available automatically in all commercial AWS Regions, the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions, and the China Regions with no action required.

🔔 AWS has opened the public preview of AWS Interconnect - multicloud with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), enabling customers to provision resilient, private connections between AWS and OCI from the us-east-1 (N. Virginia) Region. The service implements an open specification already used for Google Cloud (GA) and planned for Microsoft Azure in 2026. Customers can create preview connections via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or API, simplifying multicloud networking and reducing the need for DIY global network architectures.