All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8a instances with 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are now available in Asia Pacific (Taipei). These instances deliver up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price-performance versus R7a, plus 45% more memory bandwidth and SAP certification. Built on the AWS Nitro System with sixth-generation Nitro Cards, R8a offers 12 sizes (including 2 bare metal) for memory-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now supports OpenAI GPT-5.6 Terra and Luna in India with India Geo cross-Region inference. This feature ensures inferencing stays within India while automatically routing requests across AWS Regions like Mumbai and Hyderabad for higher throughput. The models run on the bedrock-runtime endpoint and support Responses, Chat Completions, and Converse APIs, integrating with existing account-level controls including model invocation logging and CloudWatch metrics.

🔐 AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now supports outbound identity federation in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany), enabling workloads to obtain short-lived JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to authenticate with external services. This feature allows secure access to third-party clouds, SaaS, and self-hosted applications without long-term credentials. Administrators can enforce token properties and control generation via IAM policies and audit usage with CloudTrail to meet sovereignty and compliance needs.

🔒 This post explains how to implement a request Lambda interceptor in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway to support legacy HTTP Basic Authentication for downstream tool APIs. It shows retrieving a service account credential from AWS Secrets Manager, validating inbound JWTs, and constructing a Basic Auth header while keeping credentials isolated from the agent. The article emphasizes that Basic Auth is outdated and recommends modern authentication like OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect, presenting this pattern only as an interim integration.

📡 Comcast has added WiFi-based motion detection to its new Xfinity Shield home protection suite, enabling compatible gateways and stationary WiFi devices to detect movement without cameras or motion sensors. The feature, called WiFi Motion, is included with WiFi Shield for Xfinity Internet customers and offers sensitivity settings to reduce false alerts from pets or adjacent units. Comcast emphasizes the feature is opt-in, does not identify individuals or precise locations, and pairs with paid Shield Select hardware and response services.

🔔 Amazon Web Services announces general availability of AgentCore payments, part of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling AI agents to discover, access, and pay for paid APIs, MCPs, and content with minimal code. The capability integrates with Coinbase and Stripe Privy wallets, supports the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), and offers payment orchestration, configurable infrastructure-level limits, and end-to-end observability. GA features include Quick Create for Coinbase credentials, a curated Coinbase Bazar MCP server of x402 pay-per-use endpoints, and support for the x402 "upto" scheme for dynamic pricing.

🔍 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now integrates data profiling and anomaly detection powered by AWS Glue Data Quality. Data stewards, engineers, and analysts can generate dataset- and column-level statistics on catalog tables and Visual ETL job results to understand data shape and completeness. A dedicated Data profile tab supports on-demand and scheduled profiling while anomaly detection flags drift without predefined thresholds. These capabilities are available in all Regions where SageMaker Unified Studio is offered.

🆕 Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) Serverless now supports running custom Python functions and shell scripts directly in the serverless runtime using PythonOperator and BashOperator. Package your Python modules or shell scripts as code packages, upload them to Amazon S3, and reference them when creating or updating a workflow. The service snapshots your code at workflow creation time and uses that snapshot for all subsequent runs, ensuring execution consistency. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where MWAA Serverless is offered.

🆕 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8i instances are now available in the Israel (Tel Aviv) region. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, offering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel cloud processors. R8i provides up to 15% better price-performance, 2.5x memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based generations, and up to 20% higher performance than R7i for general workloads.

🔧 IAM Policy Autopilot now accepts Terraform plan files to generate baseline IAM policies. The open source tool, launched at re:Invent 2025, deterministically analyzes a plan to produce scoped policies that reference specific resource ARNs where possible. This capability complements existing Terraform-aware analysis and addresses the most requested feature since launch. IAM Policy Autopilot runs locally at no additional cost.

🔒 AWS Security Hub Extended has added Supply Chain Security as its tenth curated category, expanding the program to 23 partners. The launch features Chainguard and Socket as integrated partners, offering rebuilt, provenance-backed open source packages and behavioral package analysis respectively. Both offerings are available via pay-as-you-go pricing or Private Offers for committed terms, and findings flow into Security Hub in OCSF to correlate supply chain risk with other security signals. The move aims to reduce activation friction and enable cross-partner correlation across endpoint, identity, cloud, and more.

🔍 This article demonstrates a hybrid streaming pattern that pairs lightweight, CPU-based inference with downstream generative AI agents using Google Dataflow and the Agent Development Kit (ADK). It outlines an Apache Beam pipeline that filters routine events locally and routes only complex cases to a Gemini-backed agent for multi-step remediation, reducing API costs, latency, and quota exhaustion. The approach preserves a static DAG while enabling dynamic runtime branching for targeted automation.

🗂️ Box and Google Cloud are integrating Gemini Multimodal Embeddings 2 into Box's Agentic Platform to extend RAG beyond text and enable unified search and reasoning across documents, images, tables, and charts. This integration preserves spatial and visual structure, supports crossmodal retrieval, and bridges heterogeneous formats like .docx, .xlsx, .pdf, and .pptx. The combined system targets use cases in finance, healthcare, and enterprise auditing by enabling layout-aware embeddings, cross-file synthesis, and visual-to-text auditing.

🧭 This post describes Google's Governance Agent project that automates metadata propagation using column-level lineage, Knowledge Catalog, and BigQuery. It explains how the agent propagates descriptions, glossary terms, policy tags, and trust scores from upstream sources while applying confidence thresholds and conservative grounding. The project provides both a Gradio dashboard and a CLI to support steward review and automated pipelines, and emphasizes that automation is meant to reduce repetitive work, not remove steward oversight.

🆕 Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL 19 Beta 3 in the Database Preview Environment, enabling evaluation of the pre-release on RDS. The Beta 3 release introduces features for query performance and autovacuum management, including pg_stat_autovacuum_scores, parallel autovacuum workers, pg_plan_advice, and eager aggregation, plus bug fixes and stability improvements. Preview instances are retained up to 60 days and snapshots remain limited to the Preview Environment.

🚀 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i-6TB (u7i-6tb.112xlarge) instances are now available in the AWS Europe (Zurich) region. These 7th-generation instances use custom 4th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) CPUs and provide 6 TiB of DDR5 memory to scale transaction processing in memory-intensive workloads. They deliver 448 vCPUs, up to 100 Gbps EBS and network bandwidth, ENA Express, and up to 45% better price-performance versus U-1 instances, targeting mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

🤖 Deutsche Bank partnered with Google Cloud to build an agentic AI-driven resilience platform that modernizes regulatory tabletop exercises and incident analysis. The platform ingests architecture, logs, data flows, and telemetry to generate context-aware scenarios, audit-ready evidence, and structured session records. Using Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, LangGraph, and Google ADK, the bank achieves both deterministic, traceable execution and adaptive investigation. This approach supports continuous, regulator-aligned resilience across complex, distributed systems.

🖱️ Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 preview builds to Insiders that test a faster File Explorer and a streamlined, customizable context menu. The update reduces top-level clutter, improves performance and reliability, and adds a "Customize menu" shortcut to Settings for tailoring right-click options. The team says refinements also address customer feedback such as uninterrupted file renames and immediate case-only filename updates.

🔎 Microsoft reported that some users experienced search failures across Microsoft 365 services including Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive. An internal incident (MO1456424) traced the problem to a recent deployment that caused resource utilization inefficiencies on affected infrastructure. Microsoft said it developed and deployed a fix to reduce resource pressure and restore service for impacted users. The company has not disclosed which regions were affected but categorized the event as an incident.

🔧 AWS now supports nested virtualization for Amazon WorkSpaces Personal and Core Managed Bundles, enabling developers to run hypervisor-dependent tools directly on Windows and Linux WorkSpaces. Supported OSes include Windows Server 2019/2022/2025, Windows 11, Ubuntu 22.04/24.04, RHEL 8/9, and Rocky 8/9 with DCV. Administrators can toggle nested virtualization per workspace via console, API, or CLI; it’s available in most AWS Regions with some exceptions.