All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

AWS Clean Rooms adds Spark SQL tuning and cache options

🔧 AWS Clean Rooms now supports advanced runtime configurations to improve Spark SQL query performance. Customers can set Spark properties—such as shuffle partition counts and autoBroadcastJoinThreshold—select compute sizes or custom worker counts, and opt to cache existing or newly created tables containing query results to accelerate complex, large-scale queries. These controls enable collaborators to tune performance, scale, and cost for workloads like advertising lift analysis without changing SQL logic.

Amazon GameLift Servers Adds Built-in Telemetry Metrics

📊 Amazon GameLift Servers now includes built-in telemetry metrics across all server SDKs and game engine plugins, powered by OpenTelemetry, to generate, collect, and export client-side metrics for game-specific insights. The feature can be configured to collect and publish telemetry from game servers running on managed Amazon EC2 and container fleets, supporting both pre-defined and custom metrics and exporting to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus or Amazon CloudWatch. Visualizations are available via Amazon Managed Grafana and Amazon CloudWatch dashboards to help optimize resources, improve player experience, and surface operational issues. Telemetry is available in all supported regions except AWS China; see the GameLift Servers documentation for details.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Adds Amazon Corretto 25 on AL2023

🚀 AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Amazon Corretto 25 on the Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023) platform, enabling developers to build and deploy applications with the newest Java 25 runtime and language features. The update brings improvements such as compact object headers, ahead-of-time (AOT) caching, and structured concurrency to Beanstalk-managed environments. Developers can provision Corretto 25 instances via the Elastic Beanstalk Console, CLI, or API, with general availability in commercial regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

AWS Step Functions introduces unified metrics dashboard

🔍 AWS Step Functions now provides a unified metrics dashboard in the console that centralizes usage and billing metrics for both account and state-machine levels. The dashboard covers standard and express workflows and surfaces existing metrics such as ApproximateOpenMapRunCount. It is available in all Regions where the service operates and can be opened from the Step Functions console.

MXDR for SMBs: Practical, Partnered Security Solution

🛡️ Small and medium-sized businesses often find enterprise-grade MXDR solutions overwhelming; instead, they need a partnered approach that builds internal expertise while delivering managed detection and response. The ideal MXDR for SMBs is adaptive to maturity, reduces false positives through tailored rules, offers transparent incident reporting and dashboards, and provides threat intelligence and targeted employee training. Kaspersky's Next MXDR Optimum exemplifies this model by combining expert-led support, accessible XDR tools, and role-specific training to foster a security culture.

Microsoft adds Copilot to more Microsoft 365 companion apps

🤖 Microsoft is extending Copilot functionality across its Microsoft 365 companion apps, with People and Files already supported and Calendar due in the coming weeks. These taskbar mini-apps—available only to enterprise and business Microsoft 365 customers—surface contextual info like contact details, org-wide search and OneDrive file results. Microsoft says Copilot now offers instant suggestions such as recaps, flagged comments, and updates from top collaborators, and supports seamless handoff to the full Microsoft 365 Copilot app for deeper inquiries. There is no indication that Copilot can be disabled within these companion apps.

Master Multitasking with the Jules Extension for Gemini CLI

🤖 The new Jules extension for Gemini CLI lets developers delegate routine engineering tasks—like bug fixes, dependency updates, and vulnerability patches—to an autonomous background agent. Jules runs asynchronously and can work on multiple GitHub issues in parallel, preparing fixes in isolated environments for review. It also composes with other extensions to automate security remediation, crash investigation, and unit test creation, returning ready-to-review branches so you can stay focused on higher-value work.

Amazon ECS Service Connect Adds Envoy Access Logs Support

🔍 Amazon ECS Service Connect now captures per-request telemetry with Envoy access logs to improve visibility into service-to-service traffic for tracing, debugging, and compliance. Access logging is enabled via the ServiceConnectConfiguration and emits Envoy logs to STDOUT alongside application logs, flowing through the existing ECS log pipeline without extra infrastructure. Query strings are redacted by default and the feature supports HTTP, HTTP/2, gRPC, and TCP protocols. The capability is available in all regions where Service Connect is supported.

AWS releases AI agent context pack for Greengrass developers

🤖 AWS announced an open-source AI agent context package for AWS IoT Greengrass that provides ready-to-use instructions, examples, and templates to accelerate edge device application development. The package is published on GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 license and is designed to integrate with generative AI tools such as Amazon Q. Developers can clone the repository to jumpstart creation, testing, and fleet-wide deployment workflows across supported Regions.

Amazon OCSF Ready Specialization for AWS Partners Program

🔒 Amazon today introduced the Amazon OCSF Ready Specialization to recognize AWS Partners that have technically validated their software to integrate with OCSF-compatible Amazon services and demonstrated customer success in production. The designation helps customers find pre-validated partner solutions that send or receive logs and security events in the OCSF schema, reducing integration complexity. Partners earn AWS Specialization Program benefits and signature support, including private strategy sessions and AWS guest speaker assistance. The specialization replaces and expands the prior Amazon Security Lake Specialization to broaden standardized security data interoperability.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus Adds Anomaly Detection

🔍 Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now includes anomaly detection using the Random Cut Forest (RCF) algorithm to continuously analyze time series and surface unexpected metric behavior with minimal user intervention. When you create an anomaly detector in an AMP workspace, it generates four derived time series that represent detected anomalies and their confidence values. Those derived series can be used to build dynamic alerting rules in the AMP Alertmanager and visualized alongside input metrics in self‑managed Grafana or Amazon Managed Grafana. The feature is available in all regions where AMP is generally available and is configurable via the AWS CLI, SDKs, or APIs.

AWS Cloud Map Adds Cross-Account Support in GovCloud

🔁 AWS Cloud Map now supports cross-account service discovery in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions through integration with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM). By sharing namespaces, you can allow individual accounts, Organizational Units, or an entire AWS Organization to discover resources such as Amazon ECS tasks, EC2 instances, and DynamoDB tables across accounts. The capability is available now in GovCloud (US-East) and GovCloud (US-West) via Console, API, SDK, CLI, and CloudFormation.

AWS Backup: Single-step Cross-Region Snapshot Copy

🔁 AWS Backup now supports a single-action copy of database snapshots across AWS Regions and accounts for Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon DocumentDB. This eliminates the previous two-step process and removes the need for intermediate copies, custom scripts, or Lambda automation. The change reduces operational complexity and helps achieve faster RPOs while removing costs associated with intermediate snapshot storage. You can use the feature today via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDKs.

AWS Serverless MCP Server Adds ESM Tools for Lambda

🔧 The AWS Serverless Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server now includes specialized tools to configure and manage AWS Lambda event source mappings (ESM), combining AI assistance with ESM expertise. The new toolset—comprising the ESM guidance tool, the ESM optimization tool, and an ESM Kafka troubleshooting tool—translates high-level throughput, latency, and reliability requirements into concrete ESM configurations and generates optimized AWS SAM templates. It also validates VPC network topology for VPC-based event sources and diagnoses common ESM issues to streamline setup, tuning, and troubleshooting workflows.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser Adds Web Bot Auth Preview

🔐 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser now previews Web Bot Auth, a draft IETF protocol that cryptographically identifies AI agents to websites. The feature automatically generates credentials, signs HTTP requests with private keys, and registers verified agent identities to reduce CAPTCHA interruptions and human intervention in automated workflows. It streamlines verification across major providers such as Akamai, Cloudflare, and HUMAN Security, and is available in nine AWS Regions on a consumption-based pricing model with no upfront costs.

TwelveLabs Marengo 3.0 Now on Amazon Bedrock Platform

🎥 TwelveLabs' Marengo Embed 3.0 is now available on Amazon Bedrock, providing a unified video-native multimodal embedding that represents video, images, audio, and text in a single vector space. The release doubles processing capacity—up to 4 hours and 6 GB per file—expands language support to 36 languages, and improves sports analysis and multimodal search precision. It supports synchronous low-latency text and image inference and asynchronous processing for video, audio, and large files.

Stability AI Image Tools Expanded in Amazon Bedrock

🖼 Amazon Bedrock now offers four new image-editing tools in Stability AI Image Services: Outpaint, Fast Upscale, Conservative Upscale, and Creative Upscale. These additions expand the platform's Edit, Upscale, and Control capabilities, enabling creators to perform targeted edits and resolution enhancements with greater precision. The tools are accessible via the Bedrock API and are initially supported in US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and US East (Ohio).

Microsoft DNS Outage Disrupts Azure and Microsoft 365

⚠️ Microsoft is experiencing a global DNS outage that began about an hour ago, causing widespread access problems to Azure and Microsoft 365 services. Customers worldwide report they cannot log into corporate networks or reach portals including Azure, Intune, and the Exchange admin center, and some report the Azure Front Door CDN is also unavailable. Microsoft attributes the interruptions to DNS failures, warns of intermittent request failures and latency, and is reviewing telemetry while working on mitigation; it recommends programmatic access (PowerShell/CLI) when portals are unreachable.

Chrome to Enable HTTPS-First Mode by Default in 2026

🔒 Beginning in April 2026 and completing in October 2026, Google will make the Always Use Secure Connections feature the default in Chrome, attempting HTTPS for all public site navigations and prompting users before loading non-HTTPS pages. The phased rollout starts with Enhanced Safe Browsing users in Chrome 147 and expands to all global users in Chrome 154. Internal addresses such as routers and intranets will be exempt, and Google reports early tests showed warnings on fewer than 3% of navigations, typically under one alert per week, while the browser will avoid repeatedly warning about frequently visited sites.

Fortinet Expands Unified SASE with Global POPs and AI

🚀 Fortinet announced enhancements to Fortinet Unified SASE, expanding its global footprint to over 170 points of presence and embedding AI-powered operations. FortiAI-Assist automates diagnostics and remediation to accelerate mean time to resolution, while an agentless Secure Browser and SaaS Security Posture Management extend DLP and compliance controls across 80+ SaaS apps. These updates aim to boost performance, simplify operations, and strengthen data protection for distributed workforces.