All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒Google has increased maximum payouts for its vulnerability reward programs, raising the top prize to $1.5 million. The new maximum applies to critical issues impacting Android, with reports indicating the full amount requires compromising the Pixel Titan M2 security chip. Rewards for vulnerabilities in Chrome now top out at $250,000. Since launching its programs in 2010, Google has paid $81.6 million to researchers.

🌐 Amazon Web Services announced that Route 53 Resolver endpoints now support DNS64 on inbound endpoints and IPv6 forwarding through the internet gateway (IGW) on outbound endpoints. DNS64 lets IPv6-only on-premises clients reach IPv4-only services in VPCs by synthesizing AAAA records from existing A records, removing the need to modify those services. Outbound IPv6 forwarding enables Resolver outbound endpoints to forward queries to public IPv6 name servers via the IGW. These capabilities are available at no additional cost in Regions that support Route 53 Resolver endpoints.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks introduces Frontier AI Defense, a platform initiative designed to counter next-generation, agentic AI threats that can autonomously discover and chain software flaws. Their testing of frontier models (including GPT-5.5-Cyber, Mythos, and Claude Opus 4.7) revealed a step-change in coding capability and attack automation. The program combines Unit 42 expertise, early model access, platform integration, and partner alliances to enable prioritized mitigation and autonomous remediation at machine speed.

🧾 AWS Marketplace launched a Tax management portal integrated into AWS Partner Central and the AWS Marketplace Management portal, giving sellers a self‑service way to view, search, and download invoices without support requests. The portal supports advanced filtering, bulk downloads, and programmatic access via the ListInvoiceSummaries API. India-based sellers can access tax invoices issued to buyers. Seller listing fee invoices are available across all Marketplace entities.

🚀 Amazon Web Services now offers Amazon EC2 G6 instances powered by NVIDIA L4 GPUs in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany). These instances address graphics-intensive and machine learning workloads — including natural language processing, translation, video and image analysis, speech recognition, and personalization — with up to 8 L4 Tensor Core GPUs (24 GB each), third-generation AMD EPYC processors, up to 192 vCPUs, 100 Gbps networking, and 7.52 TB local NVMe SSD. G6 instances are available as On-Demand, Spot, and Savings Plans and can be launched via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or SDKs. They expand AWS's GPU capabilities for customers with sovereignty and compliance needs.

🖥️ Amazon has launched EC2 X8i instances in Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Mumbai), powered by AWS-exclusive Intel Xeon 6 processors and certified for SAP. These memory-optimized instances deliver up to 1.5x more memory (up to 6 TB), 3.3x greater memory bandwidth, and up to 43% higher performance compared with prior X2i generations. Offered in 14 sizes from large to 96xlarge, including two bare-metal options, X8i targets SAP HANA, large databases, data analytics, and EDA, and is available via Savings Plans, On-Demand, or Spot.

🔐 Amazon announced new administration features for SageMaker Unified Studio that give administrators finer control over identity configuration and user management across both IAM and IAM Identity Center domain types. Administrators can now configure AWS IAM Identity Center for SSO onboarding, add IAM roles, users, and groups as project members, and manage domain users from a consolidated admin portal. For Identity Center domains, federated access through IAM roles now produces unique user sessions so collaborators sharing a role do not overwrite each other and actions remain auditable. These updates enable teams to use corporate IAM or IAM Identity Center identities consistently across domains and simplify collaboration and auditing in the Studio environment.

🔒 The April 2026 AWS Security monthly digest highlights new features, hands-on samples, and security bulletins across identity, AI security, data protection, and detection. Notable posts include IAM Identity Center session tags for ABAC, guidance for securing agentic AI via the Model Context Protocol, and practical steps to adopt hybrid post‑quantum TLS for Secrets Manager. The edition also summarizes April CVEs and ships 16 runnable code samples and workshops to validate recommended controls.

🚀 Amazon EC2 G7e instances with NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs are now available in the Europe (London) region. G7e delivers up to 2.3x inference performance over G6e and supports up to eight GPUs with 96 GB each, 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, 192 vCPUs, and up to 1600 Gbps networking. G7e includes NVIDIA GPUDirect P2P and GPUDirect RDMA with EFA for lower-latency multi-GPU and multi-node workloads, and is available as On‑Demand, Spot, and via Savings Plans.

🚀 Today Google Cloud announced that Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite is generally available on Gemini Enterprise. Built for ultra-low latency, high-volume workloads, and maximal cost-efficiency, Flash-Lite is positioned for production deployments that require fast, iterative responses and precise agentic capabilities such as tool calling and orchestration. Early adopters report significant reductions in latency and operating cost while retaining robust reasoning for developer assistants, customer service agents, and multimodal creative pipelines.

🔔 AWS Builder Center's AWS Capabilities by Region now offers availability notifications that alert subscribers when services or features become available in selected Regions. Subscriptions are set at the service level and automatically cover all underlying features, removing the need to track each feature individually. Notifications arrive as instantaneous in-app alerts and a consolidated weekly email digest; manage preferences under Settings > Notifications.

🔧 AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports monetization functions, a capability that lets customers customize how ad decision server (ADS) requests are built and how session data is managed during ad-personalized playback. Monetization functions enable inline data transformations and calls to external APIs at defined lifecycle hooks, removing the need for middleware between the player and the ADS. They are fail-open by design so playback continues if a function errors or times out, and the feature is generally available in all regions where MediaTailor operates; billing is a flat per-lifecycle-hook invocation rate.

🔒 The AWS Advanced JDBC Wrapper now includes a KMS Encryption plugin that provides column-level client-side encryption for Java applications. Operating at the JDBC driver, the plugin encrypts values before they reach the database and decrypts on read, keeping plaintext visible only to the application while allowing HMAC-based integrity checks. It integrates with Aurora and RDS (PostgreSQL and MySQL-compatible), Spring, Hibernate, and common connection pools without code changes, and is available as open-source under the Apache 2.0 license.

🔒 AWS earned three SNI certifications for the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region: SNI ISO/IEC 27017:2015, SNI ISO/IEC 27018:2019, and SNI ISO 9001:2015. An independent auditor accredited by KAN assessed the controls against local requirements. Combined with the 2023 SNI ISO/IEC 27001, AWS is the first cloud provider to hold all four SNI certifications. Certificates are available in AWS Artifact.

🔁 BASF created a digital twin of its complex two‑year agricultural supply chain using AlphaEvolve on Google Cloud. The evolutionary AI began from a seeded planning program and ingested three years of historical production, inventory, and demand data to autonomously evolve planning logic. Resulting algorithms closely mirrored historical inventory and production behavior, improving accuracy by over 80% versus the seed and producing human‑readable rules to support planners.

🔐 Microsoft marks World Passkey Day by outlining steps to accelerate passkey adoption and reduce reliance on passwords and phishable methods. The company highlights work with the FIDO Alliance, expanded Microsoft Entra passkey support, Windows Hello device‑bound keys, and syncing through Microsoft Password Manager. It also strengthens account recovery with verified ID and biometric checks and plans to remove security questions in Entra ID by January 2027. Organizations are urged to enable passkeys and apply policies across sign‑in and recovery.

⚡ Google Cloud announced the Bigtable in-memory tier at Google Cloud Next ’26, adding an integrated hot-data layer that delivers sub-millisecond read latency, roughly 10× higher point-read throughput per dollar, and up to 120,000 QPS on a single row. Backed by RDMA and a hybrid RAM/SSD/HDD architecture, Bigtable auto-promotes hot rows into memory and preserves durability and enterprise controls. The capability is available in the new Bigtable Enterprise Plus edition, reducing operational cache complexity and improving TCO.

📣 Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns now detects customer time zones using all phone numbers and addresses on a profile, not just the primary contact fields. When a profile's contacts span multiple time zones, the system delivers only during hours that overlap across every detected zone and will skip profiles when no common window exists. This reduces off-hours contacts and is available at no extra cost where the service is offered.

🔐 Google outlines five practical tools to make Google Account sign‑ins simpler and more secure on World Password Day 2026. Highlights include Passkeys (device-based sign-in using fingerprint, face, or PIN), recommended pairing with 2-Step Verification, and the ability to add up to 10 Recovery Contacts for account recovery. The post also promotes Sign in with Google to reduce password proliferation and Google Password Manager to create, save, sync, and autofill strong passwords and passkeys.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8gn and M8gb instances are available in AWS Europe (Ireland). Powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and 6th-generation Nitro Cards, they deliver up to 30% better compute vs Graviton3. M8gn offers up to 600 Gbps networking for network‑intensive workloads, while M8gb provides up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth for storage‑heavy applications. Larger sizes up to 48xlarge and metal options are supported.