All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

📊 Amazon Connect Customer now shows historical agent schedule adherence metrics on dashboards, giving supervisors visibility into scheduled time, adherent time, non-adherent time, and adherence percentage. The metrics can be grouped by shift activity to reveal patterns across work, break, or training periods. Supervisors can use these insights for targeted coaching, such as addressing consistent late returns from lunch.

🔒 This post announces ACME protocol support in AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), enabling customers to use familiar ACME clients like certbot and cert-manager to automate public certificate issuance and renewal. It explains the new ACME endpoint resource, domain validation scopes, EAB credentials, and IAM controls for isolating environments. The article outlines setup steps, operational best practices, and monitoring recommendations to help scale certificate automation securely.

🚀 Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports fractional GPU scheduling on Amazon EC2 G6f instances, allowing containers to request GPU partitions as small as one-eighth of an NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU (3 GB). This enables cost-efficient runs for small-model AI inference, model experimentation, and graphics rendering by right-sizing GPU resources. Configure fractional GPUs by setting GPU=0.125, GPU=0.25, or GPU=0.5 in your ECS task definition; support is available on ECS Managed Instances and ECS on EC2 with integrated monitoring and automated instance lifecycle handling.

🛠️ AWS Lambda console now extends console-to-IDE integration to support Kiro and Cursor IDEs, building on earlier Visual Studio Code support. Developers can follow a guided setup from the Lambda console to start local development in Kiro or Cursor while preserving code and configurations. The integration also enables conversion to AWS SAM templates to simplify IaC and CI/CD workflows. This feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions at no additional cost.

🔒 AWS WAF now offers the Salt Security managed rule group, available via AWS Marketplace as Salt Managed Rules for AWS WAF - AI Agent & API Security. The group provides detection and mitigation for API-focused attacks and traffic from AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoints without requiring customers to write custom rules. It addresses threats such as credential brute force, excessive GraphQL queries, SSRF, prototype pollution, and JWT anomalies while labeling MCP traffic and sensitive request attributes. Customers can subscribe and add the rule group to a web ACL directly in the AWS WAF console; pricing and versioning are managed by Salt Security through AWS Marketplace.

🚀 Amazon EC2 G7 instances powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs are now available in the Europe (Spain) Region. G7 delivers up to 4.6x AI inference and up to 2.1x graphics performance versus G6, with faster GPU-accelerated analytics. Instances offer up to 8 GPUs (32 GB each), custom Intel Xeon 6 CPUs, up to 192 vCPUs, 768 GiB memory, 700 Gbps EFA, and 7.6 TB NVMe local storage. G7s are available as On-Demand, Spot, and Savings Plans in four regions today.

🚀 Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced general availability of runtime instances for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling agents to run on customer-managed EC2 instances without manual infrastructure management. The feature complements existing microVM-based runtimes and supports diverse EC2 families including GPU-accelerated, memory-optimized, and compute-optimized types. Runtime instances allow long-running agent sessions up to 14 days and integrate with the AWS Console, CLI, SDKs, and APIs to create capacity providers and attach agents. Availability spans multiple regions and billing includes EC2 costs plus management fees, with documentation and pricing details provided by AWS.

🛡️ Palo Alto Networks announces native integration between Prisma Browser and Cortex XDR, closing critical SOC visibility gaps by turning the browser into an active security sensor. This integration feeds browser telemetry—DLP violations, tampering, and configuration changes—directly into Cortex, enabling correlated alerts and precise, surgical containment without disrupting user productivity. The approach avoids brittle extensions and provides deep, real-time context for investigations.

🔒 This post shows how to route Amazon Bedrock Guardrails intervention events into Amazon Security Lake by transforming model invocation logs into OCSF-compliant Detection Finding records. It outlines an automated pipeline using CloudWatch Logs subscription filters, an AWS Lambda transformer, Parquet output, and Security Lake partitions so analysts can query guardrail events alongside identity, network, and application telemetry. The solution maps guardrail fields to OCSF attributes, supports multi-account deployment, and offers scaling guidance and an alternative CloudWatch-only approach.

🚀 Amazon ElastiCache now supports Graviton4-based M8g, R8g, and C8gn node families for Valkey and Memcached. These nodes deliver up to 47% higher throughput, up to 43% lower P99 latency, and up to 31% better price-performance for on-demand pricing compared with Graviton3 equivalents, varying by family, size, and workload. Graviton4 instances also provide more memory per node and enhanced networking, with C8gn offering up to 200 Gbps. The new sizes are available from large to 16xlarge across 30+ AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud and China Regions; use the Console, SDK, or CLI to create or modify clusters.

📢 The AWS Glue Schema Registry is now available in ten additional regions, including New Zealand, Thailand, Hyderabad, Osaka, Malaysia, Melbourne, Mexico (Central), Israel (Tel Aviv), Taipei, and Canada West (Calgary). The serverless, free registry supports Apache Avro, JSON, and Protobuf formats to validate and manage streaming data evolution. It serves as a centralized repository that reduces validation logic and cross-team coordination, improving data quality and lowering downstream failures. The registry integrates with C# and Java apps for Apache Kafka/MSK, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Apache Flink/Managed Flink, and AWS Lambda.

🔒 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports network access controls for OpenSearch UI applications, enabling administrators to restrict access to approved networks using IAM condition keys like aws:SourceVpce, aws:SourceVpc, and aws:SourceIp. You can enforce restrictions via identity-based policies, VPC endpoint policies, and organization-wide resource control policies (RCPs), which can block off-network users before authentication. This feature is available in all Regions where OpenSearch UI is offered.

📊 Amazon Connect Customer dashboards now support one-click drill-down into real-time queue and routing profile performance. Supervisors can jump from a summary view into pre-filtered routing profile, queue, agent, or routing step widgets to investigate spikes or bottlenecks. This enables rapid identification of agent activity and reassignment to reduce wait times. The feature is available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions where Amazon Connect Customer is offered.

🔧 AWS Transform now automates post-launch actions through the migration workflow, letting teams define actions at the account level and automatically apply them to each source server across target accounts, including multi-account migrations. Actions execute via AWS Systems Manager (SSM) immediately after test or cutover launches, and users can choose predefined actions or supply custom SSM documents. The migration inventory file now includes a new structure for bulk post-launch configurations, and the Transform agent handles end-to-end migration configuration, including replication templates, EC2 launch templates, right-sizing, and post-launch actions. This capability is available in all Regions where AWS Transform is offered.

🛡️ AWS Security Agent (now part of AWS Continuum) can now automate penetration testing for applications that use email-based multi-factor authentication. The agent generates a unique forwarding address per credential so MFA messages can be routed to it via an email provider rule, allowing the agent to read and submit codes or links during a test without storing email account credentials. This complements existing TOTP support and is available in all Regions where the agent is supported.

🔐 This post examines how NICE Actimize reduced AWS KMS costs by 77% for a multi-tenant, event-driven platform by rethinking data key caching. It outlines the cache stampede problem that arises when envelope encryption operates at high concurrency and describes two solutions: the AWS-recommended hierarchical keyring with DynamoDB branch keys and a custom CachedKmsClient using Caffeine caches. The article covers design, trade-offs, and security considerations for both patterns.

🔒 Enterprises with strict compliance and sovereignty needs often keep data on-premises, risking missed AI advances. Recent research of over 1,400 IT leaders found 48% prioritize infrastructure with data residency and local security controls, and 52% now use hybrid cloud to combine public cloud power with local data control. Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) delivers on-premises AI, optimized infrastructure, and a choice of Gemini or open models to enable secure, sovereign AI.

🧭 BigQuery introduces autonomous, history-based query optimizations and an upgraded advanced runtime to improve performance and reduce compute costs without user intervention. These capabilities include enhanced vectorization, short query optimizations, and support for open formats like Apache Iceberg, delivering up to 35% faster queries and 40% lower slot usage in 2025. The platform’s fluid scaling autoscaler enables per-second billing and average cost reductions up to 34%, with built-in safety guardrails to prevent regressions.

🔍 Amazon RDS now surfaces the initialization status of storage volumes created from snapshots, enabling customers to know when restored or converted instances reach full performance. The new StorageOperationStatus and StorageOperationPercentProgress fields are available in the RDS Console and the DescribeDBInstances API, showing initialization and optimization progress in real time. This visibility helps you schedule latency-sensitive workloads appropriately and is available by default in all commercial and US GovCloud Regions via console, CLI, or SDKs.

🔒 Google Cloud and MLCommons’ MedPerf use Confidential Computing to benchmark medical AI on real patient data while preserving privacy. The collaboration runs evaluations inside hardware-isolated Trusted Execution Environments, extending protection across CPUs and GPUs with A3 VMs and NVIDIA H100 GPUs. This approach enables federated evaluation for initiatives like Federated Tumor Segmentation, revealing site-specific performance gaps and improving trust in clinical AI.