All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Amazon Aurora DSQL Now Available in Frankfurt Region

🚀 Amazon Aurora DSQL is now available in Europe (Frankfurt), expanding AWS’s global footprint for its serverless distributed SQL engine. The managed service provides active-active high availability, multi-Region strong consistency, and automatic, virtually unlimited scaling so teams can build always-on applications without infrastructure management. Aurora DSQL is advertised as offering the fastest distributed SQL reads and writes, and is already available across US, Asia Pacific, and European Regions. Customers can trial it via the AWS Free Tier.

Amazon Connect Introduces Granular Recording Permissions

🔒 Amazon Connect now offers granular UI permissions for conversation recordings and transcripts, enabling administrators to control access to playback, copying and downloads separately. Administrators can allow users to listen to calls while preventing transcript copying, and set download rules that permit redacted recordings but block unredacted downloads. The capability supports complex scenarios where sensitive conversations remain redacted while other interactions remain fully available.

Azure Storage Mover: Cloud-to-Cloud S3 to Blob Migrations

🚀 Azure Storage Mover is now generally available for direct cloud-to-cloud migrations from AWS S3 to Azure Blob Storage. The fully managed service performs high-speed, server-to-server parallel transfers without requiring self-hosted agents, preserving file metadata and supporting incremental syncs to minimize downtime. Integrated automation via the Azure portal, CLI, and REST API removes the need for custom scripts or third-party tools, while RBAC, Azure Active Directory, Multicloud Arc connectivity, and encryption in transit address security and compliance. Customers who tested the preview moved petabytes of data and reported reduced infrastructure overhead and faster access to Azure analytics and AI capabilities.

AWS Outposts 2U Server Now Available in GovCloud Regions

🔒 AWS now supports the Outposts 2U server in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and GovCloud (US-West). The fully managed, industry-standard 2U form factor delivers up to 128 vCPUs and extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to on-premises or edge locations with limited space. Customers can run Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, and AWS IoT Greengrass locally while connecting to the parent GovCloud region for broader management and operations.

Harden Identity Defense: Richer Context and Correlation

🔒Microsoft outlines expanded Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) capabilities designed for modern, hybrid environments. The post highlights general availability of unified identity and endpoint sensors, broad on‑premises sensors for Domain Controllers, AD FS, and AD CS, and native integration with Microsoft Entra ID. It emphasizes an identity‑centric approach that correlates accounts across platforms, integrates with PAM, and links identity signals into Defender XDR to enable contextualized alerts, coordinated response, and automatic attack disruption across devices and sessions.

Practical Guide to Google Cloud Parameter Manager Overview

🔒 Google Cloud's Parameter Manager centralizes application configuration to avoid hard-coded credentials and fragile config files, supporting validated JSON and YAML payloads as well as arbitrary unformatted data. It integrates with Secret Manager using a __REF__ syntax to keep confidential values separate and uses versioned, immutable parameter versions to prevent accidental changes. The post walks through storing an API key in Secret Manager, granting the Parameter Manager IAM principal access, and calling renderParameterVersion from a Node backend. A sample React/Node weather app demonstrates runtime configuration, fallback dummy data, and advanced patterns such as regional parameters and feature rollouts.

Google Cloud Cross-Site Interconnect Now Generally Available

🔗 Google Cloud announced that Cross-Site Interconnect is now generally available, providing a cloud-delivered, transparent layer 2 connectivity overlay for global WANs. The service uses Google’s global backbone to deliver high-bandwidth, on-demand links with a 99.95% SLA, dynamic consumption pricing, and support for MACsec encryption and VLAN-based multi-destination handoffs. It exposes operational metrics via dashboards and APIs so teams can monitor latency, loss, and utilization while abstracting failover and resiliency management.

DynamoDB Zero-ETL Integration with Redshift in Taipei

🔁 The Amazon DynamoDB zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift is now available in the Asia Pacific (Taipei) region, enabling analytics on production DynamoDB tables without impacting operational workloads. Customers can run high-performance SQL, leverage built-in ML and Spark integrations, and use materialized views with automatic incremental refresh and data sharing. History mode provides built-in support for analyzing historical data and building Type 2 Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD 2) tables without custom ETL code.

Amazon QuickSight Adds Visual Data Preparation Experience

📊 Amazon QuickSight now provides a visual data preparation experience that enables business users to clean, transform, and combine data without writing code. The interface supports multi-step workflows—appends, aggregations, flexible joins—and records each transformation step to improve traceability and shareability. It increases dataset source depth from 3 to 10 levels and boosts cross-source join capacity 20× (1GB to 20GB), and is available to Author, Author Pro, and select Quick Suite Enterprise subscribers across multiple regions.

Google Gen AI .NET SDK Brings Gemini to C#/.NET Developers

🚀 Google has released the Google Gen AI .NET SDK, bringing unified access to Gemini on Google AI and Vertex AI for C#/.NET developers. The SDK is available via NuGet (dotnet add package Google.GenAI) and supports client creation with an API key or with project/location settings for Vertex AI. Examples demonstrate unary and streaming text generation, image generation, and configurable response schemas and generation settings. Google provides the API reference, GitHub source (googleapis/dotnet-genai) and a DemoApp with samples to help developers get started.

Cross-Cloud VPC Peering with NVAs and Regional Affinity

🌐 This blog presents a reference architecture for deploying Network Virtual Appliances (NVAs) in a regional hub-and-spoke design using VPC Network Peering. It explains how Google’s Cross-Cloud Network and software-defined global backbone support any-to-any connectivity while preserving regional affinity for latency and data residency. The post details traffic flows and key services such as Cloud Interconnect, HA VPN, Internal Passthrough Network Load Balancers, policy-based routes, and Private Service Connect to integrate managed services and workload VPCs.

AWS RTB Fabric Generally Available for Low-Latency AdTech

🚀 AWS today announced RTB Fabric, a fully managed service that connects publishers and buyers with AdTech partners such as Amazon Ads, GumGum, Kargo, MobileFuse, Sovrn, TripleLift, Viant, and Yieldmo over a private, high‑performance network delivering single‑digit millisecond latency. The service can reduce standard cloud networking costs by up to 80% and requires no upfront commitments. Built-in modules support containerized applications and foundation models and run inline to optimize traffic, improve bid efficiency, and increase bid response rates.

Hugging Face and VirusTotal: Integrating Security Insights

🔒 VirusTotal and Hugging Face have announced a collaboration to surface security insights directly within the Hugging Face platform. When browsing model files, datasets, or related artifacts, users will now see multi‑scanner results including VirusTotal detections and links to public reports so potential risks can be reviewed before downloading. VirusTotal is also enhancing its analysis portfolio with AI-driven tools such as Code Insight and format‑aware scanners (picklescan, safepickle, ModelScan) to highlight unsafe deserialization flows and other risky patterns. The integration aims to increase visibility across the AI supply chain and help researchers, developers, and defenders build more secure models and workflows.

Amazon EC2 I8g Storage-Optimized Instances Expand Regions

💾 Amazon Web Services has made Amazon EC2 I8g storage-optimized instances generally available in Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and third-generation Nitro SSDs, I8g delivers up to 60% better compute performance and up to 65% improved real-time storage performance per TB versus the previous generation. These instances offer up to 45 TB of local NVMe storage, up to 100 Gbps networking, and are aimed at transactional databases, real-time analytics, and I/O-intensive AI pre-processing workloads.

Amazon Connect adds threaded email views and history

📧 Amazon Connect now includes threaded email views and appends conversation history to agent replies, helping agents and customers preserve context and continuity across exchanges. The update provides a familiar, mail-like threading model and surfaces prior messages inline within Amazon Connect Email, making follow-ups and issue resolution faster. The capability is available in multiple AWS regions and streamlines agent workflows.

Choosing the Right AWS Service for Secrets and Configs

🔐 AWS outlines when to use Secrets Manager, Systems Manager Parameter Store, and AWS AppConfig to manage credentials, configuration values, and feature flags. The guidance recommends Secrets Manager for sensitive credentials that need rotation and multi‑Region replication, Parameter Store for simple or high‑volume key/value data, and AppConfig for validated, controlled deployments. The post compares encryption, access controls, replication, monitoring, and pricing to help architects select the best fit.

AWS Launches Second Secret Region: AWS Secret-West

🔒 AWS announced the launch of AWS Secret-West, its second Secret U.S. region for handling mission-critical workloads at the Secret classification. The region offers multiple Availability Zones, an ICD-accredited security architecture, and authorized services under ICD 503 and DoD SRG IL6. It provides lower latency for western U.S. operations, multi-region resiliency, and geographic separation to support government mission requirements.

Google Cloud H4D VMs Boost Finance Workload Performance

⚡ Google Cloud announced the H4D VM family (Preview), powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (Turin), aimed at delivering extreme performance for financial services workloads. The H4D series targets latency-sensitive use cases such as high-frequency trading, Monte Carlo risk simulations, backtesting, and derivatives pricing by offering faster core-to-core communication, larger memory capacity, and improved network throughput. AMD benchmarking with the open-source KX Nano test reported an average ~34% out-of-the-box performance gain over prior C3D VMs, with per-core and multi-threaded uplifts around 1.33–1.36x. Google Cloud will demonstrate H4D and complementary HPC solutions at STAC Summit NYC on October 28th and will have experts available to discuss performance, security, and compliance.

Amazon CloudWatch adds interactive incident reporting

📝 Amazon CloudWatch now offers interactive incident report generation, enabling customers to produce comprehensive post-incident analysis in minutes. The capability, available within CloudWatch investigations, automatically gathers and correlates telemetry data, user inputs, and investigation actions to produce streamlined reports. Reports include executive summaries, timelines, impact assessments, and actionable recommendations to help teams identify patterns and implement preventive measures. The feature is available in multiple AWS regions.

Amazon U7i High Memory Instances Reach US East (Ohio)

🚀 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i instances (u7i-6tb.112xlarge) are now available in the AWS US East (Ohio) Region. These 7th-generation instances deliver 6TB of DDR5 memory and 448 vCPUs powered by custom 4th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids). They support up to 100 Gbps for EBS throughput and networking, include ENA Express, and are designed for mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.