All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 AWS Backup now completes Amazon EKS cluster state backups up to 10x faster. This improvement reduces backup windows for clusters with large numbers of namespaces and Kubernetes resources from days to hours and is automatically enabled at no additional cost in supported Regions. AWS Backup is a policy-based, fully managed solution to centralize and automate protection across compute, storage, and databases.

🔍 CrowdStrike has introduced Falcon OverWatch for Defender, a managed threat-hunting service that brings continuous, expert-led hunting to Microsoft Defender environments without replacing existing endpoint protections. Running a lightweight Falcon sensor alongside Microsoft Defender, the offering combines human hunters, deep adversary intelligence, and AI-driven analytics to surface stealthy post‑exploit activity and escalate high-confidence threats. It promises AI-powered analysis at scale—up to 6.2 trillion events per day—broad visibility across millions of endpoints, and operationalized hunting patterns to improve detection and response across customers.

🛡️ AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has raised maximum quotas for six resource types to help customers scale. Updated limits include customer managed policies, instance profiles, managed policies per role, role trust policy length, roles per account, and OpenID Connect providers. These changes give teams more flexibility to design IAM controls and support growing workloads. To request increases, use Service Quotas or AWS Support per region.

🏷 CloudWatch Logs Insights now supports querying log groups by tags, allowing searches across all log groups that share key-value tags without listing them explicitly. Tags such as Environment:Production, Application:PaymentService, or Owner:TeamName let teams scope queries by environment, application, or ownership. As log group tags are added or removed, queries automatically reflect the matching log groups, reducing operational overhead as environments scale. This capability is available today in all commercial AWS Regions.

🔁 Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports host-to-client URL redirection, automatically launching approved links from streaming sessions in the user's local browser. Administrators can configure allow and deny URL patterns via the AWS Management Console to keep sensitive applications inside the streaming environment while offloading bandwidth-heavy content such as video. The feature works for browser navigation and embedded links in applications like Microsoft Word, with host-side support for Chrome and Edge; URLs on the configured allow list open automatically in the user's default local browser.

🔒 This AWS Security Blog post explains how to identify and secure open proxies in your AWS environment to prevent abuse, protect IP reputation, and control costs. It describes common proxy types—HTTP, SOCKS, transparent, and reverse—and the risks they introduce when misconfigured on EC2 instances, containers, and serverless functions. The guidance recommends strict access controls and authentication, deploying proxies in private subnets or via AWS PrivateLink, and restricting security groups and load balancers. It also emphasizes monitoring with VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail, and GuardDuty, automated remediation, regular assessments with Amazon Inspector, and keeping incident response runbooks current.

🚀 Google announced that Cloud Composer is now Managed Service for Apache Airflow and that Apache Airflow 3.1 is Generally Available to support AI and MLOps workloads. The release introduces a decoupled architecture, native DAG versioning, managed backfills, event-driven scheduling, and Human-in-the-Loop alerts. Managed Airflow embeds a Data Engineering Agent for agentic troubleshooting, adds a declarative YAML-based Deployment Automation Framework with cross-product bundles, and launches an MCP Server in public preview to reduce developer context-switching.

📱 AWS has added expanded CloudWatch Alarm investigation tools to the AWS Console Mobile App. The update consolidates interactive metric graphs, AI-generated log summaries, and natural-language log search into a single alarm view to reduce time from notification to root cause. Engineers can zoom into specific time windows, adjust time zones, run voice or typed queries, and select pre-saved Logs Insights queries. Related metrics and resources are shown alongside alarms; the app is available in all AWS Commercial Regions at no additional cost.

🔄 AWS announces General Availability of AWS Entity Resolution incremental ML-based matching workflows. Customers can now process only newly added records rather than reprocessing entire datasets, cutting latency and infrastructure costs. The feature supports up to 50M incremental records against 1B historical records and processes 1M incremental records in under one hour.

🚀 Amazon FSx is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, offering fully managed, high-performance file systems for cloud workloads. The service supports NetApp ONTAP, Windows File Server, Lustre, and OpenZFS, and handles hardware provisioning, patching, and backups. Built on current AWS compute, networking, and disk technologies, FSx aims to deliver improved performance and lower TCO while supporting reliability, security, and scalability.

🔒 AWS updated VPC Lattice to allow resource configurations to reference domain-name targets that are private to your VPC. You can share a resource configuration for a private FQDN across accounts by setting the Resource Config DNS Resolution property to IN_VPC, causing VPC Lattice to use the VPC's DNS to resolve targets. This enables secure cross-account access to privately hosted backends without public DNS entries. The capability is available via Console, CLI, SDKs and APIs at no additional cost in all regions where VPC Lattice is offered.

✨Amazon Quick now creates dashboards from natural language prompts using Generate Analysis. You describe the dashboard you want, select up to three datasets, and review an editable plan before generation. The feature produces organized sheets with visuals, filter controls, and calculated fields such as year-over-year and month-over-month comparisons, reducing creation time from hours to minutes. At launch, Generate Analysis is available to Enterprise subscription and Author Pro users, with promotional access for Authors through December 2026.

🆕 Aurora DSQL now supports the PostgreSQL JSON data type, enabling applications and tools that depend on PostgreSQL's native JSON type to work with Aurora DSQL without code changes. You can create or modify tables to store semi-structured data such as API payloads, configuration objects, or event logs alongside relational data. PostgreSQL compression is available and enabled by default for larger JSON payloads, helping reduce storage costs and improve storage efficiency.

🤖 Four new Qwen models—Qwen3.5-27B-FP8, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Qwen3.5-0.8B, and Qwen3.5-2B—are now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. The lineup covers multimodal vision-language reasoning, an efficient Mixture-of-Experts model optimized for agentic coding, and two compact models for rapid prototyping and edge deployments. You can deploy them in SageMaker Studio with a few clicks or programmatically via the SageMaker Python SDK for experimentation and production use.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has expanded availability of I8ge Amazon EC2 instances to Europe (Paris) and multiple Asia Pacific regions including Thailand, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Tokyo. Powered by Graviton4 processors and third-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, these storage-optimized instances deliver notable compute and storage gains and provide up to 120 TB of local NVMe. Offered in eleven sizes (including two metal options), I8ge instances also support high network and EBS bandwidth for data-intensive workloads.

📊 Amazon Quick now supports Dataset Q&A, a conversational analytics feature that lets users ask natural language questions directly against enterprise datasets while enforcing governance such as Row Level and Column Level Security. Powered by a text-to-SQL agent, it identifies relevant data and generates engine- and dialect-aware SQL for SPICE and AWS data assets like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Aurora PostgreSQL, and Apache Iceberg. Dataset owners can add custom instructions and semantic metadata to a knowledge graph, and an Explain capability lets users inspect the generated SQL and reasoning before acting on results.

🔒 Amazon EventBridge now supports logging data plane APIs to AWS CloudTrail, giving customers greater visibility into event bus activity. The update adds capture of the PutEvents API and records requester identity, IP address, timestamps, and request details. You can opt in per event bus via the CloudTrail console or APIs; the capability is available in commercial, GovCloud (US), and AWS China regions.

🔒 Azure IaaS combines a layered defense-in-depth architecture with Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative—secure by design, secure by default, and secure in operation—to protect compute, networking, storage, and operations. Hardware roots of trust, measured boot, and host isolation reduce platform exposure while VM protections such as Trusted Launch and confidential computing guard workloads at runtime. Network defaults enforce least privilege and private connectivity, and centralized telemetry in Azure Monitor and Defender for Cloud enables continuous detection and response.

🚀 At Google Cloud Next '26, Firestore introduced expanded agentic AI integrations, built-in full-text search, and deeper MongoDB compatibility aimed at accelerating agent-driven applications. The Enterprise edition’s reimagined query engine adds hundreds of expressive query features, JOINs via subqueries, and pipeline operations. Native connections to AI Studio and third-party coding agents plus preview tools like natural language console querying and Usage Insights simplify building agentic workflows. These capabilities are available now in Firestore Enterprise in both Native and MongoDB compatibility modes.

🔍 Amazon Quick now supports Amazon S3 table buckets as a direct data source, enabling dashboards, conversational analytics, and exploration of Apache Iceberg tables stored in S3 without intermediate warehouses or OLAP layers. Paired with Zero-ETL ingestion from systems like Salesforce, SAP, and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, organizations can access near real-time insights with reduced pipeline complexity. Admins configure S3 table bucket permissions once, and authors can immediately create datasets and use Dataset Q&A to query the lakehouse in natural language.