All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🛡️ Microsoft has removed the legacy Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool from Windows 11 24H2, 25H2 and recent beta builds as part of its planned deprecation. The company previously converted WMIC to a Feature on Demand and announced its eventual removal; WMI itself remains available. IT administrators are advised to migrate scripts to PowerShell, WMI COM APIs, .NET libraries or other modern tools. The change aims to reduce abuse of WMIC as a LOLBIN used by attackers for ransomware, evasion, and other malicious activities.

🔎 Amazon S3 Metadata and annotations are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West), enabling faster discovery, understanding, and enrichment of S3 data. S3 Metadata captures system-defined details like object size and source and stores them in Amazon S3 Tables for near real-time tabular queries. Annotations let you attach rich business context in JSON, XML, or YAML (up to 1 GB per object) that travels with the object and follows durability and consistency properties.

🤖 Amazon Bedrock now supports OpenAI GPT‑5.6 models (Sol, Terra, Luna) on the bedrock-runtime endpoint and adds cross‑Region inference. The feature includes Global and Geo routing (now with US Geo support) to increase throughput and reduce inference costs. OpenAI Responses, Converse, and Chat Completions APIs are supported and integrate with Bedrock logging, CloudWatch metrics, and AWS cost reporting.

🚀 Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) has increased the maximum number of replication rules per registry from 10 to 25. This change addresses limitations for complex multi-region and multi-account architectures, allowing more granular replication strategies for scenarios such as distributing images for low-latency pulls and separating production and staging targets. The increase is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon ECR is supported.

🔁 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now allows terminating up to 100 instances with a single TerminateInstanceInAutoScalingGroup API call, reducing API request volume when scaling down. Batch termination is intended for rapid scale-down scenarios like AI/ML training, container orchestrators, or event-driven fleets and validates all instances atomically before proceeding. Existing Auto Scaling behaviors such as lifecycle hooks and load balancer connection draining remain enforced for each instance. The capability is available in all AWS Regions at no additional cost.

🔧 Amazon MSK Provisioned clusters now support configuring custom domain names at the cluster level for both ZooKeeper and KRaft metadata modes. This removes the need to set domains per broker and ensures persistent endpoints across scaling, migrations, and failovers. The setting persists through cluster operations and is available for new and existing clusters in all Regions where MSK Provisioned is offered, at no extra cost.

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8i and R8i‑flex instances are now available in the Canada West (Calgary) region. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, offering up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based instances. R8i provides large sizes including 96xlarge and SAP certification; R8i‑flex offers common memory‑optimized sizes from large to 16xlarge. Purchase options include Savings Plans, On‑Demand, and Spot.

🔍 The Amazon Connect Customer dashboards now include reporting on routing steps and agent proficiencies, enabling supervisors to monitor and optimize contact-to-agent matching. Managers can filter agents by assigned proficiencies, group metrics by routing steps, and track metrics such as the number of contacts queued in a routing step. These analytics are available in all AWS commercial and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions where Amazon Connect Customer is offered.

🔒 Amazon Web Services is rolling out a redesigned AWS Sign-In and session selection experience to a subset of customers, introducing a unified email entry point and refreshed session management. Existing sign-in methods and credentials continue to work, and sign-in with supported identity providers is available only for accounts created with those providers. Organizations using IAM Identity Center or federation should continue to use their existing portals, and administrators who rely on browser automation should review the changes for compatibility.

🔍 AWS Network Firewall now reports rule hit counts for stateful rules, giving administrators visibility into how often each stateful rule in a firewall policy matches traffic. This capability helps accelerate incident response, uncover shadow or redundant rules, and validate policy changes by confirming new rules match intended traffic. Hit counts are enabled by default for custom and managed rule groups, refresh at intervals as low as five minutes, and are available at no additional charge in supported Regions except UAE and Bahrain.

🚀 Amazon Quick announces general availability of Microsoft 365 extensions for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook, enabling AI-driven tasks directly within users' M365 environments. The Excel extension assists with advanced analysis, pivot tables, charts, and data cleaning. PowerPoint and Word extensions generate and format presentation decks and documents using organization templates and track changes. The Outlook extension helps prioritize emails, organize inboxes, schedule meetings, and draft replies using Quick data and full inbox context.

🔒 Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports automatic semantic enrichment for VPC-enabled domains, allowing customers with private network configurations to use AI-powered semantic search without exposing domains to the public internet. The feature converts keyword searches into context-aware retrieval, handling all semantic processing automatically and removing the need to manage ML models. It requires OpenSearch version 2.19 or later and is available across 11 Regions globally.

🔷 Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud-Native Application Platforms, marking its third consecutive year in that quadrant. The post highlights how Azure’s platform consolidates application modernization, AI toolchains, operations, and security into a single foundation. It describes services like Azure App Service, Container Apps, Azure Functions, and API Management as core components enabling production AI workloads and agentic applications. Customer examples illustrate real-world production usage and operational impact.

🚀 AWS Console-to-Code now supports 26 additional services and adds cross-region and cross-browser-tab action recording. This expands coverage from 6 to 32 services, helping developers, DevOps, and cloud architects convert manual console workflows into repeatable infrastructure as code (IaC). Actions are consolidated across regions and tabs so complex multi-region deployments retain context. Available today in all commercial AWS Regions.

🗺️ Amazon Location Service now supports server-side per-category and density-based POI filtering via the GetStyleDescriptor API. Developers can pass poi-categories and poi-density parameters to return style descriptors that render only selected categories at the requested density. This removes prior client-side workarounds and ensures consistent maps across web, mobile, and server renderers.

🔒 Certighost (CVE-2026-54121) demonstrates how a standard domain user can coerce an Enterprise CA to issue a Domain Controller certificate via AD CS "chase" behavior. The flaw allows an attacker to obtain PKINIT authentication as a DC, perform DCSync, and escalate to domain compromise. Microsoft patched the issue on July 14, 2026; mitigate by patching, restricting CA outbound access, and reducing MachineAccountQuota.

🖥️ AWS CloudShell now offers a built-in visual file editor that launches from your shell with a single 'edit' command, requiring no setup. The browser-based editor supports syntax highlighting, find-and-replace, multi-line selection, copy-paste, and undo-redo, enabling seamless in-console edits for scripts, CloudFormation templates, and Lambda code. This feature is available in all Regions where CloudShell is offered.

📢 Microsoft reminded administrators that Windows Server 2022 will reach end of mainstream support on October 13, 2026, and will transition to extended support with monthly security updates through October 14, 2031. The company urged customers to plan upgrades to Windows Server 2025, available since November 2024, and to begin deployment testing early. Microsoft also extended hotpatching for Datacenter: Azure Edition until October 2027 and noted related lifecycle dates for other products.

🔐 Security leaders predict that by 2029 the CISO will shift from a primarily technical defender to a strategic business leader. Experts foresee CISOs enabling innovation, advising executives on risk, and coordinating enterprise-wide trust and resilience efforts while adapting to AI-driven speed and complexity. The role will vary by organization but will demand stronger business acumen, orchestration skills, and continuous validation of exposure.

🛠️ Administrators can now set per-user limits on index storage and agent hours in Amazon Quick to control subscription costs. Limit profiles let admins cap consumption at user, role, or account levels with a priority hierarchy to ensure appropriate capacity. When a user reaches their limit, new consumption is blocked while existing content is preserved. This capability is available for Professional and Enterprise plans in supported AWS Regions.