All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🕶️ DefCon has added smart glasses to its banned list, prohibiting audio- or video-recording eyewear because organizers say there is no reliable way to tell if they are recording, which undermines trust and privacy. Attendees are required to wear non-smart corrective lenses if needed. The ban supplements strict photography rules that limit group shots and encourage portrait settings to blur backgrounds. Growing market activity from Google, Samsung, and Apple has heightened concerns among conferences and CISOs about privacy and data security.

🚀 Amazon RDS for Oracle now offers 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances for R8i and M8i instances, delivering up to 53% savings versus On-Demand pricing. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, offering improved performance and memory bandwidth over prior Intel-based instances. Reserved Instance benefits apply across Multi-AZ and Single-AZ configurations and include size flexibility for BYOL licensing. Purchase options are available via the AWS Console, CLI, or SDK in supported regions.

🛠️ AWS Lambda now supports Java 8, Java 11, and Java 17 runtimes on Amazon Linux 2023 (AL2023), available as managed runtimes and container base images. These AL2023-based runtimes let customers migrate from Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) without having to upgrade their Java version immediately. AL2 reached end of life on June 30, 2026; AL2-based Java runtimes will receive critical and selected important patches until June 30, 2027 to assist migration.

📍Amazon Location Service now supports proximity-based point of interest discovery using GrabMaps data in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Asia Pacific (Malaysia) AWS Regions. Developers can call SearchNearby to return places within a specified radius and rank results by distance, with optional category filters such as fuel stations, hospitals, or restaurants. This enables localized discovery use cases for delivery, ride-hailing, and travel apps using hyperlocal data validated by millions of daily Grab journeys.

🔒 Modern platform migrations must involve security teams from the start. A contemporary XDR/EDR deployment is a multi-component ecosystem—storage, detection, investigation, and response—that places distinct demands on hardware and software. Vendors should specify supported components, versions, and licensing caveats rather than offer a single “yes.” Kaspersky NEXT XDR/EDR Expert now lists support for Nutanix 7.3, enabling integrated security during migration.

🛡️ Google is rolling out a new two-word naming scheme from its Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) to label cyber threat actors, replacing earlier TAG and Mandiant systems. The first word denotes motivation or activity type, while the second denotes the actor’s origin or status, such as "CASTLE" for China or "RELIC" for Russia, with non-state actors ending in "COMET." The move aims to standardize reporting but risks adding more confusion instead of unifying industry taxonomy.

🧭 Amazon CloudWatch now offers fully managed Prometheus collectors that gather metrics from AWS services such as Amazon EKS, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon MSK, and Amazon OpenSearch Service. You supply a scrape configuration and connections to your resources while CloudWatch provisions, scales, and collects metrics automatically. Collected metrics are delivered in OpenTelemetry format and can be queried with PromQL alongside AWS-vended metrics for unified dashboards, alarms, and cross-service correlation. The feature supports multiple discovery methods and is available in all Regions with the CloudWatch OTLP endpoint except Asia Pacific (New Zealand); standard ingestion and hourly managed collector charges apply.

🛡️ This Cloud CISO Perspectives piece from Google Cloud explains why AI-native defensive strategies should be a board-level priority. Authors Chris Betz and Alicja Cade outline how AI Threat Defense (AITD) shifts security from reactive to automated, enabling business speed and resilience. The article offers five governance-focused questions for directors to assess modernization, remediation, consolidation, contextual prioritization, and AI safety.

🛰️ Cloudflare has added isolation and access controls to its global Media over QUIC (MoQ) network by introducing a provisioning API that creates isolated relays (scopes) and issues publish/subscribe tokens. The relays are available across Cloudflare’s network within seconds with no servers to deploy and support draft-14 and draft-16 MoQ transport features; the beta is free to use. Tokens are scoped, revocable, and manageable via API or dashboard, and Cloudflare is documenting the control-plane model as an IETF Internet-Draft for broader interoperability.

🚀 AWS CodeDeploy is now available in five additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Thailand), Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), and Mexico (Central). The fully managed deployment service automates application rollouts to Amazon EC2, on-premises servers, AWS Lambda, and Amazon ECS, enabling lower latency and helping meet data residency needs for customers in these regions. CodeDeploy now operates across 34 commercial regions plus AWS GovCloud (US) and the AWS China Regions.

🧭 Today, AWS released the open source Context Ontology Accelerator to help organizations build machine-readable ontologies of products, customers, policies, and operational rules for more explainable and auditable AI agents. The accelerator connects to structured and unstructured data, uses AI to draft ontologies for domain experts to review, and stores the approved model in a knowledge graph using W3C standards. It includes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so any standards-based agent can consume the ontology.

🔧 Starting today, Amazon EC2 C7i-flex instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) are available in Europe (Milan). These AWS-exclusive processors deliver up to 15% better performance compared to comparable x86 Intel processors used by other providers. C7i-flex offers improved price-performance—up to 19% better than C6i—and supports sizes from large to 16xlarge for common compute-intensive workloads.

🚀 Amazon EC2 C7i instances, powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids), are now available in Europe (Milan) and Canada West (Calgary). These AWS‑exclusive processors deliver up to 15% better performance than comparable x86 Intel processors used by other cloud providers. C7i instances provide up to 15% improved price-performance versus C6i, larger instance sizes up to 48xlarge, and two bare‑metal sizes with built‑in Intel accelerators for data and compute offload.

🔧 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now provides full Git version control directly within core tools like Query Editor, Visual ETL, Workflows, and Notebooks. The updated Repositories experience replaces automatic sync with flexible, file-level control and lets teams choose which files to track in Git on GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. Repositories are decoupled from project creation, support multiple repos and branches concurrently, and preserve CLI access via JupyterLab or Code Editor terminals.

🔍 AWS Direct Connect now provides visibility into Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes exchanged between AWS and your on-premises routers for private, transit, and public virtual interfaces (VIFs). You can view accepted and advertised routes, including prefix, address family, AS path, community values, and installation timestamp, via the Direct Connect console or the ListVirtualInterfaceRoutes API. Filters let you narrow results by prefix, AS path, community, or address family, helping troubleshoot routing, validate BGP policies, and monitor hybrid connectivity. The feature is available in all AWS commercial Regions and AWS China Regions.

🔔 Amazon Redshift now offers Graviton-based rg.large and rg.12xlarge instances on the trailing maintenance track starting with patch P202. The trailing track targets customers prioritizing stability by running versions validated in the leading track. RG instances deliver up to 2.4x faster query performance than RA3 at ~30% lower price per vCPU. Customers can provision or resize clusters to these instance types via the AWS Console, CLI, or SDKs in all regions where RG is generally available.

🛠️ AWS has updated the IAM Policy Simulator with three key changes: it is now integrated into the IAM console, it supports testing of service control policies (SCPs), and it offers greater modeling flexibility for realistic scenarios. The simulator replaces the standalone site and lets you include SCPs to evaluate interactions with identity and resource policies. New options allow excluding specific policies to model removal scenarios, and cross-account simulations report per-policy decisions with matched statements shown for denials. These enhancements aid automation of policy unit tests, detection of over-permissive access, and validation of guardrails across regions where the simulator is available.

🔍 Amazon Inspector’s SBOM Generator (inspector-sbomgen) now supports a plugin system that lets developers add custom package collectors without recompiling or waiting for official releases. The post explains how to scaffold plugins, the discovery-collection pipeline, testing with Lua fixtures, and IDE support for rapid iteration. It also details the sandboxed safety model, artifact tracing via source_path, and how plugin-generated components integrate with Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning.

🔒 Google reports that AI has enabled Chrome to patch 1,072 security bugs across Chrome 149 and 150, exceeding the total fixed in the prior 23 milestones combined. The company uses large language models across the vulnerability lifecycle—from discovery and repro to patch generation and testing—and has developed multi-agent systems like Naptime and Big Sleep. Google is also accelerating updates with tighter release cycles and exploring dynamic patching to reduce the window between fix commit and user update.

🧭 This article explains how Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Agent Sandbox helps platform teams run more AI agents per node by replacing heavy microVMs with lightweight gVisor sandboxes. It summarizes testing on an n2-standard-48 VM showing Agent Sandbox increased agent density from 61 to 88 in a baseline scenario and enabled higher-density modes up to 274 agents with suspend/resume and warm-pool strategies. The piece highlights cost and performance trade-offs and orchestration patterns like pod snapshots for freezing idle agents.