All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

📊 Amazon Connect now exposes eight new metrics to evaluate AI agent outcomes, including goal success rate, faithfulness score, and tool selection accuracy. These metrics give contact center teams visibility into whether AI-driven interactions resolve customer requests and where contextual hallucinations occur. Metrics are accessible from the AI Agent Performance dashboard, the GetMetricDataV2 API, or a zero-ETL data lake for custom reporting. This capability is available in all Regions that support Amazon Connect AI Agents.

🏦 AWS Marketplace sellers can now delete bank accounts directly from the Payment Settings page in the AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP). This self-service capability supports removal of ACH- and SWIFT-type accounts without contacting customer service, and shows Last Updated timestamps for each entry. The change helps enterprises and ISVs clean up unused or failed accounts, reduce payment routing risk, and simplify multi-currency banking management.

⚙️ AWS Deadline Cloud now supports configurable pre- and post-submission scripts, enabling studios to run custom pipeline logic as part of every job submission. Pre-submission hooks can validate job configurations, discover and attach additional inputs such as textures or caches, modify submission parameters, or enforce studio policies before uploads; post-submission hooks can send notifications, update tracking systems, or log submission details. Scripts are defined in simple YAML or JSON files placed per-job or in a shared directory via an environment variable, receive job metadata automatically, and support configurable timeouts.

🛠️ Microsoft now allows IT administrators to uninstall the AI-powered Microsoft Copilot app from managed enterprise devices using the new RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp policy setting, broadly available after the April 2026 Patch Tuesday. The setting is provided as a Policy CSP and Group Policy for endpoints managed via Microsoft Intune or SCCM, and applies only to Windows 11 25H2 devices where both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are installed, the user did not install the Copilot app, and it has not been launched in the last 28 days. If enabled, the app will be uninstalled in a non-disruptive way; users can still re-install it if they choose.

🚀 GPT-5.5 is being made generally available in Microsoft Foundry, enabling enterprises to run OpenAI's latest frontier model for production agentic workflows. The model brings deeper long-context reasoning, improved agentic execution, higher computer-use accuracy, and better token efficiency. Foundry supplies governance, identity isolation, persistent sandboxes, and integrations to evaluate and scale agents securely.

🔗 Amazon Athena now provides managed connectors for 12 external data sources, including DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Snowflake, enabling queries against data outside Amazon S3 without deploying connector infrastructure. Athena creates and manages AWS Glue Data Catalog federated connectors on your behalf and registers each source as a federated catalog. You can query those sources alongside S3 data and optionally apply fine‑grained access controls through AWS Lake Formation. Federated queries are available in all standard AWS Regions except AWS GovCloud (US) and China Regions.

🔗 AWS announced native integration between AWS Client VPN and AWS Transit Gateway, enabling centralized remote access across multiple VPCs and on-premises networks without an intermediate VPC. Client source IPs are preserved end-to-end, allowing authorization rules and forensic tracing to map traffic back to specific users. Transit Gateway flow logs capture connection-level details tied to those preserved client IPs, improving troubleshooting and auditability. The integration is available in all Regions where Client VPN is offered and incurs no additional charges beyond standard service pricing.

🔧 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now automatically selects and continuously maintains the optimal network topology for Slurm GPU clusters based on the instance types in the cluster. By choosing tree or block topology models that match instance interconnect characteristics, HyperPod reduces GPU-to-GPU latency, improves NCCL collective efficiency, and raises distributed training throughput. The topology adapts automatically during scale-up, scale-down, and node replacement events, so administrators no longer need to manually edit topology files or reconfigure Slurm. Topology-aware scheduling is enabled by default across supported AWS Regions.

🚀 AWS Parallel Computing Service (AWS PCS) now supports Slurm 25.11, including an expedited re-queue feature that can automatically reschedule jobs affected by node issues at highest priority. You can enable a Prometheus-compatible OpenMetrics endpoint for real-time visibility into jobs, nodes, and scheduling using existing monitoring tools. AWS PCS can forward slurmdbd and slurmrestd logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon S3, or Amazon Data Firehose. Scheduler audit logs are now delivered as a dedicated log type to provide independent control over ingestion, retention, and storage costs.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports serverless notebooks and a built-in data agent for AWS IAM Identity Center (IdC) domains, extending functionality that was previously available only in IAM domains. The serverless notebook provides a single interactive workspace for SQL, Python, large-scale data processing, ML workloads, and visualizations. A built-in AI data agent generates code and SQL from natural-language prompts and helps guide users through tasks. The environment is backed by Amazon Athena for Apache Spark, scaling from interactive queries to petabyte-scale processing, and is available in all Regions where Unified Studio is supported.

🔧 Amazon has released the aws-smus-cicd-cli, an open-source command-line tool that automates deployment of multi-service data and AI applications built in SageMaker Unified Studio. Teams define applications once in an manifest.yaml, and the CLI substitutes stage-specific settings, provisions resources in dependency order, and runs post-deployment tests. Four lifecycle commands — describe, bundle, deploy, test — integrate with existing CI/CD pipelines to reduce configuration drift and speed releases. The CLI is available at no additional cost in supported Regions; you pay only for the AWS resources provisioned during deployment.

⚙️ AWS Compute Optimizer now supports the newest EC2 and RDS instance types, expanding recommendations to include Compute, General Purpose, Memory-optimized, Memory-intensive, and Storage-optimized families. The update covers EC2 families such as C8*, M8*, R8*, x8i, and i7i, and RDS classes including M7i, M8g, R8g, X1, and Z1d across MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora MySQL, and Aurora PostgreSQL. This capability is available in all standard AWS Regions where Compute Optimizer operates, excluding AWS GovCloud (US) and the two China regions.

🔒 AWS has announced general availability of the AWS for SAP MCP Server on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling AI agents to connect directly and securely to SAP ERP systems at scale. Built on Model Context Protocol (MCP) and SAP OData standards, the server supports CRUD access to sales orders, purchase orders, materials, and finance documents. The managed AgentCore Runtime provides session isolation, private connectivity, and dual-layer authentication with CloudWatch telemetry and CloudFormation templates for rapid, no-infrastructure deployment.

📊 AWS has launched the Attributed Revenue dashboard in AWS Partner Central, providing Partners a self-service view of monthly attributed revenue by product, AWS service, and billing period. The dashboard consolidates data from the three Partner Revenue Measurement methods — Resource Tagging, User Agent string, and AWS Marketplace Metering — so Partners can monitor consumption patterns and revenue trends. Partners with multiple AWS Marketplace seller accounts can connect subsidiary accounts to see aggregated revenue across all connected accounts, and the dashboard is available in all commercial regions for Partners migrated to AWS Partner Central.

🔍 AWS has extended Elastic Beanstalk's AI-powered environment analysis to Windows Server platforms, enabling developers and operators to diagnose and resolve Windows-based environment issues more quickly. The feature collects recent events, instance health metrics, and logs from Windows instances and sends that telemetry to Amazon Bedrock for analysis. You can request an AI analysis from the Elastic Beanstalk console using the AI Analysis button or programmatically via the AWS CLI with the RequestEnvironmentInfo and RetrieveEnvironmentInfo operations. Results include step-by-step troubleshooting recommendations tailored to the environment's current state and are available in Regions where both services are offered.

🚀 Second-generation AWS Outposts racks are now supported in the AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul, Sydney) and Europe (Paris) Regions. Outposts racks bring AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools into on‑premises data centers or colocation spaces to provide a consistent hybrid experience. Customers can order racks attached to these Regions to optimize latency, meet data residency requirements, run low-latency workloads locally, and manage applications from their home Region.

🔒 Amazon Quick now supports adding co-owners to admin-managed Microsoft SharePoint Online and Google Drive knowledge bases and their data source connections. Owners receive full management capabilities — editing, syncing, sharing, and deleting — while Viewers have query-only access. The Owner co-owner option is restricted to admin-managed SharePoint and Google Drive; other knowledge base types support Viewer sharing only. Administrators can also share connections so teams can create knowledge bases from the same integration. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Quick is offered.

🔒 Fortinet released its 2025 Sustainability Report, outlining progress in securing the digital world, reducing environmental impact, expanding cybersecurity education, and strengthening governance. The company expanded AI-driven threat protection across its portfolio and introduced quantum-safe capabilities in FortiOS. It also improved product energy efficiency—up to a 62% reduction for select models—and has trained over 914,800 people toward its 1M goal.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has launched EC2 X8g instances in the Europe (Ireland) region. Powered by AWS Graviton4 processors, X8g delivers up to 60% better performance than Graviton2-based X2gd instances and supports up to 3 TiB of memory with an increased memory-per-vCPU ratio. These instances target memory-intensive workloads — including EDA, in-memory caches, relational databases, real-time analytics, and memory-heavy containerized applications — and provide enhanced networking, high EBS bandwidth, and EFA/ENA support on larger sizes.

🆕 Amazon Redshift now supports row-level UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE operations on Apache Iceberg tables, allowing direct DML on both partitioned and unpartitioned Iceberg datasets. Customers can perform UPSERT workflows such as change data capture and slowly changing dimensions without moving data to external engines. Tables remain interoperable with other Iceberg-compatible engines and respect AWS Lake Formation permissions. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where Redshift is offered.