All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 2F-IT has built a Fortinet-centric consultancy in Germany by concentrating senior NSE 8 expertise within a compact team. This approach embeds expert practitioners into delivery, mentorship, and architecture decisions, reducing reliance on single points of failure. The firm supports certification through labs, mentoring, and incentives, translating deep technical capability into higher quality, resilient customer outcomes across complex environments.

🔒 AWS now offers Claude Opus 5, the latest Opus model with optional zero data retention (ZDR) for enterprise customers. The model improves coding capabilities, long-running agents, and complex document analysis while supporting regional residency and AWS-managed features. Customers can access Opus 5 via Amazon Bedrock (ZDR by default) or Claude Platform on AWS (ZDR on request). The offering integrates with AWS billing, authentication, and governance features.

🛠️ Amazon Redshift now offers an All Upfront payment option for 3‑year Serverless Reservations, delivering up to 50% savings versus on‑demand rates. This joins existing 1‑year No Upfront, 1‑year All Upfront, and 3‑year No Upfront options to provide more flexibility for cost optimization. Reservations are managed at the AWS payer account level and can be shared across accounts to reduce compute costs for Amazon Redshift Serverless workloads.

🛰️ Two new models, Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Sonnet 5, are now available in the Kiro IDE and CLI for AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Opus 4.8 targets complex multi-step tasks with improved self-verification and a 1M context window (2.2x credit multiplier), while Sonnet 5 offers agentic reasoning and coding at lower cost with experimental support and a 1M context window (1.3x credit multiplier). Kiro administrators gain enhanced monitoring and tracking: an aggregate usage dashboard, daily per-user CSV telemetry to your S3 bucket, and optional prompt logging for compliance and debugging, with data stored in the customer's account. Update your IDE/CLI and restart to access the new models.

🔐 Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) is introducing a unified cryptonym-based naming schema to standardize threat actor tracking across platforms and reports. The system uses two-word names: a unique memorable term and a second word denoting motivation, origin, or activity type to aid defenders. Several dozen active groups will be renamed initially, with prior aliases and MITRE ATT&CK mappings preserved for continuity. The approach aims to simplify mapping across vendor taxonomies while acknowledging visibility differences.

⚙️ AWS Clean Rooms now supports larger worker types of 32 vCPUs with 244 GB of memory for SQL analyses, up from the previous 16 vCPUs and 120 GB. The increase enables more compute- and memory-intensive workloads, improving performance for complex queries on large datasets and helping customers optimize costs. Use cases include running complex feature engineering across billions of records to accelerate model training and collaboration between advertisers and publishers.

🛠️ Cloudflare announced Cache Response Rules, a new rule type that runs after an origin response arrives but before Cloudflare caches it. These rules let you rewrite Cache-Control, manage cache-tags, and strip headers like Set-Cookie, ETag, and Last-Modified without changing the origin. The feature complements existing Cache Rules by giving the response phase final control over whether and how Cloudflare caches content.

🤝 AT&T partnered with Microsoft Foundry and AMD to build OTel2.0, a telecom-focused AI stack that processes massive token volumes while controlling cost and complexity. Using Foundry Managed Compute and a mix of open models such as Phi-4, OSS-120B, and Gemma-4, AT&T scaled across heterogeneous GPUs (including AMD MI300X) to run experiments, data preparation, and training—processing about 1T tokens and leveraging ~530 GPUs. The effort prioritized rapid deployment, model choice, and economic efficiency.

🔔 AWS now allows customers who pay via electronic funds transfer to set preferences for automatic application of credit memos. Choices on the Billing and Cost Management console include applying credit memos to the original invoice, the next eligible invoice, or the oldest unpaid invoice. By default, credits apply to the original invoice first, then future invoices, unless changed.

🆕 Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports community MySQL 9.7 in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, enabling testing of the latest Long-Term Support release. The preview serves as a sandbox to evaluate new features, bug fixes, and security patches before general availability. Instances in the preview are retained up to 60 days and snapshots are limited to preview restores; pricing matches production RDS in the US East (Ohio) Region.

🔧 AWS has announced the general availability of the AWS Lambda Durable Execution SDK for .NET, enabling C# developers to build resilient, long-running workflows using Lambda durable functions. The SDK provides idiomatic C# constructs for progress checkpointing, durable invocation, callbacks for human or agent-in-the-loop workflows, and suspension waits of up to a year. It installs via NuGet, includes a local testing emulator for debugging, and supports common multi-step scenarios like payment pipelines and AI orchestration.

📣 Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports vended Application Load Balancer (ALB) logs to improve observability and simplify debugging of network traffic patterns. You can analyze ALB access, connection, and health check logs directly in CloudWatch to gain insights into client connections, traffic distribution, and target health. CloudWatch telemetry enablement rules allow automatic configuration of logging for existing and new ALBs across organizations, accounts, or specific resources to ensure consistent monitoring coverage.

🔎 Amazon Bedrock AgentCore now sends traces, prompts, structured logs, and standard output to a single per-agent Amazon CloudWatch log group, consolidating previously separated telemetry. This removes the need to search across multiple log groups and enables scoping of IAM policies and CMK encryption at the agent level. New agents created from July 20, 2026 use this by default in supported regions; existing agents can enable it via an environment variable and ADOT 0.17.1+.

🧭 This post introduces co-operative time-slicing from the llm-d project to reduce accelerator idle time during reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models. By treating sampling and training steps as schedulable phases, the platform interleaves independent RL jobs on shared hardware, increasing aggregate GPU duty cycles from ~40% to 70% without harming convergence. The system uses a client library, a cluster orchestrator, and a node-level snapshot agent to checkpoint and restore device state, enabling fast context switches and improved price-performance for RL workloads.

🚀 Amazon Web Services (AWS) now offers Amazon EC2 I8ge instances in Europe (London) and Canada (Central). Powered by AWS Graviton4, these storage-optimized instances deliver up to 60% better compute performance and up to 55% better real-time storage performance per TB versus prior generations. I8ge provides up to 120TB of local NVMe, reduced storage I/O latency, and up to 180 Gbps network bandwidth across eleven sizes.

🚀 Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) is now available in Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (Zurich), and Europe (Stockholm). This expansion enables running VMware Cloud Foundation directly in your Amazon VPC on EC2 bare-metal instances powered by AWS Nitro. It supports VCF 9.0 and 9.1, allowing rapid migration, reduced operational risk, and improved proximity for lower latency and compliance.

🤖 Voicify partnered with Google Cloud to transform phone calls into reliable, AI-driven interactions for restaurants and healthcare. By adopting Gemini Enterprise and Vertex AI, the company improved latency, reduced costs, and achieved enterprise-grade security and compliance. Their orchestration platform validates orders against POS systems, handles traffic spikes with provisioned throughput and pay-as-you-go, and shortened client onboarding dramatically. The architecture emphasizes scalability, data integrity, and multicloud availability.

🚀 In the agentic era, organizations must move from passive data stores to proactive systems of action by providing AI agents with trusted business context. Google introduces the Agentic Data Cloud to unify data, models, and operational databases on an AI-native stack, leveraging BigQuery, Spanner, and open standards like Apache Iceberg. The approach reduces latency, operational overhead, and integration gaps that hinder production-grade agentic AI.

🔔 Microsoft Teams and several Microsoft 365 services experienced an outage on July 23, with users reporting access problems for Teams, SharePoint, Excel, and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center. Downdetector recorded 2,403 reports at 11:11 a.m. ET, well above the normal baseline. SharePoint drove most complaints (78%), followed by Excel (11%) and the Admin Center (6%). Microsoft acknowledged the disruption, citing incident MO1437424 and stating it is investigating.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker AI now supports EC2 G7e instances in Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). These instances include up to 8 NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs (96 GB each), 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, and up to 1,600 Gbps EFA networking, offering up to 2.3x inference performance versus G6e. G7e delivers up to 768 GB total GPU memory enabling single-node serving of medium-to-large LLMs up to 70B with FP8 precision and is suited for LLM inference, image/video generation, spatial and scientific computing.