All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

📱 Google’s phone number verification notifies users when their SIM is confirmed and links that number to all Google accounts on the device. The feature supports RCS messaging and fraud protection but can surface hidden verification SMS or metadata collection. Verification runs by default, may use carrier APIs or hidden SMS, and can attach identifiers like ICCID/IMSI. Users can opt out per account but may lose RCS and risk re-enablement.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker AI Inference now supports G7 instances powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, delivering up to 4.6x inference performance versus G6. G7 offers 32 GB per GPU, 5th Gen Tensor Cores, up to 700 Gbps EFA-enabled networking, and up to 7.6 TB NVMe local storage, enabling efficient serving of 7B–30B models, image/video generation, and multi-model endpoints. Deploy via the SageMaker console, API, or SDK by selecting ml.g7.* instance types; availability currently includes US East (N. Virginia, Ohio) and US West (Oregon).

🚀 Amazon EKS now supports Amazon EC2 placement groups and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) configuration for node pools in EKS Auto Mode and the open-source Karpenter. These options let you choose EFA-only or standard ENI configurations on EFA-capable instances and control instance distribution with cluster, spread, or partition placement strategies. The features improve performance and availability for distributed training, inference, and production services and are available in all Regions where EKS operates.

🚀 Checkout.com migrated from a self-hosted Apache Airflow to Google Cloud’s Managed Service for Apache Airflow (Gen 3) to reduce operational overhead and improve reliability. The move eliminated manual patching and scaling, introduced DAG isolation and managed upgrades, and integrated with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging for better visibility. As a result, the team saw faster deployments, higher stability, and estimated monthly cost savings of ~30%.

📢 Microsoft confirmed it will stop shipping security updates for Exchange Server 2016 and Exchange Server 2019 under the Extended Security Update (ESU) program in October 2026. The announcement follows a six-month extension granted in April 2026 and reiterates there will be no further extensions. Administrators are urged to upgrade to Exchange Server Subscription Edition or migrate to Exchange Online.

🛡️ Google has made CodeMender available as a fully managed AI code security agent for enterprise customers via the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and AI Threat Defense. Originally a DeepMind research project, CodeMender now builds and runs PoC exploits in sandboxes, proposes tested fixes into pipelines, and offers multiple Gemini model options for cost and coverage balance. Features include secure traffic routing, data isolation, zero code retention and integrations with tools like VS Code and Antigravity.

🔔 AWS Secrets Manager now publishes events to Amazon EventBridge when secret values change, enabling event-driven responses without parsing CloudTrail. You can create EventBridge rules to detect active secret value changes and route them to targets like AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, or Amazon Step Functions. Notifications are published to the default event bus automatically, require no opt-in, and are available in all Regions where AWS Secrets Manager is offered at no extra cost.

🔒 As CSOs gain prominence, many now report directly to the CEO, shifting expectations from technical stewardship to strategic partnership. Reporting to the CEO grants greater access and influence but demands business-focused skills, clear metrics, and the ability to translate risk into business impact. Experts recommend aligning expectations, documenting goals, prioritizing trust and candor, and treating governance as a strategic enabler to drive organizational resilience.

📢 AWS has expanded 100 Gbps dedicated Direct Connect capacity at the Cirion data center in Lima, Peru. This location now supports private connections to all public AWS Regions (excluding China), AWS GovCloud, and AWS Local Zones, and is the first in Peru to offer 100 Gbps with MACsec encryption. Direct Connect provides private, physical links between AWS and customer data centers, offices, or colocation environments to deliver more consistent network performance than the public internet.

🛡️ LG Electronics USA will suspend smart TV apps that convert televisions into always-on residential proxy nodes, following research showing over 42% of webOS apps contain such proxy SDKs. The company is working with developers to remove the option and will suspend noncompliant apps, while tightening its app evaluation process. Spur’s research also found similar proxy components in Samsung’s Tizen apps, and proxy providers such as Bright Data were commonly identified. LG emphasized ongoing platform reviews to protect users.

🚨 AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) is now available in six additional Regions: Bangkok, Malaysia, New Zealand, Taipei, Calgary, and Mexico Central. AWS DRS is the recommended disaster recovery service for minimizing downtime and data loss, supporting recovery from physical servers, VMware, Hyper-V, and cloud environments. It enables point-in-time recovery, cross-Region EC2 recovery, and unified drills, failback, and recovery for diverse enterprise applications and databases.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 C6in instances are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei). These sixth-generation network-optimized instances, powered by 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the AWS Nitro System, deliver up to 200 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 100 Gbps Amazon EBS bandwidth with 400K IOPS. C6in instances support up to 128 vCPUs across 10 sizes (including bare metal) and offer EFA on 32xlarge and metal sizes for high-performance networking.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 M6in and M6idn instances are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) and South America (Sao Paulo). These sixth-generation, network-optimized instances use 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the AWS Nitro System to deliver up to 200 Gbps network bandwidth—roughly 2x the bandwidth of comparable fifth-generation instances. They support up to 128 vCPUs, 512 GiB memory, up to 100 Gbps EBS bandwidth, 400K IOPS, EFA on select sizes, and up to 7.6 TB of instance storage on M6idn variants.

🚀 Amazon EC2 R6in and R6idn instances are now available in AWS Europe (Paris) and Canada (Central). These sixth-generation, network-optimized instances use 3rd Gen Intel Xeon processors and the AWS Nitro System to deliver up to 200 Gbps network bandwidth, 2x improved bandwidth and packet-processing versus prior generation. They support up to 128 vCPUs, 1024 GiB memory, up to 100 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and offer EFA on select sizes. R6idn adds up to 7.6 TB of high-speed instance storage.

🔎 Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio now supports Amazon OpenSearch as a data source, allowing you to query and analyze search and log analytics data alongside other assets. You can combine OpenSearch data with sources like Amazon Redshift, Amazon S3, and relational databases within a single governed environment. The integration enables correlating operational search data with analytical datasets for cross-source insights and streamlined workflows.

🛡️ AWS WAF now supports dynamic label interpolation, allowing labels applied to requests (including managed Bot Control and ATP labels) to be referenced by namespace instead of enumerating individual values. Use the ${namespace:} syntax in custom request/response headers and response bodies to forward matched labels and synthetic values (client IP, request ID, JA3/JA4) to your origin or embed them in challenge and block pages. This reduces rule maintenance, supports hundreds of evolving bot categories, enables per-device signals, and lets applications make nuanced decisions—such as challenges, redirects, or routing—based on WAF classifications.

🟦 Amazon Elastic Container Service now includes built-in blue/green, linear, and canary deployment strategies in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, enabling safer and faster containerized application updates. These features are native to Amazon ECS and remove the need for custom deployment tooling while offering production-ready controls like deployment lifecycle hooks, bake time, and quick rollback. Deployments run alongside existing versions for validation before traffic shifts, and you can use CloudWatch alarms, the deployment circuit breaker, or the StopServiceDeployment API to detect failures and rollback. Support includes ALB, NLB, and ECS Service Connect and configuration is available via the Console, CLI, SDKs, or IaC.

📣 Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) now offers three hierarchical pricing plans — Essentials, Pro, and Enterprise — that bundle commonly used deliverability and management capabilities. Each plan builds on the prior tier and provides progressively greater features at a discount versus à‑la‑carte purchases. Plans remove the need to evaluate and buy individual add-ons and are available in all AWS Regions where SES operates except the Middle East (UAE) and Bahrain.

🔒 AlloyDB, a PostgreSQL-compatible managed service, now offers columnar engine accelerated HNSW to speed up pgvector vector search. This preview feature pins HNSW indexes in a compressed, in-memory columnar cache to reduce buffer-manager overhead and enable up to 4x higher QPS compared to standard PostgreSQL. The enhancement requires simple flag changes and uses the same pgvector SQL syntax, delivering higher throughput and improved AI recall without application changes.

📘 Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now provides Action Logs, an observability feature that records detailed, timestamped actions ECS performs during service deployments and Managed Daemon updates. These logs surface previously invisible service-side operations to help monitor and troubleshoot workloads without contacting AWS Support. You can enable Action Logs at the cluster level via the console or CloudWatch vended logs APIs and deliver them to CloudWatch Logs, S3, or Kinesis Data Firehose. Amazon Q in the ECS console integrates with Action Logs to detect deployment issues and provide root cause analysis and remediation guidance; standard CloudWatch/S3/Firehose pricing applies.