All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

AWS launches Apache Spark Upgrade Agent for Amazon EMR

🛠️ AWS announced the Apache Spark upgrade agent, a capability that automates and accelerates Spark version upgrades for Amazon EMR on EC2 and EMR Serverless. The agent performs automated code analysis across PySpark and Scala, identifies API and behavioral changes for Spark 2.4→3.5, and suggests precise code transformations. Engineers can invoke the agent from SageMaker Unified Studio, the Kiro CLI, or any MCP-compatible IDE, interact via natural-language prompts, review proposed edits, and approve implementations. Functional correctness is validated through data quality checks to help maintain processing accuracy during migration.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP Adds S3 Access Points Support

📂 You can now attach Amazon S3 Access Points to Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file systems so applications can access file data as if it were stored in S3. This lets a broad range of AI, ML, and analytics services—including Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, and Glue—use your FSx file data without copying it. Create and attach access points via the Amazon FSx console, AWS CLI, or SDK; support for existing file systems will arrive in a forthcoming maintenance window. The capability is available in select AWS Regions.

No-Cost Google Cloud AI Training to Upskill This Holiday

🎁 This holiday season Google Skills provides no-cost AI courses and hands-on labs taught by Google Cloud experts, intended for both technical and non-technical learners. Technical offerings include sandboxed labs covering Gemini Code Assist, Vibe coding, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration, ADK agents, fine-tuning, and AI infrastructure, with 35 free monthly credits to practice in real environments. Non-technical content emphasizes leadership, Gemini Enterprise, NotebookLM, short practical lessons, and skill badges or certification prep to validate progress.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server: Optimize CPU on M7i/R7i

🔧Amazon RDS for SQL Server introduces an Optimize CPU option with support for M7i and R7i instance families, lowering prices by up to 55% compared with equivalent sixth‑generation instances. Optimize CPU disables SMT on instances with two or more physical CPU cores to halve vCPU counts and associated third‑party licensing charges while preserving the same number of physical cores and near‑equivalent performance. The biggest savings appear on 2Xlarge and larger sizes and on Multi‑AZ deployments; memory‑ or I/O‑intensive workloads can be further tuned to reduce costs.

Amazon EC2 P6e-GB300 UltraServers Now Generally Available

🚀 AWS has announced general availability of Amazon EC2 P6e-GB300 UltraServers powered by the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72. The new UltraServers deliver 1.5× GPU memory and 1.5× FP4 compute (without sparsity) compared with P6e-GB200, enabling higher-context inference and improved throughput for large models. Ideal for reasoning, Agentic AI, and production inference; contact your AWS sales representative to get started.

S3 Storage Lens: performance metrics and prefix analytics

📊 S3 Storage Lens now provides three new capabilities: application performance metrics, expanded prefix analytics across billions of prefixes, and direct export of metrics to managed S3 Tables. The performance metrics include access pattern, request origin, and object access count metrics to surface inefficient requests, cross‑Region access, and hot object reads. Enable these features in your advanced dashboard to make metrics queryable via AWS analytics services.

Amazon EC2 X8i memory-optimized instances (Preview)

🚀 Amazon Web Services today announced a preview of Amazon EC2 X8i, a next-generation memory-optimized instance family built on custom Intel Xeon 6 processors. X8i offers up to 6 TB of memory—1.5× the capacity of X2i—and up to 3.4× the memory bandwidth of the previous generation. AWS reports 35% higher overall performance compared with X2i, and X8i is SAP-certified with a 46% SAPS increase for mission-critical SAP deployments. The instances target in-memory databases, large-scale databases, analytics, and EDA workloads; customers can request preview access to evaluate performance and fit.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server Adds Developer Edition Support

🆕 Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server 2022 Developer Edition, enabling teams to run a feature-complete, free edition of SQL Server in non-production RDS instances. The Developer Edition includes all Enterprise features for building, testing, and demonstrating applications while reducing licensing costs for development and test environments. Core RDS capabilities — automated backups, automated software updates, monitoring, and encryption — are supported on Developer Edition. The license is strictly limited to development and testing and may not be used in production or for commercial end-user scenarios.

AWS Announces Memory-Optimized EC2 X8aedz Instances

🚀 AWS has introduced Amazon EC2 X8aedz, a new memory-optimized instance family powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (Turin) that deliver up to 5 GHz maximum CPU frequency. X8aedz claims up to 2x higher compute performance and ~31% improved price-performance versus the prior X2iezn generation, combining high single-thread speed with a 32:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio and local NVMe storage. Instances come in eight sizes (2–96 vCPUs, 64–3,072 GiB), include two bare-metal variants, and offer up to 8 TB of local NVMe SSD. They are available now in US West (Oregon) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and can be purchased via On-Demand, Spot, or Savings Plans.

Unit 42 and AWS Launch No-Cost Incident Response Retainer

🔒 Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 and Amazon Web Services have expanded their partnership to offer a no-cost Unit 42 Incident Response Retainer in AWS Marketplace for qualified customers. The retainer provides 250 hours of initial incident response, a 2-hour response SLA and 24/7/365 access to Unit 42’s incident response team. The offering is designed to accelerate containment, enable holistic investigations across cloud and enterprise environments, and reduce procurement overhead while providing preferred pricing for proactive services.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Adds Policy and Evaluations

🛡️ Amazon Web Services' AgentCore introduces preview features — Policy and Evaluations — to help teams scale agents from prototypes into production. Policy intercepts real-time tool calls via AgentCore Gateway and converts natural-language rules into Cedar for auditability and compliance without custom code. Evaluations offers 13 built-in evaluators plus custom model-based scoring, with all quality metrics surfaced in an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard to simplify continuous testing and monitoring.

AWS Lambda Durable Functions for Multi‑Step Workflows

🔁 AWS announced Lambda durable functions, a built-in capability for authoring reliable multi-step applications and AI workflows within the Lambda developer experience. Durable functions automatically checkpoint execution, can suspend runs for up to one year, and recover from failures without requiring additional infrastructure. New primitives like steps and waits let developers pause and resume logic without incurring compute charges, while the service handles state and error recovery so teams can focus on business logic.

AWS Support transforms support with AI-driven plans

🤖 AWS Support has restructured its support portfolio into three AI-driven plans: Business Support+, Enterprise Support, and Unified Operations. Each tier layers faster response times, proactive guidance, and AI-assisted operations while combining generative AI with AWS engineering expertise. Highlights include 24/7 contextual AI assistance, designated TAMs, integrated security incident response, and the preview AWS DevOps Agent for one-click context sharing and proactive incident prevention. These plans are available in all commercial AWS Regions.

Amazon EMR Serverless Removes Local Storage Provisioning

🚀 Amazon EMR Serverless now provides fully managed serverless local storage for Apache Spark workloads, removing the need to provision disk type or size per application. The service offloads intermediate operations such as shuffle to an auto-scaling, encrypted serverless storage with job-level isolation, so customers pay only for compute and memory consumed. This reduces disk-related job failures and can lower costs by up to 20%. It is generally available for EMR release 7.12 and later.

Amazon Nova Forge: Build Frontier Models with Nova

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced general availability of Nova Forge, a SageMaker AI service that enables organizations to build custom frontier models from Nova checkpoints across pre-, mid-, and post-training phases. Developers can blend proprietary data with Amazon-curated datasets, run Reinforcement Fine Tuning (RFT) with in-environment reward functions, and apply custom safety guardrails via a built-in responsible AI toolkit. Nova Forge includes early access to Nova 2 Pro and Nova 2 Omni and is available today in US East (N. Virginia).

Amazon EC2 M4 Max Mac instances (Preview) for Apple builds

🚀 Amazon Web Services is previewing Amazon EC2 M4 Max Mac instances, powered by the latest Mac Studio hardware to accelerate demanding Apple build and test workflows. These next-generation Mac instances target developers building for iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, and Safari. M4 Max offers a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and 128 GB unified memory, plus Nitro-based networking and EBS bandwidth to support large-scale CI/CD and testing.

Amazon CloudWatch Unified Data Management and Analytics

🔎 Amazon CloudWatch now provides unified data management and analytics to consolidate operational, security, and compliance data across AWS and third-party sources. The launch enables organization-wide ingestion from AWS sources such as AWS CloudTrail, Amazon VPC, and Amazon WAF, plus managed collectors for CrowdStrike, Okta, and Palo Alto Networks. Customers can use pipelines to transform and enrich logs to standard formats like OCSF and define facets for faster insights. Data can be stored in managed Amazon S3 Tables at no additional storage charge and queried natively or with any Apache Iceberg-compatible analytics tool.

Amazon OpenSearch: GPU-Accelerated Auto-Optimized Vectors

🚀Amazon OpenSearch Service now offers GPU-accelerated, auto-optimized vector indexes that let teams build billion-scale vector databases in under an hour. Serverless GPU acceleration can speed index builds up to 10X while reducing indexing cost to roughly a quarter of previous expenses. Auto-optimize jobs evaluate k-NN algorithms, quantization, and engine settings against specified latency and recall targets to produce configuration recommendations without manual tuning. These capabilities support vector collections and OpenSearch 2.17+/3.1+ domains across multiple regions.

Amazon Nova 2 Omni: Multimodal Reasoning Model Preview

🚀 Amazon announced Nova 2 Omni, an all‑in‑one multimodal model in preview that accepts text, images, video, and speech inputs while producing text and image outputs. It offers a 1M token context window, supports 200+ languages for text and 10 for speech, and provides image generation/editing and multi‑speaker speech transcription with native reasoning. Early access is available to Nova Forge and authorized customers.

AWS announces compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C8a instances

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 C8a instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC (Turin) processors with up to 4.5 GHz frequency. AWS says C8a delivers up to 30% higher performance, up to 19% better price-performance versus C7a, 33% more memory bandwidth, and up to 57% faster GroovyJVM performance for Java workloads. The family includes 12 sizes, two bare-metal options, and is built on the AWS Nitro System for high-performance compute use cases such as HPC, batch processing, ad serving, multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. C8a instances are initially available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) and can be purchased via Savings Plans, On-Demand, or Spot.