All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔧 Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) Region now supports up to four Elastic Volumes modifications per volume within a rolling 24‑hour window. Elastic Volumes lets you increase size, change type, or adjust performance without detaching volumes or restarting instances. The enhancement is automatically available and permits starting a new modification immediately after the previous one completes, improving operational agility for sudden data growth or workload spikes.

🔁 Quick Automate now supports secure export and import of automation versions across automation groups, AWS accounts, and Regions. The feature packages workflows, runtime configuration, and step metadata into an encrypted link protected by AWS KMS; export links remain valid for 12 hours and are reusable, eliminating repeated exports. It speeds promotion between environments and enables point-in-time snapshots for recovery. Note that connectors, credentials, and human-in-the-loop queues are excluded and must be reconfigured.

🔔 Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) now provides Microsoft Windows Server licensing entitlements, allowing customers to migrate or create Windows Server VMs in EVS and obtain licensing directly from AWS. Administrators configure an EVS connector to their VMware vCenter and supply VM IDs via the console or CLI. Licensing is charged on a per vCPU‑hour basis and can be added or removed at any time; the feature is available in all Regions where EVS is offered.

🎙 Amazon Connect expands agentic speech-to-speech voice AI to three additional AWS Regions — Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Europe (Frankfurt) — and introduces new locales including Australian English, British English, Singaporean English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Korean. These updates let organizations deliver more natural, human-like voice AI experiences across a broader geographic footprint. Amazon Connect's agentic self-service agents understand, reason, and act across voice and messaging channels, adapting responses to customer tone and sentiment to automate routine and complex service tasks.

🛡️ AWS IoT Greengrass v2.17 now supports running the edge runtime as a non-root user on Linux, helping organizations meet security and compliance requirements that prohibit root access. The update adds an uninstall lifecycle action for components and introduces nucleus lite optimizations — including a Secure Tunneling lite component (~4 MB), TPM 2.0 support for fleet provisioning, and a PKCS#11 interface for HSM-backed authentication — to reduce memory consumption. v2.17 is available in all Regions where Greengrass is offered.

🚀 Amazon DocumentDB now supports an in-place major version upgrade from MongoDB-compatible 5.0 to 8.0 via the AWS Management Console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI. The upgrade requires no new clusters, no endpoint changes, and no index rebuilds, reducing operational overhead and minimizing disruption. Version 8.0 delivers up to 7x faster query latency and up to 5x improved storage compression, and introduces features such as collation, views, new aggregation stages and operators, enhanced text search with text index v2, and much faster vector index builds (up to 30x). In-place MVU is available in all Regions where DocumentDB 8.0 is offered at no additional cost.

🔐 Amazon EKS now supports seven new IAM condition keys for cluster creation and configuration APIs, giving organizations finer-grained governance over cluster settings. Administrators can enforce private-only API endpoints, require customer-managed KMS keys for secret encryption, restrict approved Kubernetes versions, mandate deletion protection, set control plane scaling tiers, and enable zonal shift. The keys apply to CreateCluster, UpdateClusterConfig, UpdateClusterVersion, and AssociateEncryptionConfig APIs and integrate with Service Control Policies for centralized multi-account enforcement. They are available in all Regions where EKS is offered at no additional charge.

⚡ Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns now supports hourly segment refresh, reducing the minimum refresh interval from 24 hours to one hour. This lets campaigns enroll newly eligible customers throughout the day instead of waiting for a daily run. The capability applies across all campaign types, is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns is offered at no extra cost, and can be enabled via the console or the API by turning on the Refresh option.

🔐 Microsoft Deputy CISO Ilya Grebnov outlines practical steps to make opportunistic cyberattacks harder by design. He emphasizes credential elimination using managed identities and federated tokens, paired with endpoint reduction to move services off the public internet. The article further advocates platform engineering—paved paths, policy-as-code, and centralized core services—to enforce consistent secure defaults and reduce the attack surface at scale.

🔎 Amazon has added JOIN and sub-query commands to CloudWatch Logs Insights, enabling queries that span multiple log groups and correlate data from different sources. The new capabilities remove the need to run separate queries and manually merge results, accelerating troubleshooting and investigations. Typical uses include correlating application and infrastructure errors, analyzing security events across services, and tracking user sessions across distributed systems. The features are available today in all commercial AWS Regions.

🛡️ This AWS Security Blog post demonstrates how to clone an AWS CloudHSM cluster across Regions using the copy-backup-to-region workflow and Client SDK 5 (recommended version 5.17 or later). It walks through creating and initializing a source cluster, generating a backup, copying that backup to a destination Region, and launching a new cluster from the copied backup, including certificate transfer and security group adjustments. The guide emphasizes that non-exportable keys can only be synchronized to cloned clusters, that users and passwords must be maintained manually after the initial backup, and that Client SDK 3 reached end-of-support on January 1, 2025, so migration to SDK 5 is required.

🔁 Amazon has added enhanced consumer offset synchronization to MSK Replicator, improving bidirectional Kafka replication so consumer applications resume from the correct position when moved across clusters. This lets teams move producers and consumers independently, in any order, without risking data loss or duplicate processing. Previously, offsets synchronized only when producers and consumers ran on the same cluster, which required careful migration sequencing. The feature can be enabled via the AWS Console, AWS CLI, or AWS CloudFormation and is available in all Regions where MSK Replicator is offered.

🔁 Amazon Web Services announced that Amazon MSK Replicator now supports replicating data from external Apache Kafka clusters—including on‑premises, self‑managed on AWS, or third‑party clouds—into MSK Express brokers. This capability simplifies workload migration, enables MSK Express clusters to act as failover or backup targets for disaster recovery, and supports hybrid and multi‑cloud data distribution. MSK Replicator preserves original topic names, prevents infinite replication loops, and synchronizes consumer group offsets bidirectionally to let producers and consumers move independently without data loss.

🔍 Amazon MSK Replicator now delivers replicator logs that provide end-to-end visibility into replication health. The logs surface critical replication events, client errors, and steady-state activity, and include prescriptive guidance to help operators resolve common issues more quickly. Common problems called out in log entries include insufficient permissions on source topics, partition quota exhaustion on target clusters, and records exceeding size limits. You can enable log delivery when creating or updating a Replicator via the AWS Console, AWS CLI, or AWS CloudFormation and forward logs to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3, or Amazon Data Firehose.

🛡️ Many businesses assume that backing up data equals protection, but backups alone do not sustain operations during outages. The article contrasts traditional backups, which enable post-incident restore, with BCDR solutions that keep systems running through failover and rapid recovery. It cites research showing recovery expectations often exceed real-world performance and recommends hybrid cloud strategies. Datto sponsors the piece and positions its BCDR tools for MSPs.

🤖 Over eleven months Cloudflare built an internal AI engineering stack that integrates AI Gateway, Workers AI, the Agents SDK, and developer tools like OpenCode and Backstage. The platform centralizes authentication with Cloudflare Access, routes model traffic and costs through AI Gateway, and runs inference on Workers AI to reduce latency and expense. The deployment includes an AI Code Reviewer and an Engineering Codex to enforce standards and maintain quality at scale.

📦 Amazon announced that S3 Express One Zone, its high-performance storage class for latency-sensitive workloads, now supports S3 Inventory. Inventory provides a scheduled, asynchronous alternative to the synchronous List API, producing daily or weekly reports that include object metadata, encryption status, and storage class. You can configure reports via the AWS CLI, SDKs, or S3 API and choose CSV, ORC, or Parquet output, with delivery to a specified destination bucket.

🤖 Cloudflare's Agents Week highlights a broad set of primitives, services, and developer tooling to support agents as first-class workloads on the Cloudflare Workers platform. Key compute advances include Artifacts, Sandboxes GA with programmable egress, Durable Object Facets, and Workflows v2 to scale background agents. Security features—like Cloudflare Mesh, Managed OAuth for Access, and resource-scoped permissions—aim to make secure agent deployment the default while an expanded Agent Toolbox adds inference, memory, voice, email, and browsing capabilities to help builders move prototypes to production.

🤖 Amazon Connect now supports touchtone buffering to automatically pass caller context into AI-powered self-service sessions. When calls are initiated from websites, mobile apps, or links, contextual data such as customer IDs, session references, and campaign codes can be delivered at connect time. AI agents use this data to identify callers, understand intent, and act without requiring re-identification or repeated explanations.

⚡Microsoft is rolling out a set of File Explorer enhancements to Windows 11 Insiders that aim to improve launch speed and overall performance. While implementation details are limited, the company earlier tested optional background preloading to accelerate startup times and offers a toggle to disable that behavior. The update also improves reliability around stopping explorer.exe after closing windows and expands fixes for bright white flashes in dark mode. A new full-screen Xbox mode is available as well; changes are arriving for Release Preview Insiders on Builds 26100.8313 and 26200.8313 (KB5083631).