All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

📂 Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now supports Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Google Drive as persistent storage options for multi-session fleets. Users streaming on shared fleet instances can connect their cloud accounts to access, save, and sync files directly within sessions, alongside the existing S3-backed home folder. This feature is available in all AWS Regions where WorkSpaces Applications is offered and incurs no extra charge beyond standard streaming usage pricing.

📣 The Athens Local Zone by AWS is now generally available, offering localized infrastructure in Greece to support data residency and low-latency use cases. It provides EC2 C7i/M7i/R7i instances, Amazon S3 (including One Zone-IA), Amazon EBS with Local Snapshots and multiple volume types, ECS, EKS, VPC, Direct Connect, and Application Load Balancer. Customers can enable the zone (eu-central-1-ath-1a) via AWS Global View or API and use standard AWS pricing models and APIs with no minimum commitment.

🔒 After a breakup, shared digital ties like accounts, subscriptions, and devices can leave you vulnerable if not properly separated. Review active sessions, update passwords and recovery options, and remove your ex from trusted devices and family-sharing settings. Revoke access to smart home devices, unlink payment methods, and cancel or recreate shared subscriptions. Use password managers, privacy tools, and support services to reclaim control and protect your safety.

🛠️ Amazon CloudWatch launches Coding Agent Insights to give engineering leaders visibility into how AI coding tools drive value across their organizations. The feature integrates with Claude apps gateway for AWS to collect telemetry from Claude Code without additional instrumentation and supports other agents like Codex and GitHub Copilot. It builds on OpenTelemetry metrics and surfaces agent telemetry alongside existing CloudWatch operational data to help track spend, adoption, and productivity. The capability is available in most AWS commercial regions with standard CloudWatch metric ingestion pricing.

🚀 KNFSD File Cache is now available as an open-source, Apache-2.0 licensed NFS caching solution on AWS. It mounts exports from on-premises, cross-region, or multicloud NFS servers and re-exports them to NFS clients in AWS, caching frequently read data in memory and local NVMe for low-latency access. Built on standard Linux kernel components and deployed via AMIs and Terraform, it supports NFS v3, v4.1, and v4.2 and targets read-heavy burst compute workloads. The preview is available in all AWS Regions with no licensing fees; customers pay only for consumed AWS resources.

🔧 With Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, teams can now create, share, and reuse custom visual transforms within visual ETL flows. This feature enables data engineers to encapsulate business-specific transformation logic—such as phone number standardization, PII masking, or data-quality checks—into reusable components that non-coders can apply across ETL jobs. The capability is available in all AWS Regions where Unified Studio is offered.

🛡️ Cloudflare has deployed new Web Application Firewall protections to block two critical WordPress vulnerabilities: an unauthenticated RCE in the REST API and a related SQL injection. The rules, activated on July 17, 2026 at 17:03 UTC, protect all proxied customers including Free plans. Customers should still apply WordPress patches (7.0.2 and backports) and ensure Managed Rules remain set to Block while monitoring Security Events.

🔐 Amazon GameLift Streams now allows assigning an IAM role to a stream session so streamed applications can securely access AWS resources like Amazon S3 and DynamoDB. By passing a RoleArn when starting a session, applications receive short-lived, auto-refreshing credentials via the standard AWS SDK credential chain with no code changes. The service validates role configuration at session start and the console offers a pre-filled trust policy template for easy setup; the feature is available in all Regions where GameLift Streams runs.

🔄 Amazon OpenSearch Service now provides one‑click migration from legacy OpenSearch Dashboards to the new OpenSearch UI for both domains and serverless collections. This serverless, zero‑downtime interface enables unified observability and search across data sources while preserving tenants and saved objects. You can migrate into new or existing OpenSearch UI workspaces and choose whether to consolidate or retain multiple tenants per team. The capability is available in all Regions where OpenSearch UI is offered and is documented in the OpenSearch UI Help and Amazon OpenSearch Service Developer Guide.

🔒 At Black Hat USA 2026, Microsoft Security highlights how threat actors exploit trusted systems—software, developer workflows, identities, and AI—to scale attacks. Sessions and briefings across August 4–6 focus on supply chain compromises, AI security, and practical defense strategies. Visit booth #2144 for demonstrations, expert-led services, and community events including a reception on August 5.

🔒 This post introduces the preview of IAM data governance tags for BigQuery column-level security. Built on Google Cloud Resource Manager tags with purpose=DATA_GOVERNANCE, these tags are global, support hierarchical classification up to five levels, and are replicated for disaster recovery. The article explains creating tag keys/values, attaching tags to columns via JSON or SQL, and defining regional BigQuery data policies for masking or raw access. It highlights decoupled governance, regional policy enforcement, and layered security requirements.

🔎 This post introduces 13 code-first demos for the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, showing how to build, scale, govern, and optimize agents using the ADK and Agents CLI. The demos range from an ADK foundation codelab and MCP data connectors to stateful deployment on Agent Runtime, event-driven long-running workflows, and production-grade governance with Agent Gateway and Model Armor. Each demo teaches practical patterns — from UI generation and multi-language A2A pipelines to test-driven security, AutoRater evaluations, and cross-framework orchestration — so teams can prototype locally and then deploy and monitor agents at enterprise scale.

🧭 Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports partition-level network topology configuration for Slurm clusters, allowing a single cluster to run different topologies (tree or block) per partition. HyperPod auto-detects topology from instance types—UltraServer types map to block and hierarchical-interconnect types map to tree—while partitions without topology data remain schedulable. The feature is enabled by default for Slurm 25.11+ and is available in all Regions that support HyperPod.

📰 Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2022 will reach the end of mainstream support on October 13, 2026, and will transition to extended support with security updates through October 14, 2031. Customers are advised to plan upgrades to Windows Server 2025, the latest LTSC release available since November 2024. Microsoft also extended hotpatching for Datacenter: Azure Edition until October 2027 and highlighted lifecycle resources for planning migrations.

🔐 Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports using customer managed AWS KMS keys to encrypt canary environment variables, allowing teams to control encryption for sensitive data such as API keys and tokens. Previously, only an AWS owned key was used; now you can specify a symmetric KMS key for at-rest encryption or perform client-side encryption and decrypt at runtime. This capability meets requirements for key management, auditability, and rotation and is available in all commercial AWS Regions, with multi-location canaries able to use per-replica Region keys.

🛡️ Amazon Managed Grafana is now FedRAMP High authorized in AWS GovCloud (US-East) and AWS GovCloud (US-West). The fully managed service, built on open-source Grafana, enables federal agencies and public sector organizations to visualize, query, and alert on operational metrics while meeting strict compliance requirements. FedRAMP provides the standardized security assessment and continuous monitoring required for US government cloud services. Customers should consult the GovCloud documentation or their AWS account team for implementation details.

📊 AWS Billing and Cost Management (BCM) now offers a Cost Efficiency widget for BCM Dashboards, allowing teams to view efficiency trends alongside Cost Explorer, Budgets, and Savings Plans and Reserved Instance reports. The widget displays efficiency scores over time by account, region, or overall, with adjustable granularity and links to the Cost Optimization Hub. Widgets support exports, scheduled email reports, CSV/PDF downloads, and cross-account sharing, and are available in all AWS commercial Regions at no extra charge.

🔍 Amazon EC2 now includes the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store names associated with public AMIs directly in the AMI metadata. When you describe a public AMI, the response shows the related public SSM parameter, enabling easier discovery and referencing. This feature simplifies using SSM parameter aliases that resolve to the latest AMI versions and is available in all AWS regions, including China and GovCloud, at no extra cost.

🔎 Amazon EC2 now includes the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store parameters linked to public AMIs directly in AMI metadata. When you describe a public AMI, the response returns the associated public SSM parameter, making discovery and reference simpler. This eliminates manual namespace searches and enables using the parameter as an alias to always resolve to the latest AMI version. The feature is available at no additional cost in all AWS commercial, China, and GovCloud Regions.

🔔 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 19 Beta 2 is available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, enabling evaluation of the pre-release on a fully managed service. PostgreSQL 19 adds parallel autovacuum, REPACK CONCURRENTLY, SQL/PGQ, and enhanced logical replication behavior. Beta 2 includes bug fixes and stability improvements from Beta 1. Preview instances are retained for up to 60 days and follow US East (Ohio) pricing.