All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔔 Amazon S3 Event Notifications now include system-generated tags in events delivered to destinations such as Amazon EventBridge, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, and AWS Lambda. These tags are metadata labels applied to buckets by AWS services and can be used to filter events across thousands of buckets with a single EventBridge rule rather than listing each bucket individually. Enable S3 Event Notifications via the AWS Management Console, SDK, or CLI; tags already applied by services like AWS CloudFormation are automatically included in new notifications. This capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions and requires no configuration changes.

💧Customers can now view annual water withdrawals data associated with their AWS workloads in the AWS Sustainability service, alongside existing carbon emissions metrics. Data is available by AWS Region, service, and account on an annual basis via the console and API, reflecting total volume withdrawn for data center operations and showing efficiency improvements as reduced withdrawals. The feature is provided at no extra charge in Regions where the service is available.

🔗 This post introduces the %%bqsql IPython cell magic and the BigFrames library to bridge Python (pandas) and BigQuery SQL within notebooks. It explains setup steps for local or Colab environments, how to enable the BigQuery sandbox, and how to load the bigframes extension. The article walks through a USDA wheat data example showing chained workflows that alternate between Python and BigQuery SQL, plus tips for schema handling and visualization.

🛡️ Francis deSouza outlines how deep context gives defenders an AI-driven advantage by unifying enterprise telemetry, vulnerability management, and agentic automation. The post introduces Google AI Threat Defense, combining Gemini, Wiz, CodeMender, and Mandiant into a prepare–scan–remediate–monitor lifecycle. It emphasizes human oversight, Zero Trust for AI, and real-world impact such as Morgan Stanley’s rapid detection improvements.

🚀 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7in-24TB (u7in-24tb.224xlarge) instances are now available in the AWS Europe (Paris) region. These U7i instances belong to the 7th generation and are powered by custom 4th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids), offering 24 TiB DDR5 memory and 896 vCPUs. They deliver up to 100 Gbps Amazon EBS bandwidth, 200 Gbps network bandwidth, ENA Express, and up to 45% better price performance versus U-1 instances. Ideal for in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

🔔 You can now transition objects to S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (Standard-IA) and S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access (One Zone-IA) immediately after creation, removing the previous 30-day minimum in S3 Standard. These classes provide up to 40% lower storage costs than S3 Standard with millisecond access, suitable for backups, log analytics, and compliance data that becomes cold quickly. Configure new S3 Lifecycle rules with 0-day transitions via the S3 console, AWS CLI, or SDKs, available in all Regions where the storage classes are offered.

🔒 Palo Alto Networks has announced the general availability of Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, an AI control plane designed to provide unified governance, identity, and runtime controls for enterprise AI interactions. The gateway sits inline between agents, AI apps, and model providers to deliver observability, policy enforcement, credential scoping, and runtime inspection. Built from Portkey innovations, it targets scale and security gaps as AI usage and outbound data volumes surge across enterprises.

🔒 This article presents a blueprint for securing AI workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), consolidating controls across Google Cloud services and GKE features to create a secure-by-default platform. It covers three layers—infrastructure, supply chain, and application—and details capabilities such as Confidential GKE Nodes, Workload Identity Federation, k8s-aibom for AI SBOMs, Model Armor, and the GKE Inference Gateway. The blueprint recommends a three-phase rollout: Deploy, Operate, and Govern, and emphasizes integrating Google Cloud controls to maintain security at enterprise scale.

🔒 AWS Backup now offers logically air-gapped vaults in six additional Regions: Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Thailand), Mexico (Central), and Canada West (Calgary). These vaults provide immutable, isolated backups that are locked by default and encrypted with AWS-owned or customer-managed keys. You can back up directly to these vaults, copy backups across accounts and Regions, share via AWS Resource Access Manager, and use Multi-party approval to protect access during account compromise. Use the AWS Backup console, CLI, or SDKs to get started and consult the documentation for region and feature details.

🛡️ AWS Backup restore testing is now available in six additional Regions: Asia Pacific (Taipei), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), Asia Pacific (New Zealand), Asia Pacific (Thailand), Mexico (Central), and Canada West (Calgary). The capability automates periodic restore tests for supported storage, compute, and database resources, letting you create plans that select recovery points, run scheduled restores, and measure completion against recovery time objectives. This helps organisations evaluate recovery readiness and meet regulatory and business continuity requirements. To start, use the AWS Backup console, CLI, or SDKs and consult the documentation for supported Regions and pricing.

🔧 AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) can now automatically re-apply an account's customizations when the account is moved to a different Organizational Unit (OU). Previously, moving an enrolled account required a manual trigger, increasing operational overhead and risk of configuration drift. You can opt in by setting aft_customization_triggers = ["account_move"], and exclude specific accounts with account_skip_customization_triggers = "true". The re-application run skips bootstrap and provisioning phases for faster execution and includes additional improvements such as custom Terraform Cloud/Enterprise workspace naming, tighter logging bucket access controls, and better scaling for Enterprise Support enrollment.

🚀 Amazon Aurora DSQL is now in scope for FedRAMP Moderate in the US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. This designation enables customers to build and run applications subject to FedRAMP Moderate compliance using Aurora DSQL. Aurora DSQL is a serverless, distributed SQL database offering active-active high availability, multi-Region strong consistency, and virtually unlimited scale.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights now supports 25 new commands and functions to enhance log querying, transformation, correlation, and analysis. The additions include type conversion and encoding, date/time, string, JSON inspection, statistical, sessionization, sequencing, null-handling, comparison, join, and lookup enrichment capabilities. These features are available today in all commercial AWS Regions and extend common tasks such as outlier detection, time-window comparisons, enrichment with lookup data, and handling of nulls in time-series analysis. See the CloudWatch Logs documentation for details.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Logs now offers intelligent storage tiering across three tiers — Standard, Infrequent Access, and Archive Instant Access — automatically classifying log data based on access patterns. This feature lets you retain high-volume verbose logs natively in CloudWatch at lower cost without operational overhead, while preserving the same query experience regardless of tier. Data not accessed for 30 days moves to Infrequent Access and for 90 days to Archive Instant Access; accessing older data promotes it back to Standard for 30 days. Intelligent-tiering is available in all AWS commercial regions except Bahrain and UAE and can be enabled at the account level via Console, SDKs, or CLI.

📣 Amazon MQ now lets you configure EBS Disk storage size for RabbitMQ brokers independently of instance type. This applies to RabbitMQ M7g brokers on version 4.2+ using cluster deployments, with storage selectable in 5 GB increments from the M7g default to the instance-specific maximum. You can set storage via the AWS Console, CloudFormation, CLI, or CDK; changes take effect after a broker reboot and follow standard Amazon MQ storage pricing.

🚀 Amazon EC2 G7e instances, powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, are now available in AWS Regions Europe (Frankfurt, Stockholm) and Asia Pacific (Mumbai). These instances deliver up to 2.3x inference performance versus G6e and are optimized for LLMs, multimodal generative AI, agentic AI, and spatial computing. G7e supports up to 8 GPUs with 96 GB each, 192 vCPUs, 1600 Gbps networking, and advanced NVIDIA GPUDirect capabilities for multi-GPU and multi-node workloads.

⚙️ AWS has expanded availability of Graviton4-based R8g instances for Amazon Aurora (MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible) and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB across multiple regions, and added M8g support in additional regions. These instances offer up to 40% better performance and up to 29% improved price/performance versus Graviton3 equivalents, with new 24xlarge and 48xlarge sizes providing up to 192 vCPUs, DDR5 memory at an 8:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio, and enhanced networking and EBS bandwidth. R8g and M8g instances can be launched via the RDS console or AWS CLI; engine version, pricing, and regional details are available in the Aurora/RDS documentation and pricing pages.

🚀 Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) Express Brokers now supports Apache Kafka version 4.2. This update brings Eligible Leader Replicas (ELR) enhancements for improved leader election correctness, a new consumer rebalance protocol for faster group rebalances, and a Streams Rebalance Protocol to extend broker coordination to Kafka Streams. MSK Express delivers up to three times more throughput per broker, faster scaling, and reduced recovery time; version 4.2 is available today and can be selected when creating or upgrading clusters via the AWS Console, CLI, or SDKs.

🔐 Amazon Cognito now supports importing users with password hashes in CSV imports, allowing migrated users to sign in immediately with existing credentials. Administrators specify the source system's hashing algorithm during import, and Cognito verifies passwords against the imported hash on first sign-in. Supported algorithms include bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2id, and PBKDF2 with SHA-256; all imported hashes receive additional cryptographic protection before storage. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where Cognito is offered and can be used via the Console, CLI, or SDKs.

🚀 Amazon RDS now supports R8gd instances in 12 additional regions and M8gd instances in 6 more regions, offering Optimized Reads for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, RDS for PostgreSQL, RDS for MySQL, and RDS for MariaDB. These R8gd and M8gd instances provide up to 165% better throughput and up to 120% improved price-performance over R6g for Aurora PostgreSQL by using local NVMe SSDs for ephemeral data and extended caching. Customers can enable Optimized Reads via the AWS Console, CLI, or SDK by creating or modifying databases to use these instance types. Regional availability lists and engine version compatibility are provided in the Aurora and RDS documentation.