All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

AWS launches Database Savings Plans for databases worldwide

🚀 Today AWS introduced Database Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that offers up to 35% savings in exchange for a one-year commitment measured in $/hour with no upfront payment. Discounts apply automatically to eligible serverless and provisioned usage across engines, instance families, sizes, deployment options, and Regions. The offer supports Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon Neptune, Amazon Keyspaces, Amazon Timestream, and AWS DMS. Database Savings Plans are available now in all AWS Regions except China and can be purchased from the Billing console or via the AWS CLI.

AWS announces Amazon Nova 2 models in Amazon Bedrock

🤖AWS has introduced Amazon Nova 2, a next-generation family of foundation models now available in Amazon Bedrock. The release includes Nova 2 Lite, optimized for fast, cost-effective reasoning for everyday workloads, and Nova 2 Pro (Preview), designed for complex, multistep tasks. Both models support step-by-step reasoning, three thinking intensity levels, built-in tools such as code interpreter and web grounding, remote MCP tool support, and a one-million-token context window. Nova 2 Lite supports supervised fine-tuning on Bedrock and SageMaker; full fine-tuning is available on SageMaker. Nova 2 Pro is available in preview for Amazon Nova Forge customers with global cross-region inference.

AWS Security Hub Adds Near Real-Time Risk Analytics

🔒 AWS announces general availability of AWS Security Hub, adding near real-time risk analytics, advanced trends, unified enablement, and streamlined pricing across AWS security services. Security Hub correlates and enriches signals from Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Security Hub CSPM to surface and prioritize active risks. Centralized deployment across AWS Organizations, attack-path visualization, and automated workflows reduce manual correlation and speed remediation at scale.

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.

AWS Debuts DevOps Agent Preview for Operational Excellence

🔧 AWS announced the preview of AWS DevOps Agent, a frontier agent designed to investigate incidents and proactively prevent outages across AWS, multicloud, and hybrid environments. The agent autonomously triages alerts, correlates telemetry, code, and deployment data, and guides teams to faster resolution to reduce MTTR. During preview it is available at no additional cost in US East (N. Virginia).

AWS GuardDuty extends threat detection for EC2 and ECS

🔍 AWS announced an update to GuardDuty Extended Threat Detection that adds multistage attack detection for Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon ECS clusters running on Fargate or EC2. The release introduces two critical findings — AttackSequence:EC2/CompromisedInstanceGroup and AttackSequence:ECS/CompromisedCluster — that group related events into a single, high-priority alert. Findings include a summary, event timeline, MITRE ATT&CK mappings, and remediation guidance to speed response. Runtime Monitoring must be enabled for full coverage, and customers can try the feature free for 30 days.

Amazon RDS for Oracle and SQL Server: 256 TiB Storage

🔔Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle and SQL Server now supports up to 256 TiB of storage per database instance — a fourfold increase in per-instance capacity. Customers can attach up to three additional 64 TiB storage volumes alongside the primary volume and add, scale, or remove those volumes without application downtime. Administrators can mix high-performance Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) volumes with cost-optimized gp3 volumes to balance performance and cost. Additional storage volumes can be created or managed via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDKs and are available in all commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) 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 Security Agent preview: AI-driven development security

🔒 AWS today announced the preview of AWS Security Agent, an AI-powered agent that automates security validation across the application development lifecycle. The service lets security teams define organizational requirements once and then evaluates architecture and code against those standards, offering contextual remediation guidance. For deployments, it performs context-aware penetration testing and logs API activity to CloudTrail; the preview is available in US East (N. Virginia). AWS states customer data and queries are not used to train models.

AWS previews EC2 C8ine instances for packet processing

🚀 Amazon Web Services previewed EC2 C8ine instances built on custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Granite Rapids) and the new Nitro v6 card. These instances are optimized for dataplane packet-processing workloads and can deliver up to 2.5× higher packet performance per vCPU versus prior C6in instances, with up to 2× higher internet-gateway bandwidth and up to 3× more ENIs. Targeted use cases include security virtual appliances, firewalls, load balancers, DDoS protection systems, and Telco 5G UPF. Preview access is available upon request through your AWS account team.

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.

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 Nova Act: Automate Production UI Workflows at Scale

🚀 AWS announced general availability of Amazon Nova Act, a service for building and managing fleets of reliable agents that automate production UI workflows. Powered by a custom Nova 2 Lite model, Nova Act can complete repetitive browser tasks, call APIs or tools, and escalate to human supervisors when needed. Developers can combine natural language with deterministic Python, prototype in the online playground, refine scripts with the Nova Act IDE extension, and deploy to AWS quickly. Nova Act is available today in US East (N. Virginia).

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.

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 Bedrock Adds 18 Fully Managed Open Models Today

🚀 Amazon Bedrock expanded its model catalog with 18 new fully managed open-weight models, the largest single addition to date. The offering includes Gemma 3, Mistral Large 3, NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2, OpenAI gpt-oss variants and other vendor models. Through a unified API, developers can evaluate, switch, and adopt these models in production without rewriting applications or changing infrastructure. Models are available in supported AWS Regions.

Amazon S3 Batch Operations: Up to 10x Faster at Scale

⚡Amazon S3 Batch Operations now finishes jobs up to 10x faster and supports jobs that include up to 20 billion objects, accelerating large-scale storage tasks. S3 pre-processes objects, runs operations, and generates completion reports with no extra configuration or cost. Typical uses include copying between buckets, tagging for lifecycle policies, and computing checksums. The upgrade is available in all AWS Regions except China and GovCloud (US).

SecAlerts: Faster, Smarter Vulnerability Tracking Platform

🔔 SecAlerts provides a streamlined, cloud-native vulnerability notification service that maps new advisories directly to the software you run, avoiding intrusive scans or local installs. Using near-real-time sources rather than relying solely on the NVD, it reduces alert noise through configurable Stacks, Channels, and Alerts, so teams only receive actionable notifications. The platform includes a searchable Feed, visualised severity metrics, per-client properties for MSSPs, an API for integrations, and audit-ready reporting to accelerate remediation.

Amazon SageMaker AI Adds Serverless MLflow Support

🧠 Amazon SageMaker AI now offers a serverless MLflow capability that automatically scales to support experiment tracking and model development without infrastructure setup. The service scales up for demanding workloads and scales down during idle periods, reducing operational overhead. Administrators can enable cross-account access via Resource Access Manager (RAM). The feature integrates with SageMaker AI JumpStart, Model Registry, and Pipelines and is offered at no additional charge in select AWS Regions.