All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Amazon Connect Customer now supports rule-based redaction for agent screen recordings, allowing administrators to define rules that redact specific applications or URLs from recorded sessions. This feature helps protect sensitive information captured during voice calls, chats, and tasks by automatically applying redaction when rule conditions are met. Rule-based redaction is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is offered and is supported on Windows operating systems. For deployment details and pricing, consult the vendor documentation and pricing pages.

🔒 Microsoft has accelerated its quantum-safe roadmap, saying advances in quantum computing bring the need to replace current encryption sooner than expected. The company plans to transition critical products and services to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) by 2029 under its Quantum Safe Program and integrate quantum-safe requirements into its Secure Future Initiative. Microsoft emphasizes modernizing infrastructure, enabling crypto-agility, and updating trust chains to ease future migrations.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Logs now enriches log events with AWS resource tags at ingestion, enabling filtering, searching, and analysis by metadata such as team ownership, environment, cost center, or application name without changing logging instrumentation. Tags are applied at ingestion so you can use them immediately in log queries to scope analysis and incident investigations. The feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions except UAE, Bahrain, and Israel (Tel Aviv). Enable resource tags on telemetry in Amazon CloudWatch Settings, via the AWS CLI, or SDKs; tag enrichment is provided at no extra cost.

🔍 AWS CloudFormation now performs pre-deployment validation on Create Stack and Update Stack operations, surfacing common deployment errors in seconds before any resources are provisioned. The release extends validation previously limited to change set creation and introduces three new checks as warnings for service quota limits, AWS Config Recorder conflicts, and ECR repository deletion readiness. Validation results are viewable via the DescribeEvents API, the CloudFormation console Deployment validations tab, and in CDK outputs for automation and AI agents. Pre-deployment validation is enabled by default across supported regions (excluding China) and can be skipped per-operation with the DisableValidation parameter or CLI flag.

🚀 AWS announces CloudFormation and CDK express mode, cutting deployment time by up to 4x for developers and AI agents by marking stacks complete once resource configuration is applied, rather than waiting for extended stabilization. Express mode lets propagation and long-running stabilization continue asynchronously, preserves dependency ordering and failure handling within stacks, and disables rollback by default to speed iterative fix-and-retry workflows. It requires no template changes and can be enabled via CLI, SDKs, console, or cdk deploy --express. The feature is available in all Regions where CloudFormation is supported.

🔒 Amazon RDS now supports dynamic connection rate scaling for IAM database authentication, so authentication throughput scales with instance resources. This allows enterprise workloads to use IAM authentication for high-volume connection patterns while depending on available CPU and memory. AWS recommends reusing IAM principals or authentication tokens to optimize performance. The feature is available in all Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US), for Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB.

🔧 AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS) now supports managed in-place Slurm major version upgrades for existing clusters, allowing moves up to three versions ahead without disrupting running jobs. Administrators update the cluster configuration via the Console, CLI, or UpdateCluster API and PCS upgrades the controller, accounting database, and REST API while preserving accounting data. Running jobs continue uninterrupted, queued jobs resume after completion, and compute nodes can be updated separately at administrators’ convenience. The feature is available in all Regions where PCS is offered and documentation is in the PCS User Guide.

🔷 Amazon Neptune now supports dual‑stack mode, allowing database clusters to accept connections over IPv4, IPv6, or both simultaneously. This enables organizations to adopt IPv6 while preserving compatibility with existing IPv4 deployments. Dual‑stack offers Private mode for internal, non‑internet IPv6 endpoints and Public mode for internet‑accessible IPv6 endpoints to support hybrid and internet‑facing applications. The feature is available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon Neptune.

⚙️ Amazon ElastiCache now supports T4g node types in Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Osaka), AWS GovCloud (US-East), and AWS GovCloud (US-West). T4g nodes use AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver a baseline CPU performance with burst capability, suited for workloads with intermittent spikes. Users can create or modify clusters via the AWS Management Console, CLI, or API and should consult the ElastiCache pricing and user guide for details.

🔐 Microsoft is advancing its quantum-safe timeline, now targeting transition of critical products and services to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. The company is embedding PQC requirements into its Secure Future Initiative to ensure clear ownership, measurable milestones, and platform readiness. Priorities include modernizing network cryptography, enabling crypto-agility, and securing chains of trust across keys, certificates, and signing. Microsoft urges organizations to begin discovery and modernization now to reduce long-term risk.

🔒 Amazon Connect Customer now permits assigning up to seven security profiles per user, up from two, enabling granular, scoped permissions for agents who support multiple lines of business. This supports tag-based or hierarchy-based access controls so each profile can grant access only to resources for a specific division. The change improves flexibility to implement least-privilege access aligned with organizational structure and is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Connect is offered.

📱AWS End User Messaging now supports rich media and interactive RCS messaging across all 22 supported countries through the new SendRcsMessage API. You can send rich cards, carousels, images, videos, and interactive suggestion buttons so recipients can take actions—confirm appointments, browse catalogs, complete payments, share locations, or interact with AI—without leaving their messaging app. The release supports four RCS types (text, files, rich cards, carousels) with six action types and configurable SMS/MMS fallback. AWS also introduced RCS Conversation pricing in 21 countries as a flat rate for unlimited messages within a 24-hour session.

🧭 Conversational Analytics in BigQuery is now generally available, enabling business and technical users to query data, run multi-step analyses, and produce visual reports using natural language directly where data resides. Built on Google’s Gemini models and BigQuery’s governed foundation, it offers inspectable answers, context citations, proactive disambiguation, and long-term memory. The feature integrates with Lakehouse sources, supports enterprise security and governance controls, and provides agentic workflows for scheduled monitoring and automated reports.

🛡️ New Microsoft research shows attackers can hijack AI agents by poisoning a tool's description so the agent quietly exfiltrates company data. The attack leverages MCP tool descriptions—plain text that agents read—to inject hidden instructions, allowing malicious actions without obvious rule violations. Microsoft recommends treating tool descriptions as system prompts, restricting approved tools, enforcing human approval for risky actions, and monitoring agent identities and behavior.

🔧 Amazon Time Sync Service now supports microsecond accurate time on 26 additional EC2 instance types across all commercial regions. Built on the AWS Nitro System, the feature exposes nanosecond precision hardware timestamps from reference clocks in Nitro, enabling ordered event logging, one-way latency measurement, and faster distributed transactions. Customers enable this by creating a Precision Time Placement Group (PTPG) to launch instances with PHC enabled and can associate PTPGs with Cluster Placement Groups for combined low-latency and precise timing benefits.

🖥️ Amazon WorkSpaces for agents is generally available, enabling AI agents to securely access and operate desktop applications inside managed WorkSpaces. The service lets agents interact with legacy ERP, CRM, mainframe, and proprietary tools without application modernization or custom integrations, while preserving identity controls, network isolation, and compliance boundaries. It supports any agent framework using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and pricing is based on active session time.

🔔 Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling introduces a new reservations-then-balanced Availability Zone distribution strategy that prioritizes launching instances into your capacity reservations before distributing remaining capacity across AZs. You can configure it in the AvailabilityZoneDistribution of your Auto Scaling group and target reservations by Capacity Reservation Group ARN or individual Capacity Reservation IDs. The feature is available today in all AWS commercial Regions at no extra charge beyond standard EC2 pricing for reservations, On-Demand, and Spot instances.

🛠️ Announcing Capability Insights, an open-source, self-hosted dashboard that deploys regional AWS capabilities data into your Amazon VPC. The solution auto-refreshes every 24 hours with data across Regions, including services, features, API operations, and CloudFormation resource types. Its Workload Analysis scans CloudTrail and CloudFormation to narrow 200+ services to the ones your account actually uses, aiding multi-Region planning while keeping all data within your VPC for compliance and data residency needs.

🔒 Today AWS announced container attribute-based rules for AWS Network Firewall, allowing firewall policies to reference native container constructs like Namespace, Cluster Name, Labels for Amazon EKS, and Cluster Name and Container Instance Attributes for Amazon ECS. This removes the need for fragile IP-based rules that break when pods scale or restart and supports generative AI and other dynamic workloads. The feature supports TLS decryption, FQDN and URL category filtering, and GeoIP controls, and is available at no extra cost in supported regions.

🚀 Amazon SageMaker Inference now supports container image caching to reduce scale-out latency for generative AI models. The service pre-caches the specified container image so new instances can begin serving without waiting to pull large images from Amazon ECR. This feature works with accelerator instance types, single-model endpoints, and inference component-based endpoints and requires no customer changes.