All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

⚡ Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports M8i and R8i 8th‑generation instances powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors available only on AWS. These instance types deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and up to 2.5× more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel‑based generations, targeting memory‑intensive and latency‑sensitive Oracle workloads. Support is offered in a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition 2, and you can modify existing RDS instances or create new ones through the RDS Management Console, AWS SDKs, or CLI.

🔐 Check Point Services offers PS Private Training (Custom ILT), a tailored instructor‑led program that turns complex security environments into operational control. The service replaces generic courses with environment‑specific labs, hands‑on exercises, and field‑proven best practices delivered by active Professional Services consultants. It focuses on closing hands‑on skill gaps, speeding issue resolution, and lowering operational risk even in well‑equipped organizations.

🔬 Amazon Braket now offers access to Rigetti's Cepheus-1-108Q, the first 100+ qubit superconducting QPU available on the service. The device uses a modular 3×4 array of twelve 9‑qubit chiplets with tunable and intermodule couplers and introduces CZ gates with an adiabatic implementation to reduce phase and leakage errors. Customers can run deeper circuits for chemical simulation, combinatorial optimization, and machine learning via the Braket SDK or frameworks such as Qiskit, CUDA‑Q, and Pennylane, and researchers can use pulse‑level control. Cepheus-1-108Q is available in the US West (N. California) Region.

🌐 AWS announced IPv6 support for AWS Transfer Family SFTP connectors, AS2 connectors, and Transfer Family web apps. The change enables connectors to reach IPv6-native remote servers and trading partners while letting end users access web apps from IPv6 networks and devices. Dual-stack support lets customers communicate with both IPv4 and IPv6 systems during migration. The feature is available in most regions where Transfer Family is offered.

🔍 AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now provides a console search bar and a new SearchCertificates API to locate certificates by domain name, certificate ARN, or validity range. Administrators managing large certificate inventories can combine parameters to quickly find certificates that are expiring soon or match specific criteria. The capability supports both ad hoc console queries and scripted automation via the API. This feature is available in Public AWS, AWS China, and AWS GovCloud regions.

🤖 AWS Cost Explorer now integrates Amazon Q generative AI so you can query your AWS cost and usage data using natural language. Suggested prompts and a new 'Ask Question' button let users pose common or custom questions while Cost Explorer automatically updates charts, filters, and groupings to match the query. When Amazon Q uses additional datasets like pricing or anomaly detection, visual outputs appear in an artifacts panel. The conversation remains contextual for follow-up analysis without switching tools.

🔒 Cloudflare has introduced Organizations in public beta to help enterprise customers manage multiple Cloudflare Accounts centrally. The feature creates an organization layer for account grouping, introduces an Org Super Administrator role, and provides aggregated analytics and shared policy sets. Initial rollout targets enterprise plans with staged expansion to other customers and partners. There is no additional fee for Organizations during beta.

📝 Amazon has added import/export capabilities to SageMaker Unified Studio notebooks to simplify migration from JupyterLab and other platforms. The feature supports .ipynb, .json, and .py formats while preserving cell types, outputs, execution history, and metadata. Exports are available in four package types (.zip with requirements, .ipynb, .py, and native .json). The release also introduces developer productivity features including cell reordering, keyboard shortcuts, cell renaming, and multi-line SQL with tabbed results.

🔑 AWS has added support for policy store aliases along with named policies and policy templates in Amazon Verified Permissions. Developers can now assign human-readable aliases to tenant policy stores and reference policies by meaningful names instead of system-generated IDs. This removes the need for separate mapping tables and simplifies multi-tenant deployments and everyday policy management. These capabilities are available in all Regions where the service operates.

🛠️ Microsoft has deprecated and removed the Support and Recovery Assistant (SaRA) command‑line utility from all in‑support Windows updates effective March 10. The company recommends administrators migrate to the Get Help command‑line tool (GetHelpCmd.exe), which offers similar diagnostic capabilities and runs on a more secure infrastructure. Get Help can be scripted and executed remotely to troubleshoot Microsoft 365 apps, Outlook, Teams, and Windows clients.

🔒 Amazon WorkSpaces Personal now assigns globally unique, publicly resolvable DNS names to each AWS PrivateLink interface VPC endpoint. This change eliminates DNS name collisions across VPCs and accounts, enabling enterprises to deploy WorkSpaces Personal directories in multiple VPCs without conflict. The AWS-managed names resolve to private IP addresses reachable only within the respective VPC, require no additional Route 53 or custom DNS configuration, and remain backward compatible. The feature is available in all regions where PrivateLink supports WorkSpaces.

🔔 Amazon Web Services now lets customers create Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file systems in the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region. The fully managed service delivers low-latency, high-throughput shared file storage built on the OpenZFS file system with features like snapshots, data cloning, and compression. Designed for demanding workloads, it offers sub-millisecond latencies and multi-GB/s throughput while simplifying deployment and scaling. Check the AWS Region Table and product page for availability and details.

🌱 Google reports that its seventh‑generation TPU, Ironwood, achieved an approximately 3.7x improvement in Compute Carbon Intensity (CCI) versus TPU v5p based on fleet measurements in January 2026. CCI captures estimated CO2e per utilized FLOP, including embodied (Scope 3) and operational (Scope 1 and 2) emissions. Google also cites a roughly 5x increase in utilized FLOPs and a rise in peak BF16 FLOPS from 459 to 2,307. The company attributes gains to hardware advances and software/system optimizations such as Mixture of Experts sparsity, wider FP8 adoption, and improved fleet orchestration, while noting results are a point‑in‑time snapshot that can vary by workload, location, and accounting method.

🔍 Looker now provides self-service Explores that convert CSV, XLS/XLSX, or Google Sheets into instant, governed Explorations using a drag-and-drop or sheet import workflow. Uploaded files are securely persisted in your BigQuery instance and can be re-uploaded or refreshed for ongoing ad-hoc dashboards. Merge queries enable combining uploaded data with modeled Looker datasets (unlimited within the same BigQuery connection) to enrich official metrics, while conversational analytics supports natural-language querying. Admin controls and monitoring keep ad-hoc work distinct from core, governed models to maintain metric integrity.

🗣️ Looker Embedded now offers conversational analytics through the generally available Conversational Analytics API, enabling natural-language querying and AI recommendations inside customer-facing applications. The capability can be deployed via a low-code iframe or integrated SDKs and supports multi-Explore queries, a built-in code interpreter, and customizable theming for private-labeled experiences. Grounded in Looker’s governed semantic layer, it surfaces verifiable SQL to reduce hallucinations and accelerate developer extensibility and data monetization.

🚀 AWS announced the general availability of Smithy-Java, an open-source Java framework that generates type-safe clients and standalone types from Smithy models. Built on Java 21 virtual threads, it offers a simpler blocking-style API while remaining competitive with complex async alternatives. The GA release includes a Java client code generator, support for AWS SigV4 and major protocols, a dynamic client that requires no codegen step, standalone type generation for reuse, schema-driven serialization to reduce SDK size, and binary decision diagrams for faster endpoint resolution.

🚀 RVU accelerated its personalization platform by adopting Dataproc and Google Cloud Serverless for Apache Spark, using high-speed Spark processing for feature engineering across its consumer brands. The company reduced feature engineering and model development time from weeks to days, enabling faster experimentation and quicker contractor onboarding. This scalable, managed approach co-locates data in BigQuery, simplifies operations, and improves time-to-market for hyper-personalized campaigns.

🚀 The new AWS IoT Greengrass Component SDK delivers a compact, high-performance runtime for edge devices, reducing component memory footprints to under 0.5MB compared with roughly 30MB. It provides native C, C++, and Rust bindings while maintaining compatibility with both the Greengrass nucleus and nucleus lite. Targeted at resource-constrained industries such as automotive, industrial IoT, robotics, and smart buildings, the SDK enables more complex AI/ML workloads at the edge and is available in all AWS Regions where Greengrass is offered.

🔒 FortiOS 8.0 delivers a unified operating system to simplify security and networking across hybrid, multi-cloud, and IT/OT environments. The release consolidates controls through the Fortinet Security Fabric and adds features such as SASE Outpost, Sovereign SASE, unified SD‑WAN, and multipath IPsec for resilient connectivity. It also extends OT support and compliance with standards like NERC CIP and IEC 62443. Key risk-focused updates include MCP observability, image OCR in FortiGuard DLP, agentic AI automation, and FIPS 204/205 hybrid cryptography to mitigate quantum risk.

🔐 Amazon S3 is rolling out a new default bucket security setting that will automatically disable server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C) for all new general purpose buckets. For existing buckets in accounts without any SSE-C-encrypted objects, S3 will also block SSE-C for new write requests. AWS will not change buckets in accounts that already use SSE-C. The rollout covers 37 regions, including AWS China and GovCloud, over the next few weeks.