All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Microsoft Adds Copilot Chat to Microsoft 365 Office Apps

💬 Microsoft is rolling out Copilot Chat to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for eligible Microsoft 365 business customers. Unlike Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat is web-grounded and uses only web data by default, though it is content-aware and tailors responses to the file you have open. Microsoft says the feature is included at no additional cost for qualifying licenses, and admins can opt out of automatic installs; organizations can purchase a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to unlock full access to organizational data.

CrowdStrike Unveils Agentic AI Platforms After Onum Deal

🤖 CrowdStrike is expanding its agentic AI strategy following its $290 million acquisition of Onum, introducing two initiatives designed to accelerate real-time telemetry and automate SOC workflows. The Agentic Security Platform builds an "enterprise graph" with a semantic data model that acts as a Rosetta Stone to normalize diverse telemetry and enable a global query and command engine. Agent Works provides a no-code environment to create, test, and deploy agentic systems, while the Agentic Security Workforce delivers mission-ready agents in Falcon sensors to automate repetitive analyst tasks and enforce data-protection controls across endpoints.

Amazon EKS Adds Community Add-Ons Catalog for GovCloud

🔒Amazon EKS now offers a curated catalog of community add-ons for AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The catalog includes popular open-source components such as metrics-server, kube-state-metrics, cert-manager, prometheus-node-exporter, fluent-bit, and external-dns, all packaged, scanned, and validated for compatibility by EKS. Container images are hosted in an EKS-owned private ECR repository, and you can install and manage add-ons via the EKS Console, API, CLI, eksctl, or infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation.

AWS launches EC2 I7i storage-optimized instances globally

🚀 Amazon Web Services has announced the availability of high-performance, storage-optimized EC2 I7i instances in the South America (São Paulo) and Canada West (Calgary) regions. Powered by 5th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, these instances deliver up to 23% better compute and improved price performance versus I4i. I7i offers up to 45TB NVMe, lower latency, and enhanced real-time storage performance, with support for bare-metal sizes and up to 100Gbps networking for I/O-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads.

Amazon Lex Adds LLM-Based NLU for Eight New Languages

🚀 Amazon Lex now leverages large language models to augment the natural language understanding of deterministic conversational bots in eight additional languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian, and German. The enhancement helps voice and chat bots parse complex utterances, tolerate spelling errors, and extract key details from verbose inputs so bots can fulfill customer requests. The capability is available in 10 commercial AWS Regions where Amazon Connect operates.

AWS FIS Adds EBS I/O Latency Injection for Testing

⚙️ Amazon EBS now provides a latency injection action in AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) to simulate degraded I/O performance on EBS volumes as part of controlled fault injection experiments. The action reproduces real-world signals such as Amazon CloudWatch alarms and OS timeouts so teams can observe application behavior and validate recovery. Pre-defined templates are available in the EBS and FIS consoles, and experiments can be customized or combined with other actions to integrate into chaos engineering and CI workflows. The capability is available in all Regions where FIS is supported.

Amazon EC2 adds detailed NVMe instance store metrics

📊 Amazon announced detailed performance statistics for EC2 instance store NVMe volumes, providing real-time I/O visibility on Nitro-based instances. The capability exposes 11 metrics at one-second granularity, including IOPS, throughput, queue lengths, and latency histograms broken down by IO size. Available by default across AWS Commercial and China Regions at no extra charge, it aligns NVMe monitoring with EBS detailed metrics for a consistent operational experience.

Data Science Agent Adds BigQuery ML, DataFrames, and Spark

🧭 Google Cloud has expanded the Data Science Agent in Colab Enterprise notebooks to support BigQuery ML, BigQuery DataFrames and Spark, enabling large-scale data transformation, model training, and inference directly on BigQuery or via Serverless for Apache Spark. The agent can now auto-retrieve BigQuery table metadata and lets you add tables via an @ mention from your current project to provide prompt context. To invoke frameworks, include keywords such as BigQuery ML, BigFrames, or PySpark; sample prompts are provided to guide forecasting, supervised learning, and dimensionality reduction workflows. Notable limitations: generated PySpark targets Spark 4.0 and @ mentions only search the current project; BigQuery improvements are available now in BigQuery notebooks and coming soon to Vertex AI.

Microsoft Purview Updates for Fabric: Securing Data for AI

🔒 Microsoft announced Purview innovations for Fabric at FabCon to unify discovery, protection, and governance across Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Fabric. New generally available controls include Information Protection policies for Fabric items, DLP for structured data in OneLake, and Insider Risk Management for Fabric. Preview features add DSPM data risk assessments and enhanced Copilot controls, while the Unified Catalog gains finer metadata, tagging, and data‑quality workflows to improve discoverability and trust.

Azure Kubernetes Service Automatic: Simplified AKS for All

🚀 AKS Automatic is now generally available, delivering a fully managed, opinionated Kubernetes experience with production-ready defaults and automated day-two operations. It removes infrastructure toil—automatic node provisioning, scaling, patching, and repairs—while enabling intelligent autoscaling with HPA, VPA, KEDA and Karpenter. Developers retain the full Kubernetes API and toolchain and gain GPU and AI workload optimizations.

Google Cloud and Infoblox introduce DNS Armor security

🛡️ DNS Armor is a cloud-native DNS security service from Google Cloud, built in partnership with Infoblox, that provides preemptive detection and mitigation of DNS-based threats for Google Cloud workloads. By intercepting internet-bound DNS queries and inspecting them in real time with Infoblox Threat Defense, it identifies malicious and high-risk domains, C2 activity, DNS tunneling, DGA patterns and evasive techniques such as fast-flux, and forwards detailed logs to Cloud Logging, Security Command Center, or SIEMs. Delivered as a turnkey managed service with no VMs and no impact to Cloud DNS, DNS Armor is enabled at the project level for granular protection and is available now in preview.

Gemini and Open-Source Text Embeddings Now in BigQuery ML

🚀 Google expanded BigQuery ML to generate embeddings from Gemini and over 13,000 open-source text-embedding models via Hugging Face, all callable with simple SQL. The post summarizes model tiers to help teams trade off quality, cost, and scalability, and introduces Gemini's Tokens Per Minute (TPM) quota for throughput control. It shows a practical workflow to deploy OSS models to Vertex AI endpoints, run ML.GENERATE_EMBEDDING for batch jobs, and undeploy to minimize idle costs, plus a Colab tutorial and cost/scale guidance.

Microsoft to Remove WMIC After Windows 11 25H2 Upgrade

🔧 Microsoft has announced that the legacy WMIC command-line tool will be removed after systems are upgraded to Windows 11 25H2 and later. Administrators are advised to migrate scripts and automation to PowerShell or programmatic alternatives such as WMI's COM API or .NET libraries. The change affects only the WMIC client; the underlying WMI infrastructure remains supported. Microsoft says the removal reduces complexity and limits abuse of WMIC by threat actors.

AWS OSPAR 2025 Report: 170 Services Covered Under OSPAR v2.0

🔒 AWS has completed its annual OSPAR 2025 audit cycle under the newly enhanced OSPAR v2.0 guidelines, becoming the first global cloud provider in Singapore to receive the report. The certification covers 170 services in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region, including seven newly scoped services such as Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) and AWS Payment Cryptography. Customers can retrieve the full report through AWS Artifact to support due diligence and compliance.

Oklahoma DOT Modernizes Bridge Management with Google Cloud

🔍 ODOT teamed with Google Cloud and North Highland to centralize decades of bridge inspection, location, and maintenance data into BigQuery and govern it with Dataplex, creating a single trusted source for analysis. Non-technical and technical staff can query complex datasets conversationally through Gemini in Looker, while BigQuery ML powers predictive models to flag at-risk bridges ahead of failures. Secure sharing via Analytics Hub and unified governance enables better resource allocation, improved safety, and faster, data-driven decisions across the agency.

Amazon AppStream Adds Fractional GPU Graphics G6 Instances

🖥️ Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports Graphics G6 instances with fractionalized GPU sizes, enabling customers to provision GPU capacity in smaller fractions (for example 1/2, 1/4, or 1/8) instead of full GPU instances. The new G6f and Gr6f options are built on the EC2 G6 family and are designed to optimize shared GPU resources for graphics workloads that need less than a full GPU. These instances are available in 10 AWS Regions and use pay-as-you-go pricing; they can be launched from the AWS Management Console or via the AWS SDK when creating an image builder or fleet.

Team-wide VMware Certification: Boost Security and Retention

🔐 Team-wide VMware certification acts as a force multiplier for security, operations, and talent retention. Certified teams share a common language around architecture, reduce misconfigurations, and respond to incidents faster. Expertise in vSphere, NSX, vSAN, and cloud foundations teaches not just deployment but secure, scalable configuration. Programs like VMUG Advantage make broad certification practical with labs, exam vouchers, and personal-use licenses.

Amazon S3 Adds Conditional Deletes for General Buckets

🔒 Amazon S3 now supports conditional deletes in S3 general purpose buckets. You can include an HTTP If-Match header with an object's ETag when calling DeleteObject or DeleteObjects; S3 will only delete the object if the provided ETag matches, reducing accidental removals in high-concurrency, multi-writer environments. Administrators can also enforce conditional deletes using the s3:if-match bucket policy condition. The capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions and accessible via the API, SDKs, and CLI.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Now in AWS GovCloud

🚀 Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database is now available in AWS GovCloud (US‑East, US‑West), providing a serverless endpoint that transparently distributes data and queries across multiple Aurora Serverless instances while preserving transactional consistency. The service supports PostgreSQL 16.6, 16.8, and 16.9 compatibility and includes distributed query planning and transaction management so you don’t need to build custom sharding or manage multiple databases. Compute automatically scales up and down within customer-specified budgets, reducing the need to provision for peak capacity.

AWS Storage Gateway Adds IPv6 Dual-Stack Support Globally

🌐 AWS Storage Gateway now supports IPv6 for endpoints, APIs, and gateway appliance interfaces, offering new dual‑stack access alongside IPv4. Existing IPv4-only endpoints remain available for backward compatibility. Customers can standardize on IPv6 or transition gradually using the dual‑stack appliances and APIs. Support is available in all AWS Regions where the service is offered.