All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Microsoft Defender uses asset-aware protection powered by Security Exposure Management to identify and defend High-Value Assets such as domain controllers, IIS/Exchange servers, and identity infrastructure. The platform applies HVA-aware anomaly detection, cloud-delivered intelligence, and endpoint protections to detect credential dumping, webshell deployments, and other high-impact TTPs. Defender can also trigger automated disruption to contain threats and recommends prioritizing HVA coverage and remediation.

🎿 My Epic Assistant is an AI-powered concierge built by Vail Resorts with Google Cloud and partner 66degrees to deliver personalized recommendations across passes, lessons, and resort services. The assistant uses multi-agent orchestration, webhook-supplied user attributes, and a structured pass matrix to generate tailored pass suggestions and actionable content cards. Since launch, it has reduced escalations to human agents by 45%, speeding support while preserving brand and policy controls.

🔒 Google-managed MCP servers provide enterprise-grade, production-ready endpoints that let AI agents securely call Google services such as Maps, BigQuery, GKE, and Cloud Run. They remove infrastructure overhead by handling hosting, scaling, and reliability while integrating with Cloud IAM, VPC-SC, and Model Armor for governance and inline content filtering. Built-in observability via Cloud Audit Logs ensures traceability of tool calls for compliance and troubleshooting.

🚀 AWS now supports up to 32 GB of memory and up to 16 vCPUs for functions running on Lambda Managed Instances, enabling compute-intensive workloads without managing infrastructure. Customers can choose memory-to-vCPU ratios of 2:1, 4:1, or 8:1 to match CPU- or memory-heavy tasks (for example, 16, 8, or 4 vCPUs at 32 GB). The capability is available in all Regions where Lambda Managed Instances is GA and can be configured via Console, CLI, CloudFormation, CDK, or SAM.

🔧 AWS announced the general availability of Visible services and Visible Regions account settings in the AWS Management Console. Administrators can customize which services and Regions appear for authorized users to simplify navigation and reduce clutter. Configure these options in Console under Unified Settings or programmatically via User Experience Customization (UXC) with the AWS CLI, SDKs, CDK, or CloudFormation; the features are available in AWS Commercial Regions at no additional cost.

🔍 Cloudflare has added complete visual diagrams to the Cloudflare Workflows dashboard so developers can better inspect and debug code-first workflows. Because Workflows are dynamic code — with Promises, await, loops and nested functions — Cloudflare parses the bundled script at deploy time into an AST, using oxc-parser and a Rust Worker compiled to WebAssembly to translate nodes into a graph. The renderer maps step and function relationships, tracks parallelism and ordering with starts and resolves indices, and exposes a concise set of node types to support debugging and future real-time tracing features.

🔒 Google warns that advances in quantum computing could render widely used public-key cryptography vulnerable as early as 2029, increasing the risk of store-now-decrypt-later attacks. The company points to progress in quantum hardware, error correction and factoring resource estimates that compress migration timelines. To reduce exposure, Google will include post-quantum digital signature protection in Android 17, aligned with NIST recommendations. It urges organizations to treat post-quantum cryptography migration as an immediate operational priority rather than a distant compliance task.

⚡ Karl Weinmeister frames LLM inference as an efficient frontier that trades latency against throughput and argues production systems often sit below this curve. He presents five actionable optimizations—semantic model routing, prefill/decode disaggregation, modern quantization, context-aware L7 routing with prefix caching, and speculative decoding—and explains their practical tradeoffs. A Vertex AI case study reports 35% faster time-to-first-token and doubled prefix cache hit rates after deploying GKE Inference Gateway.

🎮 Amazon GameLift Servers now supports Amazon EC2 5th through 8th generation instances, expanding options for game server hosting. The release lets developers choose General Purpose (M), Compute Optimized (C), and Memory Optimized (R) families across Intel, AMD, and AWS Graviton processors, with variants offering local storage and enhanced networking. This update improves price-performance, efficiency, and flexibility for scaling multiplayer game workloads globally.

🔒 AWS HealthImaging now supports fine-grained study- and series-level access control for medical imaging data. Customers can reference DICOM Study Instance UIDs and Series Instance UIDs directly in IAM policies for DICOMweb APIs and create temporary, scoped grants using AWS STS session policies, removing the need to list individual image set ARNs. This reduces PHI exposure by limiting access to specific studies or series and supports workflows such as pathologist case-level access, radiology sharing with external partners, and controlled research distribution. The service is HIPAA-eligible and generally available in key regions.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has launched EC2 High Memory U7i instances in AWS Europe (Milan), introducing u7i-8tb.112xlarge with 8 TiB DDR5 and u7i-12tb.224xlarge with 12 TiB DDR5 memory. These instances are powered by custom 4th‑generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) processors and deliver 448 and 896 vCPUs respectively. Both sizes support up to 100 Gbps for Amazon EBS and networking and include ENA Express, making them well suited for mission‑critical in‑memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server.

🤖 AWS Step Functions now supports 28 additional AWS service integrations and over 1,100 new API actions, enabling direct orchestration of a broader set of services without writing custom integration code. New integrations include Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for invoking AI agent runtimes and Amazon S3 Vectors for document ingestion workflows. The update also adds support for AWS Lambda durable execution APIs to enable idempotent durable function invocations and management of durable executions from workflows. These enhancements are generally available in all Regions where Step Functions is offered.

🖼️ Amazon Bedrock now offers Palmyra Vision 7B from Writer, a multimodal 7B-parameter model that interprets and generates text from images via the Bedrock API. Trained on PixMo, a dataset of one million high-quality image-text pairs, the model supports visual question answering, handwritten text extraction, chart interpretation, and image-based comprehension for enterprise workflows. It is available in select AWS Regions to simplify deployment of multimodal applications.

🔗 AWS now enables remote connections from Kiro and Cursor IDEs to Amazon SageMaker Studio. Data scientists, ML engineers, and developers can use their local Kiro/Cursor setups — including spec-driven development, conversational coding, and automated feature generation — while running workloads on SageMaker's scalable cloud compute. Authentication is supported via the AWS Toolkit extension or SageMaker Studio's web UI, preserving Studio security boundaries and reducing context switching.

🔒 Amazon now supports FIPS-compliant operation for Amazon ECS Managed Instances running Graviton-based and GPU-accelerated workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. ECS Managed Instances in GovCloud enable FIPS by default, use FIPS-compliant endpoints and validated cryptographic modules, and boot kernels in FIPS mode. Customers can enable the feature via the Console, ECS MCP Server, ECS Express Mode, or infrastructure-as-code; management charges apply in addition to EC2 costs.

🆕 Research and Engineering Studio (RES) on AWS 2026.03 introduces expanded administrator controls, enhanced filesystem support, and session management improvements. Admins can onboard multiple FSx for ONTAP volumes as RES filesystems, configure DCV token expiration to support longer session files, and add up to three custom login links. The release also enables admins to restart VDIs in error states from the Sessions page and lets users reset VDI schedules to the system default, alongside assorted bug fixes and performance improvements.

🔔 Research and Engineering Studio (RES) 2026.03 introduces administrator controls, expanded filesystem support, and session-management improvements to simplify cloud-based research desktops. Administrators can onboard multiple FSx for ONTAP volumes, configure DCV token expiration for longer session files, and add up to three custom links on the RES login page. The release also enables restarting VDIs in error states from the Sessions page, lets users reset VDI schedules to system defaults with one action, and includes assorted bug fixes and performance improvements across supported AWS Regions.

🔧 AWS Parallel Computing Service (AWS PCS) now supports additional Slurm settings for slurmdbd and cgroups accessible via the console, CLI, and SDK. Administrators can tune accounting behavior, privacy controls, and data retention through slurmdbd, while cgroups enable CPU binding, memory limits, and device access restrictions to prevent oversubscription. These options can be set at cluster creation or applied to existing clusters across all AWS PCS regions.

🔔 AWS has expanded availability of Amazon EC2 I8ge instances to Europe (Stockholm) and multiple Asia Pacific regions including Mumbai, Malaysia, Singapore, and Sydney. These storage-optimized instances run on Graviton4 processors and leverage third-generation Nitro SSDs, delivering up to 60% better compute and up to 55% better real-time storage performance per TB versus prior Graviton2-based storage instances. I8ge offers up to 120 TB of local NVMe, high network throughput, and dedicated EBS bandwidth for low-latency, data-intensive workloads.

🔒 The new Aurora DSQL Connector for Ruby (pg gem) simplifies building Ruby applications on Aurora DSQL by automating IAM token generation, SSL configuration, and connection pooling. It removes the need for persistent user-generated passwords while preserving full compatibility with existing pg gem features. The connector also provides optional optimistic concurrency control (OCC) retry with exponential backoff and supports custom IAM credential providers and AWS profiles.