All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

AWS launches memory-optimized EC2 R8i and R8i-flex

🔔 AWS announced general availability of new memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R8i and R8i‑flex instances powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors. AWS says these instances deliver up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x the memory bandwidth of prior Intel-based generations, with up to 20–60% faster results on targeted workloads. R8i provides 13 sizes including a new 96xlarge and SAP certification, while R8i‑flex offers common, cost-efficient sizes from large to 16xlarge. Instances are initially available in N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, and Spain and can be purchased via On‑Demand, Spot, or Savings Plans.

Value Exchange in Cybersecurity: Aligning Vendors & Partners

🤝 Strong vendor–partner alignment drives faster resolution, tailored deployments and sustained security outcomes for customers. Palo Alto Networks frames this mutual commitment as the value exchange and supports it with investments such as a refreshed Learning Center for Partners to build role-based expertise. When vendors and partners operate as a unified ecosystem, platformization reduces silos, lowers total cost of ownership and enables unified visibility and faster remediation. Weak collaboration, conversely, increases downtime, cost and risk.

JJ Cummings on Managing Sensitive Threat Intelligence

🔒 At Talos, JJ Cummings — leader of the Threat Intelligence and Interdiction team — discusses the delicate work of handling partner-provided, sensitive information while conducting nation‑state investigations. He outlines how analysts create unattributable or alternatively attributable reporting to preserve sources and still deliver operationally useful findings. JJ credits colleagues such as Matt Olney and Ryan Pentney and emphasizes his team's role as force multipliers in incident response, threat hunting, and deep analysis.

TwelveLabs Pegasus 1.2 Now in AWS Virginia and Seoul

📹 TwelveLabs Pegasus 1.2 is now available in US East (N. Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) through Amazon Bedrock. The video-first language model is optimized for long-form content and combines visual, audio, and textual signals to deliver advanced video-to-text generation and temporal understanding. Regional availability reduces latency and simplifies architecture for enterprise video-intelligence applications. To begin, request model access via the Amazon Bedrock console.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server: Kerberos via Self-Managed AD

🔐 Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server now supports Kerberos authentication when instances are joined to a self-managed Microsoft Active Directory. Previously, Kerberos integration required AWS Managed Microsoft AD; customers can now enable Kerberos authentication with their existing on-premises or self-managed AD environments. This change simplifies migrations and preserves enterprise identity configurations while continuing to support existing integrations with AWS Managed AD. The feature is available in all AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Building the Frontier Firm with Microsoft Azure Modernization

🚀 Microsoft frames a new enterprise archetype—Frontier Firms—that embed AI agents across workflows and rearchitect operations around a modern cloud foundation. The post warns that AI cannot scale on legacy systems and that technical debt undermines agility, security, and innovation. It cites IDC findings showing substantial gains in agility, resilience, ROI, and speed to market when organizations migrate and modernize on Azure, and urges continuous modernization and use of Microsoft’s App Modernization Guidance.

Amazon RDS io2 Block Express Now in AWS GovCloud Regions

🔒 Amazon announced that Amazon RDS io2 Block Express volumes are now available in AWS GovCloud (US‑West) and AWS GovCloud (US‑East) Regions. These volumes provide consistent sub‑millisecond latency and industry‑leading outlier latency control for mission‑critical database workloads. io2 Block Express supports up to 256,000 Provisioned IOPS, 4,000 MB/s throughput, 64 TiB volumes, and 99.999% durability. Customers can upgrade from io1 without downtime using the ModifyDBInstance API and modify existing io1, gp2, or gp3 volumes in the RDS Management Console.

Amazon Connect embeds Tasks and Emails into websites

📨 Amazon Connect now supports embedding Tasks and Emails directly into websites and applications via a new contact form option in the communication widget. Supervisors and managers can use a drag-and-drop editor to design customer-facing forms and generate code snippets for seamless site integration. These interactions continue to be managed through existing Amazon Connect workflows, enabling flexible callback requests and web-based email submissions.

Amazon Connect Adds Recurring Activities to Schedules

🔁 Amazon Connect now supports recurring activities in agent schedules, enabling managers to create repeating events such as daily stand-ups or weekly team meetings with a few clicks. You can configure recurring series for individual agents or share a single recurring series across multiple agents, removing the need to create each occurrence manually. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect agent scheduling is offered and is designed to improve manager productivity and keep agent calendars up to date.

AWS Direct Connect Opens Location in Barcelona, Spain

📡AWS announced a new AWS Direct Connect location at the Equinix BA1 data center near Barcelona, Spain, enabling private, direct connectivity to all public AWS Regions (excluding China), AWS GovCloud Regions, and AWS Local Zones. This is the first Direct Connect site in Barcelona and the third in Spain, offering dedicated 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps circuits with MACsec encryption available. Direct Connect enables private physical connections between AWS and customer data centers or colocation facilities, delivering a more consistent network experience than the public internet.

Amazon QuickSight Raises Calculated Field Limits Globally

🔎 Amazon QuickSight has increased calculated-field capacities: analyses can now include up to 2,000 calculated fields (previously 500) and datasets can include up to 500 calculated fields (previously 200). The expansion enables authors and data curators to build more transformations and extract richer, more complex insights from very large datasets and diverse end-user personas. In regions where Amazon Q is available, users can also construct calculations using natural language. The new limits are currently available across all supported QuickSight regions.

Amazon Aurora MySQL 3.10 Declared Long-Term Support Release

🚀 Amazon Web Services has designated Aurora MySQL 3.10 (compatible with MySQL 8.0.42) as a long-term support (LTS) minor release, effective immediately. Clusters that choose the LTS minor version can remain on that release for at least three years or until the major engine’s standard support ends, whichever is sooner. During the LTS lifecycle, AWS will publish only targeted patches addressing select high-severity security and operational issues and will not introduce new features. This LTS designation is available in all regions where Aurora MySQL is offered.

AWS Marketplace Launches Streamlined AMI Fulfillment

🚀 AWS Marketplace has introduced a streamlined fulfillment experience for Amazon Machine Image (AMI) and AMI with CloudFormation products across both the website and console. The update combines configuration and purchase steps on a single page, clearly presenting fulfillment options, related AWS services, and seller-provided guidance. It also brings a new in-console launch experience for container products, providing a consistent multi-region, multi-language workflow.

AWS Batch introduces default-x86_64 and default-arm64 pools

🔔 AWS Batch now offers two new default instance type categories: default-x86_64 and default-arm64. These options automatically select the most cost-effective EC2 instance types across generations based on your job queue requirements and will be expanded as new instance types become available in a region. You can enable them via the instanceType parameter for managed compute environments; the existing optimal option remains supported. Only Compute Environments in an ENABLED and VALID state will receive automatic updates.

Amazon S3 adds compute checksum to verify datasets

🔒 Amazon Web Services has added a compute checksum operation to S3 Batch Operations, enabling large-scale verification of stored datasets without restoring or downloading objects. You can submit a manifest or target a bucket with prefix/suffix filters, select algorithms such as SHA-256, MD5, CRC32C and others, and receive a detailed integrity report when the job completes. This capability complements S3's built-in validation and simplifies compliance, preservation, and accuracy checks across all storage classes and object sizes.

Bedrock Batch Inference: Claude Sonnet 4 and GPT-OSS

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now supports Batch inference for Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI GPT-OSS (120B, 20B), enabling asynchronous processing of large workloads at approximately 50% of on-demand inference cost. The update targets bulk scenarios such as document analysis, large-scale summarization, content generation, and structured data extraction, and is optimized to deliver higher overall batch throughput on these newer models. Batch progress and workload metrics — including pending and processed records, tokens per minute, and Claude-specific pending tokens — are exposed at the AWS account level via Amazon CloudWatch.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone adds FIS resilience testing

🛠 AWS now supports resilience testing for S3 Express One Zone using AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS), enabling simulated network disruptions that cause data plane requests to timeout for directory buckets. The FIS network disruption action is included in the AZ Availability: Power Interruption scenario and is available in all Regions where the storage class is offered. You can run experiments via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or the FIS API to validate monitoring, recovery procedures, and improve application resilience; consult FIS pricing for cost details.

Amazon Athena Adds CTAS Support for S3 Tables and Iceberg

🆕 Amazon Athena now supports CREATE TABLE AS SELECT (CTAS) statements targeting S3 Tables, enabling creation and population of a managed S3 Table from a single SQL query. The capability supports source data in Parquet, CSV, JSON and lake formats such as Apache Iceberg, Hudi, and Delta Lake. CTAS lets you partition data on the fly and the resulting tables can be queried, JOINed, and updated in Athena. This feature is available in AWS Regions where both Athena and S3 Tables are supported.

Amazon EC2 R8g Instances Now in AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta)

🚀 Amazon EC2 R8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4 are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region. R8g delivers up to 30% better performance versus Graviton3, offers larger sizes—up to 48xlarge and 1.5 TB memory across 12 sizes including two bare-metal options—and targets memory‑intensive workloads. Built on the AWS Nitro System, these instances provide up to 50 Gbps networking and up to 40 Gbps to EBS for databases, in‑memory caches, and real‑time analytics.

DynamoDB: Emit Only Throttled Key Events to CloudWatch

📈 DynamoDB now supports selectively emitting events for throttled keys to CloudWatch Contributor Insights, enabling you to monitor only throttled items rather than all accessed keys. By emitting exclusively throttled-key events, you reduce monitoring costs and noise while maintaining visibility into throttling and usage hotspots. This mode is available in all commercial AWS Regions, GovCloud (US), and China Regions.