All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 AWS IAM Identity Center's Identity Store APIs now accept ARNs for users, groups, group memberships, and identity stores wherever resource IDs were previously required. This additive change means existing integrations keep working while allowing callers to supply either resource IDs or full ARNs directly. Responses still return resource IDs and malformed or wrong-type ARNs result in a ValidationException. The feature is available in all Regions where IAM Identity Center is offered at no extra cost.

📱 AWS Accounts now support phone number verification using SMS one-time passcodes for primary contact numbers. Customers can initiate verification via the AWS Management Console or the new SendPhoneNumberVerification API, and confirm with VerifyPhoneNumber. Verification status is exposed in GetContactInformation and changes via PutContactInformation require re-verification. Organizations can inherit verified numbers from the management account for member accounts.

🚀 AWS Transfer Family now auto-approves SFTP connector quota increase requests up to 1,000 connectors per AWS account in each Region. The default remains 100 connectors, and you can still request higher limits via the AWS Service Quotas console. Automatic approval covers connectors using service-managed egress or Amazon VPC Lattice egress. If you require more than 1,000 connectors, submit a higher quota request manually.

🔐 Amazon Redshift introduces a new DEBUG permission to let data owners grant select identities access to unredacted secure logging records across federated warehouses. With federated permissions, Redshift enforces FGAC across warehouses while secure logging redacts sensitive system table values; DEBUG lets authorized identities view full records for their queries or for account administration. Grants use the standard GRANT command for IAM users, roles, or Identity Center principals and remain effective when exporting system table data to Amazon S3 Tables.

🆕 Amazon S3 Tables now support the Apache Iceberg Version 3 data types including geometry, geography, unknown, and nanosecond-precision timestamps, plus column default values. These additions let you store geospatial coordinates and nanosecond event times natively, reducing the need to encode values as strings or integers and improving efficiency and query performance. S3 Tables continue to provide automatic maintenance and compaction for Iceberg tables and are available in all Regions where S3 Tables are offered.

🚀 KDDI Corporation has launched the "SASE Gateway powered by Palo Alto Networks" using the new SP Interconnect (SPI) architecture to directly link carrier-grade closed networks (WVS2) with Prisma SASE. The service eliminates IPsec overhead, enhances performance and flexibility for Japanese enterprises, and centralizes security management under a single policy engine. It can be extended with Cortex XDR, Prisma Browser and SOC/IR services to support AI adoption, hybrid work and cloud migration.

🐧 Microsoft has made WSL Containers generally available, enabling direct build, run, and deployment of Linux containers on Windows via a new wslc.exe (alias container.exe). The release adds missing preview features like restart, file copy, health checks, networking commands, mounts, and configurable storage. A WSL Containers API lets Windows apps programmatically launch containers, and integrations include Defender for Endpoint, Intune policy controls, and VS Code tooling support.

🆕 AWS Deadline Cloud introduces flexible expressions and richer parameter types for job templates, enabling teams to embed pipeline logic directly in templates. The update supports Python-style expressions (arithmetic, conditionals, string/path ops, list comprehensions) and new boolean, list, and frame-range parameters. Expressions are type-checked at submission and evaluate deterministically. The capability is provided via the EXPR extension to Open Job Description and is available in supported AWS Regions.

🛡️Signal released version 8.30, finishing the rollout of its encrypted backups across Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. The update introduces on-device local backups for iOS and desktop and harmonizes Android backups to a single cross-platform format. Hosted and local backups remain end-to-end encrypted and require recovery keys, while hosted backups include a rotating supplemental key for added protection.

🤖 Developed jointly by AWS and OpenAI, Bedrock Managed Agents (BMA) is an AWS-native implementation of OpenAI's Agents API that runs entirely inside AWS. BMA maintains state through durable sessions, manages tool selection and execution, and allows reusable skills and MCP-connected tools. Each agent uses its own IAM role, supports human approvals for consequential actions, and logs supported API activity to AWS CloudTrail. The preview is available in select US regions with no additional BMA charge beyond consumed AWS resources.

🔍 Amazon RDS now reports the full snapshot size for RDS Snapshots through a new FullSnapshotSizeInBytes field in the DescribeDBSnapshots API and a console column labeled 'Full Snapshot Size'. This value represents the total size of all blocks that constitute a snapshot, including referenced blocks from prior incremental snapshots, and differs from the incremental snapshot size that only counts newly stored blocks. The feature is available for all Amazon RDS instances in all commercial AWS Regions and can be used via the console, CLI, or SDKs starting today.

🛠️ AWS Deadline Cloud now supports running jobs using Docker containers from Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) on Linux-based service-managed fleets. Deadline Cloud is a fully managed service for compute-intensive workloads like visual effects, simulation, and gaming. Customers can bring their own container images and have Deadline Cloud automatically deploy them at scale. Container support is available in all Regions where Deadline Cloud is offered.

🔍 Palo Alto Networks today announced CLARA Agent, an integration that connects Strata Cloud Manager to Google Cloud Gemini Enterprise to deliver conversational, evidence-backed cloud and AI security insights. The agent discovers infrastructure, surfaces production and shadow AI/ML models, and prioritizes critical exposures and vulnerabilities. Available via Google Cloud Marketplace, CLARA Agent leverages A2A and MCP protocols to provide secure, context-aware responses without extra infrastructure, and aims to democratize visibility across cloud, platform, and AI teams.

🛈 Microsoft has begun broad rollout of the Windows 11 2026 Update (26H2), but most users will see incremental changes since many features were already delivered via monthly updates. The update installs as a small enablement package for systems on 24H2 or 25H2, making it more like a regular cumulative update. Devices that shipped with 26H1 cannot upgrade directly to 26H2, and installing 26H2 resets the support lifecycle (24 months for Home/Pro, 36 months for Enterprise/Education).

📣 Administrators can now store up to 20,000 values per data table in Amazon Connect Customer to define contact center configurations such as operating hours, escalation rules, AI prompts, and queue assignments. The update enables export, bulk editing, instance-to-instance table moves, and loading data from sources like Excel and DynamoDB. Business teams can maintain reference data themselves to adjust configurations in real time without relying on technical staff, and the feature is available in all AWS commercial and GovCloud regions where Amazon Connect Customer is offered.

🖥️ Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now offers unified graphics images that work across G4dn, G5, G6, and G7 instance families. This single image type replaces generation-specific images, simplifying image management and making it easier to adopt newer GPU generations. The console shows compatible instance types when creating a fleet, and fleets can change instance types across supported families via the console or the UpdateFleet API. Unified graphics images are available in all supported AWS commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions, and customers can upgrade existing images or launch builders from a unified base image.

🚀 Google Cloud announces GKE Agent Sandbox and the Agent Sandbox RL orchestration SDK, now generally available, to address infrastructure bottlenecks in large-scale agentic reinforcement learning. The solution integrates SandboxWarmPool with GKE Image Streaming to eliminate cold-starts, reduce GPU idle time, and support thousands of large images with low TTFC. Native integrations with popular RL tools and an async Python SDK simplify orchestration and warm-pooling strategies for researchers.

🔔 Today Microsoft announced that SQL Server on Azure Local is generally available for both connected and disconnected operations, enabling organizations to run SQL Server on Azure-consistent infrastructure in customer datacenters and edge locations. The offering supports modernized deployments while preserving local control, data sovereignty, and licensing options. Customers can also preview Foundry Local to run AI inference alongside SQL Server on Azure Local.

🔔 This update summarizes availability changes across several AWS services, including transitions to Maintenance, announced Sunset schedules, and services that have reached End of Support. Services moving to maintenance will stop accepting new customers after October 29, 2026, while existing customers can continue operation with AWS support. Several services—including Amazon Managed Blockchain, Amazon DevOps Guru, AWS Backint Agent for SAP ASE, and AWS Infrastructure Composer—have sunset timelines through 2027. Amazon Mechanical Turk reached end of support on September 29, 2026. AWS provides migration guides and support resources to help customers plan transitions.

🛈 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL announces Extended Support minor versions 13.23-rds.20260514, 12.22-rds.20260514, and 11.22-rds.20260514. This Extended Support provides up to three additional years of fixes for critical CVEs and bugs beyond a major version's end of standard support date. You can upgrade via Blue/Green Deployments, in-place upgrade, or restore from a snapshot. Use the Amazon RDS Management Console or AWS CLI to create or update managed PostgreSQL instances.