All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🗂️ Amazon FSx for Lustre now supports the Intelligent-Tiering storage class in 13 additional AWS Regions across Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, and South America. The Intelligent-Tiering class provides fully elastic, low-cost Lustre storage optimized for mixed hot/cold workloads by automatically tiering data across Frequent Access, Infrequent Access, and Archive tiers, with an optional SSD read cache for active data. It offers up to 34% better price-performance versus on-premises HDD and up to 96% lower costs for rarely accessed data compared to other managed cloud file offerings.

📊 AWS announces Cost Explorer historical data retention for accounts in billing groups. Customers using AWS Billing Conductor and Billing Transfer can map accounts to billing groups and view billing data priced at the payer or Bill-Transfer account's pro forma rates. Previously, billing group mapping restricted access to historical billing data priced at AWS billable rates. Accounts already onboarded will retain access to their historical Cost Explorer data with no additional action required.

🛡️ In his first Cloud CISO Perspectives, Chris Betz outlines four lessons guiding Google Cloud’s AI Threat Defense: Prepare, Scan and Prioritize, Remediate, and Monitor. He highlights how AI accelerates vulnerability discovery and defense, the importance of operational frameworks and harnesses, and the need for centralized tracking, risk-based patching, and continuous AI-driven monitoring. The guidance emphasizes reducing attack surface, close engineering collaboration, and building resilient systems.

🧭 This post describes how Yahoo and Google Cloud built Seller Agent, an agentic media-buying platform that collapses multi-week manual workflows into governed campaigns executed in seconds. The architecture uses a dual-graph approach — a knowledge graph for deterministic business logic and a context graph for auditable decision traces — combined with Google Cloud services like Spanner Graph, BigQuery Graph, and Gemini. The design emphasizes explainability, regulator-grade governance, and closed-loop learning to ensure autonomous actions remain transparent and accountable.

📊 Over the past year Microsoft published quarterly, real‑world benchmarking that compares Microsoft Defender against secure email gateway (SEG) and integrated cloud email security (ICES) vendors. The reports show Defender consistently misses fewer high‑severity threats pre‑delivery, while ICES vendors mainly improve promotional and bulk filtering. Defender’s post‑delivery remediation contribution has risen substantially, underscoring its role as a critical backstop.

🔔 AWS Lambda Managed Instances (LMI) now supports tag propagation to automatically apply tags to managed resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and ENIs. This enables consistent cost allocation, enforcement of service control policies, and compliance across resources provisioned by LMI. Configure the PropagateTags setting via CreateCapacityProvider or UpdateCapacityProvider in Explicit mode and provide key-value pairs; the feature is available in all commercial Regions where LMI is GA.

🛠️ AWS announces that DevOps Agent now supports custom SRE agents, bring-your-own sub-agents, and headless access via MCP and A2A protocols. These features let teams automate recurring SRE workflows, extend the agent by connecting external sub-agents, and invoke DevOps Agent from familiar tools such as Kiro and Claude. Additional updates include chat enhancements, incident-skip rules, enhanced knowledge with memories and Git-managed skills, human labeling, dashboards for task quality, and availability in five new Regions.

🟢 AWS Partner Central now offers lead enrichment and prospecting, letting AWS Partners enrich AWS-sourced or partner-sourced leads with AWS-generated propensity insights and recommendations for program, funding, and sales motion eligibility. Partners can upload leads in the console or programmatically via the AWS Partner Central API. Each enriched lead returns propensity-to-buy signals, Marketplace purchase likelihood, solution-category alignment, and eligibility for programs like Partner Greenfield Program and Pioneer Credits. The feature is available to ACE-eligible Partners in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

📈 Check Point Research warns of a sharp seasonal surge in travel-related cyberattacks ahead of summer 2026, with the hospitality sector experiencing a 24% year-over-year increase in weekly attacks and a 122% rise over three years. The team found nearly 50,000 new travel-related domains in May 2026—many linked to coordinated bulk-registration campaigns—and active phishing sites impersonating major booking platforms to harvest credentials and payments. Travelers are urged to verify domains, use credit cards, enable two-factor authentication, and avoid clicking links in unsolicited messages.

🔒 Fortinet highlights World Economic Forum guidance showing how AI is transforming cybersecurity and why public-private cooperation matters. The piece notes that while 91% of organizations are using or testing AI security tools, skill shortages persist and create risk. The Forum’s “Empowering Defenders” paper, to which Fortinet contributed, emphasizes operational integration, governance, workforce readiness, and practical pilot-to-scale approaches for AI in security.

🚀 Today Cloudflare announced that key members of Ensemble AI are joining the company to accelerate AI infrastructure work and help developers run powerful models efficiently at scale. Ensemble AI developed methods like NdLinear and NdLinear-LoRA to preserve model structure while reducing parameters and compute, complementing quantization and vector quantization. The hire strengthens Cloudflare Workers AI and advances efforts to lower inference costs, improve GPU utilization, and enable global, serverless model deployment.

🚀 Amazon EC2 C8i instances are now available in the Europe (Stockholm) region. These instances use custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, offering up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x more memory bandwidth versus prior Intel-based instances. C8i delivers up to 20% higher performance than C7i and provides larger sizes, including a new 96xlarge and two bare metal options. Purchase options include Savings Plans, On-Demand, and Spot.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 C7i instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) are available in the Israel (Tel Aviv) Region. C7i instances offer up to 15% better price-performance than C6i, larger instance sizes up to 48xlarge, and two bare metal sizes with built-in Intel accelerators. They support Intel AMX, and permit up to 128 EBS volumes per instance to scale data-intensive workloads.

🛡️ Today AWS WAF introduced AI traffic monetization, a Bot Control feature that enables content owners to price, meter, and accept payments from AI bots and agents accessing content and APIs. Using the x402 protocol, AWS WAF returns a machine-readable HTTP 402 response with pricing, accepted methods, and license terms; upon proof of payment it verifies at the edge and issues scoped access tokens. Publishers can set differentiated pricing by agent identity and intent, view revenue analytics in the console, and receive payouts via third-party providers such as Coinbase’s x402 Facilitator, with Stripe and MPP support coming soon.

🔍 Today AWS announced the general availability of Amazon CloudWatch Query Studio, a unified querying and visualization experience inside the CloudWatch console. Query Studio supports PromQL and Metrics Insights to query OpenTelemetry and AWS-vended metrics across accounts and regions from a single workspace. It offers visual query builders, multiple visualization types, dashboard integration, Grafana import, and keyboard shortcuts.

📣 Amazon Web Services announced general availability of CloudWatch Metrics Centralization, enabling replication of CloudWatch and OpenTelemetry metrics cross-account and cross-region into a single destination account. Enterprise teams can use AWS Organizations to define centralization rules that automatically replicate metrics for unified querying, alarming, compliance, and governance. The feature supports Metrics Insights, dashboards, alarms, Metric Math, anomaly detection, Metric Streams, and PromQL and is available in multiple global AWS Regions.

🛠️ This post walks through converting a Node.js TypeScript CLI into a compact Go single-binary tool using Antigravity to automate translation, test generation, and platform mappings. The author set goals for zero dependencies, fast startup, and a zero-trust security posture, then used an agent-driven workflow to audit alternatives, scaffold code, and apply Test-Driven Development. The migration emphasized safety, explicit error handling, thorough testing, and modular subagents to parallelize large feature sets.

🔒 European enterprises tested sovereign cloud under regulatory pressure and found residency alone doesn’t equal control. Vendors offer sovereignty features, but practitioners at EIC 2026 emphasized that identity governance — not just data location — determines operational sovereignty for AI workloads. Weak identity controls, especially for non-human AI agents, undermine claims of control despite customer-managed keys or regional data centers.

🛰️ Starting today, Amazon GameLift Servers includes free inbound and outbound network bandwidth for all instance types from generation 6 and later, covering On-Demand and Spot instances with no commitment. Customers will only be charged for Amazon GameLift Servers instance hours, simplifying cost predictability for multiplayer game hosting. The change requires no enrollment or configuration and is effective immediately for eligible fleets in supported regions, excluding China. Existing customers receive the benefit automatically.

🔔 Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports community minor versions 10.6.27, 10.11.18, 11.4.12, and 11.8.8. AWS recommends upgrading to the latest minor releases to address known security vulnerabilities and to gain bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality from the MariaDB community. You can use automatic minor version upgrades during scheduled maintenance or RDS Managed Blue/Green deployments for safer and faster updates. See the Amazon RDS User Guide for details on upgrading, and consult pricing and regional availability in the Amazon RDS documentation.