All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 Amazon CloudWatch now accepts metrics via the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) and supports Prometheus Query Language (PromQL) for querying. You are billed per GB ingested, with 15 months of storage included. Custom OTel metrics and AWS-vended metrics across 70+ services are queryable together, and a Prometheus-compatible API enables integration with Grafana and other tools. EKS customers can enable Container Insights with OpenTelemetry from the console or via CloudFormation, CDK, or Helm.

🔒 AWS Backup now supports Amazon EKS in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (Germany) Region, providing fully managed, policy-driven data protection and recovery for EKS clusters. The service includes automated scheduling, retention management, immutable vaults, and cross-Region and cross-account copies. Customers can protect entire clusters, namespaces, or individual persistent volumes without agents, replacing custom scripts or third-party tools.

🔒 The article argues that sovereignty in Europe demands verifiable control, not just contractual promises. It emphasizes integrity, accountability, and transparency, and describes the Sovereign Cortex with T Security — a partnership with Deutsche Telekom and Google Cloud — as a practical response. The post underscores placing meaningful control with trusted local partners and treating sovereignty as a design principle.

🚀 Amazon EMR Serverless now supports interactive sessions with Spark Connect, enabling development and execution of Apache Spark applications from managed notebooks like SageMaker Unified Studio and common IDEs such as Jupyter and Visual Studio Code. You can monitor and debug active and completed sessions in the EMR console and obtain granular cost and usage visibility for individual sessions. The Spark Connect client-server model keeps your development environment decoupled from the Spark driver, enabling ad hoc exploration, iterative debugging, and incremental PySpark development. Spark Connect support is available in EMR release 7.13 in all regions where EMR Serverless is offered, with the SageMaker experience in supported regions.

🔍 AWS Cost Explorer introduces Analyze with Amazon Q, enabling one-click, contextual cost explanations for any configured report. Amazon Q Developer provides analysis of cost trends, top drivers, anomalies, and optimization suggestions using your exact filters and time period. The feature adapts explanations to historical, forecast, or mixed-date views and supports follow-up questions while preserving conversation context. It is available in all commercial AWS Regions at no additional charge.

🛡️ We’re adding Knostic’s AgentMesh to VirusTotal’s Crowdsourced AI lineup to analyze Visual Studio Code extension (.VSIX) files. This integration complements Code Insight and other AI contributors to help developers, platform engineers, and security teams assess extension security and detect supply-chain threats prior to installation. The collaboration highlights the growing importance of securing IDE extensions.

🔒 Apple announced at WWDC 2026 an Apple Intelligence-powered capability that can automatically detect and update weak, duplicate, or compromised passwords in Safari and the built-in Passwords app. The feature, arriving with iOS 27, uses on-device and Private Cloud Compute foundation models co-developed with Google to perform agentic actions that update eligible accounts to strong credentials. Apple emphasizes privacy-first design, saying personal data handled in the cloud is not stored or accessible to Apple.

🛡️ This monthly AWS Security Blog digest highlights May 2026 posts on AI security, network protection, identity management, compliance guides, and supply chain defense. It summarizes new capabilities, hands-on samples, and workshops that demonstrate practical controls — from Cedar-based policy for agentic AI to URL category filtering in Network Firewall and post-quantum readiness checks.

🔍 AWS Compute Optimizer now detects idle resources for Amazon DynamoDB provisioned tables, Amazon ElastiCache (Redis and Valkey), Amazon MemoryDB, Amazon DocumentDB (provisioned and serverless), Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon SageMaker endpoints. It analyzes utilization metrics over a configurable lookback period and evaluates service-specific signals like consumed capacity, cache hits, active connections, and CPU utilization. Recommendations include detailed utilization metrics and estimated savings, viewable in the console and in the Cost Optimization Hub across AWS Organizations.

🚀 Amazon MSK Express Brokers now support automatic topic creation for Kafka Streams, removing the need to manually pre-create topics for stateful operations. This enhancement lets customers deploy Kafka Streams applications on Express Brokers without additional setup, simplifying operational workflows. The capability is available today in all regions where MSK Express Brokers are offered and requires no extra configuration to start using.

🆕 Amazon DocumentDB now supports engine minor versions, beginning with 5.0.1, adding new aggregation operators ($rand, $pow, $dateToParts, $dateFromParts), an active connections metric, and granular command-level performance metrics in CloudWatch. You can specify 5.0.1 when creating clusters or upgrade existing 5.0.0 clusters via the Console or AWS CLI. Upgrades are one-way; moving from 5.0.0 LTS to 5.0.1 exits the LTS track, so remain on LTS if you prioritise minimal upgrades.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights now supports 23 new query commands and functions to enhance log querying, parsing, transformation, and analysis. The update adds hash functions (md5, sha256), string and conversion utilities (strcontains, split, toNumber, toInt), IP utilities (ipv4ToNumber, isPrivateIP), analytics functions (rate, count_over_time, histogram), and expanded parsing capabilities (parse CSV, XML, multi). Queries can now use “limit any N” and up to 10 stats commands, and these features are available in all commercial AWS Regions.

📈 AWS announces target coverage analysis in Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer, a feature in AWS Billing and Cost Management that helps plan Savings Plans purchases against a chosen coverage percentage. The analyzer uses historical usage to recommend purchase amounts and supports customization like custom lookback periods and excluding expiring Savings Plans. Users can compare estimated cost, coverage, utilization, and savings across targets and view recommendations via interactive charts or the Purchase Analyzer API.

🔔 Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 19 Beta 1 is available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, enabling evaluation of the pre-release with managed database benefits. PostgreSQL 19 introduces native graph query support via SQL/PGQ, concurrent table repacking, and improved logical replication features. Preview instances are retained for up to 60 days and snapshots are limited to the preview environment.

🔧 AWS Lambda Managed Instances (LMI) is now available in all commercial AWS Regions except Israel (Tel Aviv), Middle East (Bahrain), Middle East (UAE), and Asia Pacific (Auckland). LMI lets you run Lambda functions on managed Amazon EC2 instances to access specialized compute configurations and EC2 pricing benefits while maintaining Lambda's operational simplicity. It fully manages instance lifecycle, OS and runtime patching, routing, load balancing, and auto-scaling, and supports parallel request processing per execution environment. Customers can leverage EC2 pricing models such as Compute Savings Plans and Reserved Instances and integrate LMI with existing Lambda workflows, event sources, and observability tools.

🔁 AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) has been rebranded as AWS Transform MGN to reflect its role as the replication engine for the agentic AWS Transform migration service. Customers can choose between the AWS Transform MGN console for manual control of replication and cutover or the AWS Transform agentic workflow for automated discovery, wave planning, and rehosting or containerization. AWS Transform MGN keeps existing compliance certifications (FedRAMP High, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO, SOC 1/2/3) and is available in all commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions. Refer to the product page and documentation for implementation details.

🆕 Amazon Aurora DSQL now supports the PostgreSQL JSONB data type with optional compression. You can create or modify tables to store semi-structured data such as configuration metadata, API parameters, and event logs alongside relational data. With PostgreSQL compression enabled by default, larger JSONB payloads are stored more efficiently to help reduce storage costs. Get started with Aurora DSQL via the AWS Free Tier and check Regional availability in the AWS Region table.

🧭 AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now includes AI-powered cost investigation using Amazon Q to analyze root causes of detected cost anomalies. The feature delivers plain-language explanations in minutes by correlating cost data with CloudTrail events and resource activity, identifying whether changes are usage- or rate-driven and pinpointing contributing services, accounts, regions, API calls, and IAM principals. Cross-account investigations work automatically for organizations with an organization CloudTrail trail, and the capability is available in all commercial AWS Regions at no extra charge, though CloudWatch Logs Insights charges may apply for data scanned.

🔒 This post outlines a practical, phased maturity roadmap for organizations that have enabled AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty. It emphasizes moving from enabled tooling to operational security practices by assessing current state, tuning signal quality, routing findings, automating safe remediations, and establishing a recurring operational cadence. Each phase includes goals, timelines, deliverables, and decision criteria to measure progress and reduce alert fatigue.

🔍 Amazon Connect Customer now provides AI agent traces for self-service voice interactions, letting operators inspect how AI agents reasoned, acted, and responded during conversations. The feature displays step-by-step traces alongside full transcripts in the Connect web UI so teams can confirm correct behavior, diagnose failures, or spot tool and parameter issues. It is available in all AWS Regions that support Amazon Connect Customer AI Agents and is documented in the Amazon Connect Customer Administrator Guide.