All news in category "Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch"

Route 53 Adds Protection Against Dictionary DGA Attacks

🛡️ Amazon Web Services has added Dictionary-based DGA detection to Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall Advanced, enabling real-time monitoring and blocking of domain queries that use word-based DGA techniques designed to mimic legitimate names. Administrators can create DNS Firewall Advanced rule(s) targeting Dictionary DGA and add them to rule groups to enforce protections on VPCs directly or through AWS Firewall Manager, RAM, CloudFormation, or Route 53 Profiles. The capability is available in all AWS Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US). See the Route 53 documentation for setup and pricing details.

Amazon Redshift Adds Apache Iceberg Write Support (GA)

🔔 Amazon Redshift now supports write operations to Apache Iceberg tables in general availability, enabling SQL DDL and DML including CREATE, SHOW, DROP, and INSERT for append-only workloads. Customers can execute concurrent read and write queries against Iceberg tables cataloged in AWS Glue Data Catalog while benefiting from transactional consistency and schema and partition evolution support. The capability is available in all regions where Amazon Redshift is offered.

AWS Expands Amazon WorkSpaces Applications Regions

🌍 Amazon Web Services has added Europe (Milan), Europe (Spain), Asia Pacific (Malaysia), and Israel (Tel Aviv) to the regional footprint for Amazon WorkSpaces Applications. The fully managed, secure application streaming service lets organizations stream desktops and apps to users without local installs while AWS manages hosting, scaling, and on‑demand access. Deploying applications closer to end users reduces latency and improves responsiveness. Administrators can enable the service from the WorkSpaces Applications console; pricing follows a pay‑as‑you‑go model.

WorkSpaces Applications adds 100+ instance types and storage

🚀 Amazon WorkSpaces Applications now offers expanded compute and storage flexibility, adding 100+ instance types across general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, and accelerated families. Customers can configure storage volumes from 200GB to 500GB and import custom EC2 AMIs, including Windows Server 2022, for image creation and customization. These enhancements are generally available in all supported AWS Regions and follow the standard pay-as-you-go pricing for the service.

EC2 Image Builder Adds Lambda and Step Functions Integration

🚀 EC2 Image Builder now supports invoking AWS Lambda functions and executing Step Functions state machines directly within image workflows. This native integration lets teams embed custom logic, multi-step orchestration, and validation into image builds without bespoke glue code. It simplifies compliance checks, notifications, and multi-stage security testing while reducing maintenance and error-prone workarounds. The capabilities are available at no additional cost across all AWS regions, including China and GovCloud, and can be used via Console, CLI, API, CloudFormation, or CDK.

Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i-flex Available in Mumbai Region

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i-flex instances are available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, these instances deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5× the memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based generations and up to 20% performance gains versus M7i. AWS cites workload-specific improvements — up to 30% faster for PostgreSQL, up to 60% for NGINX web applications, and up to 40% for AI recommendation models. M8i-flex offers common sizes from large to 16xlarge for general-purpose use, while M8i provides 13 sizes including two bare-metal options and a new 96xlarge for large, sustained CPU workloads.

Amazon U7i 12TB EC2 Instances Launch in Ireland Region

🚀 Amazon Web Services has launched EC2 High Memory U7i-12tb.224xlarge instances in the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region. These 7th-generation instances offer 12TB DDR5 memory, 896 vCPUs, up to 100Gbps EBS and network bandwidth, and ENA Express support. They target mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server. Availability aims to accelerate transaction processing and large-scale in-memory workloads.

AWS Reduces EC2 Costs for SQL Server High Availability

🔔 AWS announced on Nov 17, 2025 a new capability that lets customers designate Amazon EC2 instances running license-included Microsoft SQL Server as part of a High-Availability (HA) cluster to reduce licensing costs with a few clicks. The enhancement targets mission-critical deployments using Always On Availability Groups and Always On failover cluster instances, with AWS citing savings up to 40% in example configurations. The feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions.

Google announces Dhivaru subsea cable and regional hubs

📡 Google announced Dhivaru, a new Trans-Indian Ocean subsea cable linking the Maldives, Christmas Island, and Oman, and will build two new connectivity hubs in the Maldives and Christmas Island. The investment builds on the Australia Connect initiative and aims to improve reach, reliability, and resilience across the Indian Ocean, supporting AI services such as Vertex AI. The hubs will provide cable switching, content caching, and colocation to reduce latency, improve availability, and support local ecosystems.

AWS Backup Adds Direct Primary Support for Air-Gapped Vaults

🔐 AWS Backup now lets customers designate a logically air-gapped vault as the primary backup target across backup plans, organization policies, and on-demand jobs. This removes the prior restriction that air-gapped vaults could only hold copies, enabling direct writes to the air-gapped store and reducing duplicate-storage costs. For resource types without full AWS Backup management support, the service still creates a temporary snapshot in a standard vault, copies it into the air-gapped vault, and then removes the temporary snapshot. The capability is available in all Regions that support logically air-gapped vaults and can be selected via the console, API, or CLI.

AWS Backup Adds Delegated Admin Support in 17 Regions

🔔 AWS Backup now supports delegated administrators in 17 additional AWS Regions, allowing designated accounts to manage backup operations and administrative tasks across member accounts. The expansion includes regions in Africa, Asia Pacific, Canada, Europe, Israel, Mexico, and the Middle East. AWS Backup Audit Manager also supports cross-Region and cross-account delegated admin reports for jobs and backup plan compliance. Visit the AWS Backup console to get started.

Amazon Route 53 Profiles Adds Resolver Query Logging

🛡️ AWS announced support for Resolver query logging configurations in Amazon Route 53 Profiles, allowing centralized management of Resolver query logging across multiple VPCs and AWS accounts. The enhancement eliminates the need to manually associate logging configurations with each VPC and helps produce consistent DNS query logs for compliance and auditing. The feature is available now in supported AWS Regions via the console or AWS CLI.

Windows bug prevents Microsoft 365 desktop app installs

⚠️ Microsoft is addressing a known issue that prevents users from installing Microsoft 365 desktop apps on Windows devices. The problem stems from misconfigured authentication components affecting versions 2508 (Build 19127.20358) and 2507 (Build 19029.20294). The team is reconfiguring the components and expects a full remediation later today. Microsoft tagged the outage as incident OP1186186 and is also investigating a related admin access issue tracked as MO1176905.

2025 Google Cloud Partner All-Stars: Recognizing AI Leaders

✨The 2025 Google Cloud Partner All‑stars honor individual partners advancing innovation and delivering measurable customer outcomes. This year introduces a new AI Innovation category that recognizes strategic leaders guiding enterprise-wide AI adoption and applying agentic AI to transform core processes and create new revenue streams. Recipients also demonstrate excellence across delivery, marketing, sales, and solutions engineering, reflecting technical rigor and long-term customer focus.

Production-Ready AI with Google Cloud Learning Path

🚀 Google Cloud has launched the Production-Ready AI Learning Path, a free curriculum designed to guide developers from prototype to production. Drawing on an internal playbook, the series pairs Gemini models with production-grade tools like Vertex AI, Google Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Run. Modules cover LLM app development, open model deployment, agent building, security, RAG, evaluation, and fine-tuning. New modules will be added weekly through mid-December.

Hands-on with Gemma 3: Deploying Open Models on GCP

🚀 Google Cloud introduces hands-on labs for Gemma 3, a family of lightweight open models offering multimodal (text and image) capabilities and efficient performance on smaller hardware footprints. The labs present two deployment paths: a serverless approach using Cloud Run with GPU support, and a platform approach using GKE for scalable production environments. Choose Cloud Run for simplicity and cost-efficiency or GKE Autopilot for control and robust orchestration to move models from local testing to production.

AWS Transform auto-generates Landing Zone network YAML

☁️ AWS Transform for VMware can now automatically convert VMware network environments into Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA)-compatible YAML network configurations that can be directly imported and deployed via LZA. Building on existing IaC output formats such as CloudFormation, AWS CDK, and Terraform, this capability reduces manual re-creation of network settings, lowers the risk of configuration errors, and accelerates migration timelines while aligning deployments with enterprise security and compliance standards.

Amazon VPC IPAM Automates IP Assignments from Infoblox

🔁 AWS announced that Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) can now automatically acquire non‑overlapping IP allocations from Infoblox Universal IPAM, reducing the need for manual ticketing between cloud and on‑prem teams. The integration imports allocated ranges into a top‑level AWS IPAM pool and allows organization into regional pools to prevent address conflicts. The feature is available in all Regions where VPC IPAM is supported, excluding AWS China and AWS GovCloud (US); refer to the IPAM documentation and pricing tab for details.

Amazon MQ Adds LDAP Authentication to RabbitMQ Brokers

🔐 Amazon MQ now supports LDAP authentication for RabbitMQ brokers in all AWS regions, allowing brokers to authenticate and authorize users against LDAP identity providers. Administrators can manage users and assign permissions to topics and queues using credentials stored in their LDAP server. LDAP support can be enabled when creating or updating brokers via the AWS Console, CloudFormation, CLI, or CDK, and remains compatible with standard RabbitMQ LDAP implementations.

Amazon Aurora MySQL v3.11 Adds MySQL 8.0.43 Support

🆕 Amazon is releasing Aurora MySQL - Compatible Edition 3 updated to v3.11 with support for MySQL 8.0.43. The update delivers multiple security enhancements and bug fixes, addresses additional group replication errors, and introduces the mysql client commands option to enable or disable most client commands. You can upgrade manually by modifying a DB cluster or enable the Auto minor version upgrade option; the release is available in all AWS regions where Aurora MySQL is offered.