All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔔 AWS is announcing availability changes affecting several services and features, with some moving to Maintenance and others entering Sunset or already at End of Support. Services moving to maintenance will not be accessible to new customers after specified dates, but existing customers can continue use. Several SageMaker features and select media and communication components are impacted. AWS provides migration guides and support resources to help affected customers.

🧩 AWS Clean Rooms now supports writing SQL query results to intermediate tables within a collaboration, enabling multi-step analytical workflows between partners. These intermediate tables allow reuse of complex joins and creation of shared ID mapping tables for downstream analyses, all within the collaboration’s privacy boundary. The feature helps reduce costs and improve performance for subsequent analyses such as reach, frequency, and attribution.

🔒 AWS announces general availability of AWS WAF protection for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway, enabling protection of agentic AI workloads from common web exploits and abuse. You can associate an AWS WAF protection pack with your AgentCore Gateway to enforce IP-based access controls, rate-based throttling, and AWS Managed Rule Groups including Bot Control. Configure protections once at the Gateway and have them applied consistently to all targets behind it.

🔒 WhatsApp is introducing reserved usernames so users can hide their phone numbers from people who are not in their contacts. The company says reservations are open now and the feature will roll out globally later this year, with an optional username key that others must know to message you for the first time. Users can change or delete reserved usernames, while certain names are reserved for governments, public figures, and businesses.

🔧 Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) Serverless now supports shared VPC subnets, removing a prior validation error when creating Serverless workflows with subnets shared via AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM). This change aligns MWAA Serverless subnet ownership validation with MWAA Provisioned environments, enabling centrally managed network architectures to launch workflows in member accounts without workarounds. The update also benefits customers using Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio Workflows with shared VPC networking and is available in all Regions where MWAA Serverless is supported.

🛠️ Microsoft has extended hotpatching for Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition through October 2027, one year beyond the mainstream end date of October 2026. This extension is effective immediately and applies only to systems enrolled in Hotpatch updates, preserving the existing monthly hotpatch cadence. Hotpatching applies security fixes to in-memory code of running processes to avoid restarts, though updates from the regular channel still require reboots. The change helps maintain uptime and reduce servicing disruptions while non-hotpatch updates, such as non-security and .NET patches, still need restarts.

🛠️ Claude in Microsoft Foundry is now GA on Azure, offering enterprises an integrated path from experimentation to production. Hosted on Azure and running on NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra systems, Claude provides frontier model capabilities while integrating with enterprise controls like Entra ID, RBAC, governance, and data residency. Developers can use the Messages API, prompt caching, extended thinking, and tool streaming, and teams can opt for zero data retention for high-sensitivity workloads. Billing is consolidated as Claude Consumption Units (CCU) on the Azure bill for simplified procurement.

🔐 WhatsApp has begun global reservations for usernames to let users connect without sharing phone numbers. The optional feature allows creation and reservation of a unique username now, ahead of a wider rollout later this year. Users can also set a username key for extra protection, requiring both the exact username and key to message someone initially. Content creators and businesses may claim matching Instagram or Facebook names, and once enabled others cannot view a user's phone number.

🔍 Curve partnered with Google Cloud to adopt BigQuery Graph, moving beyond relational joins to perform multi-hop network analysis across billions of connections. By modeling users and shared identifiers as a property graph, they can traverse massive datasets with GQL, combine graph traversals with standard SQL and ML workflows, and avoid costly data migrations. This integration has improved detection, operational efficiency, and enabled plans for real-time signals and visualization.

🧭 This post introduces the preview of BigQuery's new AI.AGG() function, which enables natural-language aggregation over millions of rows of unstructured and multimodal data directly inside SQL. It explains practical uses—analyzing logs, discovering product categories, and summarizing image collections—while showing how AI.AGG() batches inputs, handles NULLs, reports errors, and integrates with other BigQuery AI functions like AI.CLASSIFY(). The write-up outlines best practices for token usage, model endpoint selection, and struct handling to help users deploy AI.AGG() effectively.

📣 Azure Files provides fully managed file storage tailored for modern Linux workloads, combining familiar file access with built-in performance, resilience, and security. The service supports AI inferencing, cloud-native Kubernetes deployments, and enterprise migrations by exposing standard NFS and SMB endpoints and integrating with Azure services. New features like zonal placement, provisioned v2, and faster provisioning improve scale, latency, and cost management for shared file scenarios.

🛡️ OpenAI has unveiled GPT-5.6 Sol, calling it its "most capable model yet for cybersecurity," but initial access is restricted to a small set of vetted partners at the request of the US government. The preview, announced on June 26, introduces three tiers—Sol, Terra and Luna—and is available via API and Codex to selected partners while OpenAI coordinates with the government on a cyber executive order framework. OpenAI says Sol excels at long-horizon tasks like vulnerability research, includes enhanced safeguards and real-time classifiers, and currently does not autonomously produce full exploits.

🔎 Fortinet contributed to INTERPOL’s Operation CyberProtect III by providing intelligence and analysis through its role in the World Economic Forum’s Cybercrime Atlas. The four-day initiative helped identify dozens of suspicious cases, suspect profiles, and potential victims on content subscription platforms. The operation highlighted trends such as encrypted messaging, coded language, cryptocurrency payments, and AI-generated profiles used to facilitate exploitation.

🔐 Today’s public-key cryptography faces a future threat from quantum computers that can render intercepted ciphertext and stored credentials decryptable. Agencies like the NSA and standards bodies such as NIST have set Q-day deadlines between 2027 and 2035 to phase in quantum-resistant algorithms, while enterprises face multi-year migrations. A practical approach is credentials-first: inventory secrets, prioritize long-lived, high-impact credentials, adopt hybrid cryptography, and design for crypto-agility to reduce Harvest Now, Decrypt Later risks.

🔒 Turner Industries migrated to ChromeOS, Google Workspace, Chrome Enterprise Premium, and Cameyo to reduce costs and improve security. The shift extended device lifecycles, cut per-device costs by 40–50%, and saved an estimated $700,000 on new hardware plus $600,000 by converting existing devices with ChromeOS Flex. Faster deployments and simplified management freed IT to focus on strategic work while maintaining strong endpoint protection and legacy app access.

📣 Amazon S3 now supports delivering server access logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs, enabling instant querying, alarms, cross-account and cross-Region aggregation, and AWS KMS encryption for access log data. You can also mirror logs to Amazon S3 Tables in Apache Iceberg format at no additional storage cost. These delivery options complement existing free delivery to S3 buckets and provide more flexibility for monitoring and analysis.

🔒 Google Cloud announces new VPC Service Controls features to secure agentic AI deployments by enforcing network-level perimeters and integrating agent identities. These updates let administrators add agent principals and principalSets to ingress/egress rules, apply conditional rules based on MCP attributes like mcp.toolName and mcp.method, and automatically protect the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform from public internet access. The enhancements are designed to complement IAM and resource policies to prevent exfiltration and tool misuse in production agent fleets.

🔍 Microsoft highlights tighter integration for PostgreSQL on Azure by embedding performance tools directly into Visual Studio Code. The PostgreSQL extension centralizes query authoring, server metrics, Azure‑specific telemetry, and Azure Advisor recommendations to shorten detection-to-resolution time. Enhanced query plan visualization and AI‑assisted analysis help teams troubleshoot and tune queries faster, while schema‑aware authoring and Entra ID integration support secure, consistent workflows at enterprise scale.

📣 Google Cloud now lets you create alerts in Observability Analytics using SQL to query logs and traces. This preview feature runs scheduled SQL queries via BigQuery on telemetry linked datasets and supports row count and boolean conditions. When conditions are met, Cloud Monitoring opens incidents and notifies configured channels. Note that BigQuery execution costs apply under your billing model.

🔔 Amazon EC2 R8g instances are now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand, New Zealand), AWS Africa (Cape Town), AWS Europe (Milan), and AWS Canada West (Calgary). These instances use AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 30% better performance than Graviton3-based instances, targeting memory-intensive workloads such as databases and real-time analytics. Built on the AWS Nitro System, R8g offers larger sizes, enhanced networking, and improved EBS bandwidth for demanding applications.