All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🔒 Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now provides lock contention diagnostics for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instances when operating in Advanced mode. The feature visualizes blocking and waiting sessions to highlight the dominant sessions, queries, or objects causing contention and preserves historical locking data for up to 15 months. You can enable diagnostics on PostgreSQL clusters via the RDS console, AWS APIs, or the AWS SDK. CloudWatch Database Insights is available in all public AWS Regions and uses vCPU-based pricing.

🔒 AWS Security Hub Extended is now generally available, offering a single-vendor plan that combines AWS detection services with curated partner security solutions on a pay-as-you-go or flat-rate basis. The plan consolidates procurement and billing—AWS serves as seller of record and Enterprise Support customers receive unified Level 1 support. It centralizes findings in a standard format for cross-tool visibility, reduces manual integration work, and lets organizations add or remove categories such as endpoint, identity, email, network, data, browser, cloud, AI, and security operations without long-term commitments.

🚀 PayPal completed a multi-year, large-scale migration of more than 300 petabytes of analytics data into BigQuery on Google Cloud to create a unified data foundation for generative AI. The initiative consolidated disparate platforms — including Teradata, Hadoop, Redshift, and Snowflake — and reduced vendor complexity. PayPal automated migration tasks, used live dashboards, and integrated FinOps to maintain zero business downtime while enabling faster queries and much fresher data for AI model training.

🚀 The preview of the Spanner columnar engine enables low-latency serving of Apache Iceberg lakehouse data with Spanner’s horizontal scale and strong consistency. It adds a columnar storage layer and vectorized execution to accelerate analytical scans — Google cites up to 200× faster scans — while isolating heavy analytical queries from transactional workloads. The feature supports on-demand columnar conversion, automatic query routing, and reverse ETL integrations with BigQuery, Databricks, Snowflake and Oracle to make curated analytical data available for real-time applications.

🔐 Amazon Cognito now supports on-demand client secret rotation and lets you bring your own custom client secrets for app clients in user pools. You can maintain up to two active secrets per app client to enable staged rollovers and avoid application downtime during transitions. These lifecycle controls address periodic rotation and migration needs and are available in all Regions where Amazon Cognito user pools are offered; management is supported via the Console, CLI, SDKs, or CloudFormation.

🔔 Amazon CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on v5.0.0 now enables CloudWatch Application Signals (APM) by default for new installations and upgrades, removing the previous manual opt-in. The add-on automatically instruments services to collect traces, metrics, and logs, delivering an application-centric view without additional Kubernetes annotations. Users get immediate access to pre-built dashboards and enriched troubleshooting to detect latency, errors, and request traces out of the box.

🚀 Amazon Web Services announced general availability of the Amazon EC2 I8g.metal-48xl storage-optimized instances powered by AWS Graviton4. These instances pair third-generation Nitro NVMe SSDs with the AWS Nitro System to deliver up to 60% better compute and up to 65% better real-time storage performance per TB, while reducing storage I/O latency and variability. They target I/O-intensive, low-latency workloads such as transactional databases, NoSQL engines, and real-time analytics, and offer large memory and local storage configurations.

🖥️ Amazon expanded availability of EC2 M8i and M8i-flex instances to US West (N. California), Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), and South America (Sao Paulo). These instances run on custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS and deliver higher performance and memory bandwidth than comparable Intel-based cloud processors. AWS reports up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x memory bandwidth versus the prior Intel-based generation, with workload-specific gains over M7i up to 20–60%. M8i-flex targets common general-purpose sizes while M8i supports larger, SAP-certified and bare-metal configurations.

📣 Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports sending push notifications from the AWS Europe (Spain) Region. This expansion allows customers in Spain to deliver messages to major push platforms including Amazon Device Messaging (ADM), Apple Push Notification Service (APNs), Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM), Baidu Cloud Push, Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS), and Windows Push Notification Services (WNS). With this addition, SNS supports push delivery from 25 regions, enabling more localised mobile, web, and IoT notification workflows and potentially lower latency for Iberian users.

🔒 FortiGate-as-a-Service (FGaaS) delivers full FortiGate firewall capability as a cloud-hosted, consumption-based service running on purpose-built Fortinet hardware in Fortinet-managed, ISO- and SOC 2-certified data centers. It combines the performance and deep inspection of on-prem FortiGate with unified management, FortiGuard threat services, and optional SOC/MSSP-managed operations for faster deployment and predictable OpEx pricing.

🔁Microsoft now enables enterprise users to restore personal settings and Microsoft Store apps from a previous Windows 11 device using the first sign-in restore experience in Windows Backup for Organizations. The update extends support beyond Microsoft Entra-joined machines to hybrid-managed environments, multi-user devices, and Windows 365 Cloud PCs, presenting a one-time restore prompt at first login. Administrators can control and deploy the feature through existing policies via Microsoft Intune or Group Policy, with general availability for devices that installed Windows updates released Feb 24, 2026 or later.

🔔 AWS has announced the developer preview of the Lambda Durable Execution SDK for Java, enabling Java 17+ developers to build resilient, multi-step serverless applications without custom progress tracking. The SDK adds automatic checkpointing, wait primitives that suspend execution for up to a year, and durable futures for callback-based flows. Paused on-demand functions are not billed for duration, and the preview includes samples and guidance to get started.

🔐 FalconID is now generally available, delivering phishing‑resistant, FIDO2-based authentication built into the Falcon sensor and delivered via the Falcon for Mobile app. It replaces passwords, push notifications and one‑time codes with biometric, device‑bound verification and cryptographic domain binding. Authentication decisions are driven by real‑time identity, endpoint and SaaS telemetry to minimize friction while blocking credential abuse. For legacy apps, FalconID offers secure indirect authentication, and when paired with SGNL it enables continuous, risk‑based authorization across environments.

📡 AWS now publishes two CloudWatch metrics — VifConnectionStatus and VifBgpSessionState — for Outposts racks in AWS GovCloud (US‑East and US‑West) where Outposts are available. These metrics show Local Gateway (LGW) and Service Link VIF connectivity and BGP session state (VifConnectionStatus: 1=operational, 0=not ready; VifBgpSessionState: 1–6 from IDLE to ESTABLISHED). View them in the CloudWatch console to set alarms, troubleshoot connectivity, and reduce dependence on external networking tools or cross‑team coordination.

🔒 AWS Security Agent now enables customers to run penetration tests against Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources shared from other AWS accounts within the same organization. By using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM), teams can securely share VPCs from sub-accounts to a central account where an Agent Space performs assessments. This capability simplifies testing across distributed, multi-account architectures and improves visibility into shared network security posture. To get started, ensure accounts are in the same AWS Organization and configure RAM before launching the agent.

🔒 Android is expanding its AI-driven Scam Detection protections for calls and messages, bringing on-device Gemini models to more Pixel and Samsung Galaxy devices. A real-world example describes a Pixel user who avoided a convincing bank scam after receiving a timely Scam Detection warning during the call. Google Messages protections now cover 20+ countries and multiple languages and have improved detection for sophisticated threats like job-offer and romance “pig butchering” scams. Processing occurs on-device, data aren’t stored or shared, and the feature is off by default and excluded for contacts.

🔌 The Aurora DSQL Driver for SQLTools and the Aurora DSQL Plugin for DBeaver Community Edition are now available, enabling developers and DBAs to run queries, explore schemas, and manage data from popular database clients. Both integrations transparently handle AWS IAM authentication and access-token management, removing the need to write token-generation code or manually supply IAM tokens. The SQLTools driver supports Visual Studio Code and is published on Open VSX for VS Code–compatible editors, while the DBeaver plugin is built on the Aurora DSQL Connector for JDBC. Together they enable password-free, IAM-based access to Aurora DSQL clusters for improved security and ease of use.

🧪 AWS has launched the Amazon Aurora DSQL Playground, a browser-based interactive sandbox that enables developers to evaluate Aurora DSQL without an AWS account. Users can write and execute SQL, test schema designs, and explore PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL capabilities with no setup. The playground offers temporary clusters and sample datasets to accelerate prototyping and learning prior to production deployment.

🔧 AWS announced Aurora DSQL integrations for popular ORMs and migration tools: a Tortoise adapter for Python, a Flyway dialect, and Prisma CLI tools for Node.js. The Tortoise adapter supports both asyncpg and psycopg, integrates with the Aurora DSQL Connector for Python for automatic IAM token generation, and includes migration compatibility patches. Flyway's dialect automates IAM-based authentication and adapts Flyway to Aurora DSQL's distributed behaviors, while Prisma tools validate schemas and generate Aurora DSQL-compatible migrations. These integrations let developers remain in familiar frameworks while offloading IAM and compatibility concerns.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i-flex instances are available in the Africa (Cape Town) region, powered by a custom Intel Xeon 6 processor exclusive to AWS. The new instances deliver up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5× the memory bandwidth versus previous Intel-based generations, and up to 20% higher performance than the M7i family for many workloads. M8i-flex targets common general-purpose sizes (large through 16xlarge) for cost-optimized workloads, while M8i provides larger, SAP-certified configurations including two bare-metal options and a new 96xlarge. Sign in to the AWS Management Console to evaluate and deploy these shapes.