All news in category “Vendor and Hyperscaler Watch”

🚀 The Amazon EC2 R7a instances are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, expanding capacity for general-purpose workloads. Powered by 4th Gen AMD EPYC (Genoa) processors with up to 3.7 GHz, R7a delivers up to 50% higher performance versus R6a. Instances are offered as Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot and can be launched via the AWS Console, CLI, or SDKs.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has launched Amazon EC2 I7ie instances in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) region. Designed for high-density, storage-optimized workloads, these instances use 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors and provide up to 120 TB of local NVMe storage, up to twice the vCPUs and memory versus prior generations, and up to 100 Gbps networking. With 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, I7ie delivers notably improved storage performance and lower, more consistent latency compared with I3en.

🔁 AWS AppConfig now integrates with New Relic Workflow Automation to enable automated, intelligent rollbacks during feature flag and dynamic configuration deployments. The extension continuously monitors application health against configured alert conditions and, when errors or elevated latency are detected during gradual deployments, triggers an immediate rollback to the prior configuration. This closed-loop automation eliminates manual intervention and reduces remediation from minutes to seconds, minimizing customer impact.

🛡️Fortinet has achieved IEC 62443-4-1 Maturity Level 2 (ML2) certification for its Secure Product Development Lifecycle (SPDL). This independent certification verifies that Fortinet’s secure development processes are formalized, documented, repeatable, and consistently applied across design, development, verification, validation, release, and maintenance of its security products. SPDL embeds threat modeling, secure-by-design engineering, automated and manual testing, supply chain integrity controls, and a transparent FortiGuard Labs PSIRT vulnerability disclosure process to improve product integrity for IT, OT, and critical infrastructure customers.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has launched general-purpose Amazon EC2 M8a instances in the AWS Europe (Frankfurt) region. Powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors (Turin) with up to 4.5 GHz and the sixth-generation AWS Nitro Cards, M8a delivers up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price-performance versus M7a. These instances provide 45% more memory bandwidth, SAP certification, 12 sizes including two bare-metal options, and significant benchmark gains for GroovyJVM and Cassandra. Customers can purchase via Savings Plans, On-Demand, or Spot.

🔧 Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, and Bell Canada have built a ServiceNow application that automates the full lifecycle of Prisma SASE, creating a direct bridge between security operations and service management. The Prisma SASE app accelerates deployment from months to hours by automating Day 0–Day N tasks—provisioning, ZTNA connector setup, and mobile user workflows—while eliminating swivel-chair operations by syncing incidents into a single ServiceNow interface. ServiceNow’s Service Bridge enables cross-instance support for MSPs and the app supports direct CSP ticket creation, reducing MTTR and operational overhead.

🔓 Amazon EKS Node Monitoring Agent is now open source on GitHub, giving operators visibility into the agent's implementation and the ability to contribute or customize its behavior. The agent automatically monitors node-level system, storage, networking, and accelerator issues and publishes them as node conditions used by Amazon EKS for automatic node repair. It is included in Amazon EKS Auto Mode and available as an add-on in all AWS Regions. Cluster administrators can inspect, adapt, and participate in the agent's ongoing development to better fit their operational needs.

🛡️ The article outlines how organizations can scale security operations by combining Microsoft Defender XDR autonomous defense with Microsoft Security Experts services to reduce manual toil and accelerate containment. It argues agentic SOCs—driven by continuous signal correlation, automated decision making, and AI agents—are required to address alert overload and capacity constraints. Automated protection takes on routine investigation and response while expert-led hunting and managed detection handle escalations and continuously improve platform protections.

🔐 Microsoft introduces a fully localized sovereign stack enabling mission-critical operations in connected, intermittently connected, and fully disconnected environments. Azure Local provides on-premises Azure governance and policy controls even with no external connectivity, while Microsoft 365 Local runs core productivity servers inside customer boundaries. Foundry Local brings large multimodal model inferencing to secured, offline hardware so organizations can run AI locally and retain full data and operational control.

🔍 AWS announced a new AWS WAF AI activity dashboard that centralizes visibility into AI-driven bot and agent traffic reaching applications. The update expands AWS WAF Bot Control detection to track more than 650 unique bots and agents and provides trend visualizations, most-active bot listings, path analysis, and request volumes by category and verification status. Administrators can act directly using Bot Control rules to allow verified crawlers while rate-limiting or blocking unverified agents. The dashboard is available in all AWS Regions and is included on flat-rate plans or provided at no extra cost for other WAF customers.

🔍 AWS Elemental MediaConvert introduces the free Probe API, a fast metadata analysis tool that reads file headers to return codec, pixel format, color space, and container information without processing full video content. The Probe API is optimized for efficiency and designed to speed validation and decision-making in media workflows. It supports automation scenarios, including integration with Step Functions, so encoding decisions can be made based on source file characteristics. The feature is available in any region where MediaConvert operates.

🔍 Amazon S3 server access logs now include the AWS source region for each request, indicating the Region where a request originated. This information appears automatically at the end of every log entry (for example, a request to a us-east-1 bucket from us-west-2 will show "us-west-2") and requires no configuration or additional cost. The update helps teams identify cross-region traffic to optimize performance and cost and will roll out to all Regions in the coming weeks.

🔍 AWS has enhanced Trusted Advisor's unused NAT Gateway detection by leveraging AWS Compute Optimizer data and additional CloudWatch metrics over a 32-day lookback. The check now verifies route table associations to avoid flagging critical backup gateways, reducing false positives. Each recommendation includes estimated monthly cost savings and is accessible in the Trusted Advisor console or via APIs. Organizations must opt in to Cost Optimization Hub and Compute Optimizer to use the enhanced recommendations.

✨Amazon Web Services has made Amazon Q Developer artifacts generally available in the AWS Management Console. The generative AI-based experience renders resource queries as tables and cost queries as interactive charts, and relocates the Q icon to the navigation bar with the chat panel moved to the left for easier access. Users can run prompts from a Prompt Library, open artifacts in a side panel, and expand to full-screen for focused analysis. Artifacts are available in all Regions where Amazon Q Developer is offered.

🖱️ Microsoft is investigating a known issue that causes the mouse pointer to disappear for some users in the classic Outlook desktop client, making parts of the app difficult to use. The company acknowledged the bug nearly two months after initial reports and said the pointer — and in some cases the text cursor — can vanish as it moves across the interface while hover effects still occur. Microsoft asked affected organizations to open a support case with the Outlook Support Team and submit diagnostic logs, and offered temporary workarounds such as clicking a message, switching to PowerPoint and back, or restarting the PC.

📺 AWS has made Elemental Media Services available in the Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region, enabling local ingestion, transport, transcoding, packaging, and delivery. The expansion includes MediaConnect, MediaLive, MediaPackage, MediaConvert, and MediaTailor. Broadcasters and streaming platforms can now process live and VOD workflows closer to Malaysian audiences to reduce latency and improve video quality while supporting server-side ad insertion and multi-device delivery.

🤖 AWS IAM Policy Autopilot, the open-source static analysis tool introduced at re:Invent 2025, is now available as a Kiro power. The integration enables one-click installation from the Kiro IDE and web interface, removing the need for manual MCP server configuration and speeding baseline IAM policy creation. Developers can generate and refine policies inside their coding workflow to support rapid prototyping and ongoing application evolution.

💰 Amazon Web Services now offers 3-year Serverless Reservations for Amazon Redshift Serverless, a discounted commitment option that can save up to 45% and improve cost predictability. Reservations commit a specified number of Redshift Processing Units (RPUs) for a three-year term with a no-upfront payment option, are billed hourly and metered per second, and can be shared across accounts at the payer level. Any usage beyond the committed RPU level is charged at standard on-demand rates.

🕒 Firefly is a software-driven clock synchronization system from Google that achieves nanosecond-level timing across data center NICs using commodity hardware. It separates fast internal NIC-to-NIC consensus from external UTC alignment and builds consensus over a d-regular random graph. Practical techniques—RTT filtering, path profiling, and optional switch/NIC features—reduce jitter and asymmetry. It yields consistent sub-10ns internal alignment while scaling to large fabrics.

🔐 Modern workforce mobility has made identity verification necessary but insufficient: authentication proves who a user is, not how risky their access may be. Attackers increasingly exploit device and session blind spots — legacy protocols, unmanaged endpoints, token theft, and MFA bypass — to reuse trusted identities. Specops's Infinipoint extends verification beyond login by continuously assessing both user and device to reduce these exposure points without disrupting productivity.