All news with #aws tag

🔒 The war in the Middle East has expanded cyber risk globally, from physical strikes on AWS data centers to waves of Iran-aligned cyber activity. Within hours of kinetic operations, hacktivists and state-aligned APTs mobilized, using DDoS, defacement, wipers and supply-chain compromises. Organizations should prioritize inventorying internet-facing assets, enforcing phishing-resistant MFA, auditing MSP and cloud dependencies, and preparing offline backups. The guidance focuses on pragmatic hardening where adversaries historically find weak spots.

🔐 AWS now supports account regional namespaces for Amazon S3 general purpose buckets, removing the need to find globally unique bucket names and enabling predictable, per-customer or per-team naming. To use it, include the new bucket namespace request header with the CreateBucket API or add your account regional suffix in CloudFormation templates. Security teams can enforce namespace-only creation via SCPs and IAM policies. This feature is available in 37 Regions, including AWS China and GovCloud, at no extra cost.

🔒 AWS Backup now supports protecting Amazon EKS clusters with logically air-gapped vaults. These vaults store immutable backup copies that are locked by default and encrypted with AWS-owned keys or customer-managed keys, and they can hold backups in the same account or across accounts and Regions. You can target a vault as the primary backup or copy destination via the console, API, or CLI, share recovery access through AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) or multi-party approval, and initiate direct restore jobs from the recipient account without copying first to reduce recovery time.

🚀 Amazon Neptune Database is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) region. You can create Neptune clusters using R5, R5d, R6g, R6i, X2iedn, T4g, and T3 instance types, and deploy production-ready graph workloads with high availability and automated backups. Neptune supports both Property Graph (Gremlin and openCypher) and RDF (SPARQL) models and offers Neptune Global Database for multi-region replication. Get started via the Console, CLI, or CloudFormation.

🔒 AWS Firewall Manager is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region. The service helps cloud security administrators and site reliability engineers protect applications while reducing the operational overhead of manual rule configuration and management. Customers can use Firewall Manager to create and maintain AWS WAF security policies and apply defense-in-depth controls across AWS security services and accounts.

🚀 Amazon EC2 C8id instances powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors are now available in the Europe (Spain) region. They provide up to 384 vCPUs, 768 GiB of memory and 22.8 TB of NVMe SSD storage, offering up to 43% higher compute performance and 3.3× greater memory bandwidth versus prior C6id instances. C8id also delivers up to 46% better I/O performance for database workloads and up to 30% faster query results for I/O-intensive analytics, and supports Instance Bandwidth Configuration to flexibly allocate 25% between network and EBS bandwidth. These instances are suited for compute- and I/O-intensive workloads and are available via Savings Plans, On‑Demand, and Spot purchases.

🚀 AWS has expanded availability of Amazon EC2 C8gd and M8gd instances, adding C8gd in South America (São Paulo) and M8gd in Europe (Ireland). Powered by AWS Graviton4, these instances deliver up to 30% better compute performance than Graviton3-based variants and offer up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe SSD block storage. They provide up to 50 Gbps network and 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth, come in 12 sizes, and include EFA support on the largest sizes. Customers can also adjust network and EBS bandwidth by 25% using EC2 instance bandwidth weighting to better optimize workload throughput.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has made EC2 R7gd instances available in the South America (São Paulo) Region, offering up to 3.8 TB of local NVMe SSD block storage. R7gd instances are powered by AWS Graviton3 processors, paired with DDR5 memory and built on the AWS Nitro System, targeting memory‑intensive workloads such as open‑source databases, in‑memory caches, and real‑time analytics. They provide high‑speed, low‑latency ephemeral storage ideal for scratch space, temporary files, and caching.

📞 Amazon Connect now offers integrated agent coaching workflows that let contact center managers create, assign, and track coaching plans directly from evaluation scorecards within the Connect UI. Managers can attach specific customer interactions and suggested language to illustrate strengths and improvement areas, while agents acknowledge feedback and add notes to confirm understanding. All coaching history is available on a single page, reducing delays and creating accountability across the contact center.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has introduced High Memory U7i EC2 instances in new regions, offering a u7i-8tb.112xlarge (8TiB) in Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) and a u7i-12tb.224xlarge (12TiB) in Europe (Spain). Powered by custom fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids) and DDR5 memory, the instances provide 448 and 896 vCPUs respectively, plus up to 100 Gbps for EBS and network and ENA Express. They target mission-critical in-memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle and SQL Server.

🔍 Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights now offers on‑demand automated analysis in AWS GovCloud (US‑East) and AWS GovCloud (US‑West), extending ML-driven database diagnostics to government regions. The feature analyzes metrics and queries, detects anomalies against normal baselines, and provides targeted remediation steps to cut mean‑time‑to‑diagnosis from hours to minutes. To use it, enable Advanced mode for Aurora and Amazon RDS via the RDS console, AWS APIs, SDKs, or CloudFormation.

✉️ Amazon Connect now lets agents select the "From" email address when replying to inbound messages or composing outbound emails. Administrators can configure multiple sender addresses per queue, and agents can search and pick the appropriate address based on the queue they are working in. This capability helps contact centers preserve correct brand identity across interactions and supports multi-brand or multi-line-of-business deployments from a single instance.

📊 Amazon Connect now exports case data directly into the analytics data lake, enabling unified analysis of case records alongside other contact-center metrics. With case data accessible in the data lake, teams can use Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight to build custom reports and explore trends such as case volume by type, handling by agent shift, and contact sentiment without maintaining complex ETL pipelines. The capability is available in multiple AWS regions including US, Europe, Asia Pacific, Canada, and Africa.

🔒 AWS announced an expanded AWS Security Hub that serves as a centralized security operations layer, aggregating risk signals from multicloud environments. The update promises near real-time risk analytics, automated analysis, and prioritized insights, and extends CSPM and Amazon Inspector capabilities to cover VMs, containers, and serverless. It also supports third-party integrations through AWS Security Hub Extended to unify visibility across vendors.

🔒 AWS Backup now supports Amazon RDS Multi‑AZ clusters in 17 additional AWS Regions, extending managed backup coverage across Asia Pacific, Europe, South America, Africa, and Canada. The expansion brings centralized lifecycle management and immutable backups via AWS Backup Vault Lock to Multi‑AZ RDS clusters, improving retention controls and tamper protection. Administrators can add clusters to existing backup plans or create new plans and attach clusters using the console, AWS CLI, or SDKs.

🔐 Google reports that UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen in the August 2025 compromise of the nx npm package to fully breach a customer's cloud environment in under 72 hours. A trojanized postinstall executed a credential stealer named QUIETVAULT, which harvested a developer's GitHub token and other secrets. The actor abused GitHub-to-AWS OIDC trust to create an Administrator role, exfiltrated S3 data, and performed destructive actions including making internal repos public.

📍 Amazon Web Services announced that Amazon Neptune now includes built-in spatial data capabilities, implementing 11 functions aligned with the ISO 13249-3 standard. The update supports GEOMETRY types—points, lines, and polygons—and integrates with GIS tools such as Esri ArcGIS and the openCypher query language. Customers can perform proximity analysis, route and asset tracking, and build location-aware AI without operating a separate spatial database. Spatial features are available at no additional charge in all Neptune regions.

📍 Amazon Neptune Database now includes native spatial data capabilities, adding 11 built-in functions compliant with ISO 13249-3 and GEOMETRY types for points, lines, and polygons. The new functions (ST_DistanceSpheroid, ST_Within, ST_Intersects, ST_Buffer, and others) integrate with openCypher and GIS tools such as Esri ArcGIS. Customers can remove separate spatial databases and run proximity, routing, and geographic-pattern analyses directly in Neptune. Spatial support is available at no additional charge in all regions where Neptune is offered.

🔔 Amazon Web Services has added stateful Model Context Protocol (MCP) server capabilities to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, enabling server-driven elicitation, sampling, and progress notifications alongside existing support for resources, prompts, and tools. Developers can now run each session in an isolated microVM and preserve session context across interactions using an Mcp-Session-Id header. These features support interactive, multi-turn workflows and real-time updates for long-running operations.

🔍 Amazon Bedrock now emits two CloudWatch metrics: TimeToFirstToken and EstimatedTPMQuotaUsage. TimeToFirstToken measures latency from request submission to the first returned token for streaming APIs, enabling SLA baselines and latency alarms without client-side instrumentation. EstimatedTPMQuotaUsage estimates Tokens Per Minute consumption across Bedrock inference APIs to support proactive quota alarms and capacity planning.