All news with #product release tag

Amazon Connect Adds Configurable Schedule Adherence

📈 Amazon Connect now supports configurable thresholds for schedule adherence, enabling contact center managers to set allowable early and late windows for shift starts, shift ends, and individual activities. Administrators can apply defaults and customize thresholds at the team level—for example, allowing a 5-minute early start, a 10-minute late end, or a 3-minute late break—so minor timing differences don’t hurt adherence scores. This reduces false violations, helps managers focus on real adherence issues, and improves agent satisfaction and productivity.

Amazon MSK Connect Expands to Ten More AWS Regions

🚀 Amazon MSK Connect is now available in ten additional AWS Regions — Jakarta, Hong Kong, Osaka, Melbourne, Milan, Zurich, Bahrain, UAE, Cape Town, and Tel Aviv. MSK Connect provides fully managed Kafka Connect clusters for deploying, monitoring, and scaling connectors to move data between Apache Kafka/Amazon MSK and external systems without provisioning infrastructure. The service supports both managed and self-managed Kafka clusters and is accessible via the MSK console and CLI.

Google Introduces LLM-Evalkit for Prompt Engineering

🧭 LLM-Evalkit is an open-source, lightweight application from Google that centralizes and streamlines prompt engineering using Vertex AI SDKs. It provides a no-code interface for creating, versioning, testing, and benchmarking prompts while tracking objective performance metrics. The tool promotes a dataset-driven evaluation workflow—define the task, assemble representative test cases, and score outputs against clear metrics—to replace ad-hoc iteration and subjective comparisons. Documentation and a guided console tutorial are available to help teams adopt the framework and reproduce experiments.

Amazon QuickSight Adds Expanded Font Customization

🔤 Amazon QuickSight now extends font customization to data labels and axes across supported charts, complementing existing controls for titles, subtitles, legends, and table headers. Authors can set font family, pixel size, color, and styling such as bold, italics, and underline for analyses, dashboards, reports, and embedded scenarios. The update improves branding alignment and readability on large displays and is available in all supported regions.

AWS Resource Explorer Enables Immediate Regional Discovery

🔍 AWS Resource Explorer now provides immediate access to resource search within each AWS Region without requiring prior activation. To start searching you need, at minimum, permissions granted by the AWS Resource Explorer Read Only Access or AWS Read Only Access managed policies, and you can discover resources via the Resource Explorer console, Unified Search, or AWS CLI/SDKs. To index the full inventory, including historical backfill and automatic updates, complete Resource Explorer setup so it can create a service-linked role. You can also enable cross-Region search with a single console click or the new CreateResourceExplorerSetup API, and the feature is available at no additional cost in supported Regions.

AWS launches EC2 High Memory U7i-12TB in Mumbai region

🚀 Amazon EC2 High Memory U7i-12tb instances with 12TiB of DDR5 memory are now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region as of Oct 13, 2025. The u7i-12tb.224xlarge is powered by custom fourth‑generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Sapphire Rapids) processors, offers 896 vCPUs, and supports up to 100Gbps for both EBS and network throughput plus ENA Express. These instances are targeted at mission‑critical in‑memory databases such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL Server, enabling higher transaction throughput, faster data loading, and shorter backup windows for large-scale deployments.

SageMaker AI Projects Adds Custom ML Templates from S3

🛠️ Amazon Web Services announced that SageMaker AI Projects can now provision custom ML project templates stored in Amazon S3. Administrators can define and manage standardized end-to-end project templates in SageMaker AI Studio so data scientists can create projects that follow organizational patterns and automated workflows. The feature is available in all AWS Regions where SageMaker AI Projects is offered.

Apple Doubles Top Bug Bounty to $2M, Bonuses Possible

🔐 Apple has increased the top award in its Apple Security Bounty program to $2m for exploit chains that emulate sophisticated mercenary spyware. Bonuses for Lockdown Mode bypasses and vulnerabilities found in beta software can more than double that payout, potentially exceeding $5m. Apple also raised many category rewards — including $100,000 for a Gatekeeper bypass and $1m for broad unauthorized iCloud access — and introduced a Target Flags initiative to speed and standardize exploitability demonstrations.

AWS Config Adds Support for Three New Resource Types

📣 AWS Config now supports three additional resource types—AWS::ApiGatewayV2::Integration, AWS::CloudTrail::EventDataStore, and AWS::Config::StoredQuery—providing broader visibility across AWS environments. If you have recording enabled for all resource types, AWS Config will automatically begin tracking these new types. They are available for use in Config rules and Config aggregators in all Regions where the resources exist. This expansion enhances your ability to discover, assess, audit, and remediate a wider range of resources.

AWS Service Changes: Maintenance, Sunset, and End of Support

📢 AWS is updating the availability status of a range of services and features across three lifecycle categories: moving to Maintenance, entering Sunset, and reaching End of Support. Services moving to maintenance will stop accepting new customers on Nov 7, 2025, while current customers can continue using them as they evaluate alternatives. Several services, including Amazon FinSpace, AWS IoT Greengrass v1, and AWS Proton, are entering sunset with documented timelines (typically ~12 months). AWS Mainframe Modernization App Testing has reached end of support as of Oct 7, 2025. AWS provides migration guides and support resources to help customers transition.

Windows 11 23H2 Home and Pro reach end of support soon

⚠ Microsoft warned that devices running Windows 11 23H2 Home and Pro editions will stop receiving security updates after November 11, 2025. The November 2025 monthly security update will be the final update for those editions. Users should upgrade to Windows 11 24H2 or later to remain protected; note that some PCs may be prevented from upgrading by a safeguard for SenseShield code-obfuscation drivers.

AWS Client VPN Now Supports macOS Tahoe (26.0) Release

🔒 AWS Client VPN now supports macOS Tahoe (26.0) with client version 5.3.1. You can run the AWS-supplied VPN client on the latest macOS releases; desktop clients are provided free and can be downloaded from the AWS Client VPN download page. AWS Client VPN is a managed service that securely connects remote workers to AWS and on-premises networks and already supports macOS 13–15, Windows 10/11 (x64 and Arm64), and Ubuntu 22.04/24.04. This update helps organizations maintain secure remote access as endpoints upgrade to the latest macOS.

Chrome to revoke notification access for inactive sites

🔕 Google is updating Chrome to automatically revoke website notification permissions for sites that haven't been visited recently on both desktop and Android. The feature targets sites that send a high volume of notifications while receiving very low user engagement — Google found under 1% of alerts generate interactions. Chrome will notify users when a permission is removed and makes it easy to restore access via Safety Check or by revisiting the site and opting back in. Users who prefer to keep persistent notifications can disable the automatic revocation entirely.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Adds R8g Instances in New Regions

⚡ Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports Graviton4-based R8g DB instances in AWS Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Seoul). R8g offers larger sizes up to 48xlarge with an 8:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio and DDR5 memory, including new 24xlarge and 48xlarge options delivering up to 192 vCPUs, up to 50 Gbps networking, and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth. AWS reports up to 40% performance and up to 29% price/performance improvements over Graviton3 equivalents, varying by engine, version, and workload. You can launch or upgrade instances through the Amazon RDS console or AWS CLI with a simple instance type modification.

Google Cloud launches Network Security Learning Path

🔒 Google Cloud has launched a Network Security Learning Path culminating in the Designing Network Security in Google Cloud skill badge to help organizations secure dynamic cloud networks. The program covers design, build, and management of secure VPCs, GKE lockdown, NGFW rules, Cloud VPN/Interconnect, and Cloud Armor for WAF and DDoS protection. Learners validate skills through a hands-on break-fix challenge lab simulating incidents like firewall policy breaches and data exfiltration.

Amazon Connect adds agent schedule adherence alerts

🔔 Amazon Connect now supports agent schedule adherence notifications, enabling supervisors to receive automated alerts by email or text (via EventBridge) when agents fall outside defined adherence thresholds. You can create rules—such as alerting when adherence drops below 85% in a trailing 15‑minute window—to notify supervisors proactively. These automated notifications remove the need for constant dashboard monitoring and help teams intervene before service levels decline.

Amazon Connect adds copy and bulk edit for agent scheduling

🔁 Amazon Connect now supports copy and bulk edit for agent scheduling configuration, making it faster to create and maintain schedules. Administrators can copy existing scheduling configurations—such as a weekday shift profile to create a weekend variant—or clone a full schedule from one agent to multiple new hires. Bulk edits allow selective updates to fields like time zone and start date without altering weekly working hours, reducing manager time spent on configuration and improving operational efficiency.

Copilot on Windows Adds Email Connectors and Office Export

🖥️ Microsoft has updated Copilot on Windows to let users link Outlook and Gmail accounts, plus Google Drive, Calendar, and Contacts, and to generate and export Office files directly from prompts. The change is rolling out to Windows Insiders via the Microsoft Store for devices running Copilot version 1.25095.161.0 or later and must be enabled manually in the app's Connectors settings. Responses longer than 600 characters now include an export button to save content as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or PDF files. Microsoft asked testers to provide feedback from within the Copilot app.

Google Launches AI Vulnerability Reward Program for AI

🔒 Google has launched an AI Vulnerability Reward Program (AI VRP) offering base rewards up to $20,000 and up to $30,000 with multipliers for validated AI-product bugs. The program moves AI-related reports from the Abuse VRP into a dedicated stream to simplify submissions and unify reward assessment. In-scope products include Search, Gemini apps and Workspace, and qualifying issues cover data exfiltration, phishing enablement and model theft. Content-focused prompt injections and jailbreaks remain out of scope and should be reported via in-product tools.

CrowdStrike Named Visionary in 2025 Gartner SIEM Placement

🔍 CrowdStrike Falcon Next‑Gen SIEM has been named a Visionary in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Security Information and Event Management. The product is presented as an agentic SOC engine that combines AI-driven detections, real-time telemetry and a unified data foundation to accelerate detection and response. CrowdStrike cites metrics including 150x faster search, over 1PB/day ingestion and up to 80% cost savings, and highlights the acquisition of Onum to improve real-time pipelines and scale. New AI agents for workflow, data transformation, search analysis and correlation rule generation aim to simplify playbook creation, data prep and detection tuning.