All news with #product release tag

Microsoft and Oracle Expand Oracle Database@Azure Reach

🚀 Microsoft and Oracle have expanded Oracle Database@Azure with broader regional coverage and support for Oracle Database 19c and 23ai, plus full support for Base Database, Exadata (Dedicated and Exascale), and Autonomous Database. The update introduces continuous zero-ETL mirroring into OneLake via Oracle GoldenGate and native integrations with Microsoft Fabric, enabling real-time analytics with Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and Power BI. Security and operational management are strengthened through Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Entra ID, and Azure Arc, while Azure Accelerate for Oracle and marketplace programs streamline migrations and partner engagement.

Amazon EC2 M7i arrives in Milan with custom Intel CPUs

🚀 Amazon EC2 M7i instances, powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids), are now available in the Europe (Milan) region. M7i delivers up to 15% better performance versus comparable x86 Intel processors on other clouds and up to 15% improved price-performance compared to M6i. Instances scale to 48xlarge and include two bare-metal sizes (metal-24xl, metal-48xl) with built-in Intel accelerators for data streaming, in-memory analytics, and QuickAssist Technology, making them suited for sustained high-CPU workloads like gaming servers, CPU-based ML, and video streaming.

Google Cloud Adds AI Annotations and Object Contexts

🧠 Google Cloud is introducing two Cloud Storage features—auto annotate and object contexts—that apply pretrained AI to generate metadata and attach custom key-value tags to stored objects. Auto annotate (experimental) produces image annotations such as object detection, labels, and objectionable-content signals tied to an object's lifecycle. Object contexts (preview) let teams add, manage, and query contextual tags with IAM controls and Storage Insights integration. Together they enable scalable discovery, curation, and governance of previously unanalyzed unstructured “dark data.”

IBM Spectrum Symphony HostFactory Connectors for GCP

🚀 Google Cloud announces the general availability of open-source IBM Spectrum Symphony HostFactory connectors for Google Compute Engine and GKE. The connectors enable organizations to extend on‑premises Symphony clusters into Google Cloud or deploy fully cloud-native clusters with automatic provisioning and decommissioning to match workload demand. Partner-built by Accenture and validated by Aneo, the connectors support enterprise features such as Spot and on‑demand VMs, GPUs, Local SSD, Confidential VMs, Pub/Sub event-driven management, Kubernetes CRDs, and integration with managed instance group (MIG) APIs for large-scale HPC operations.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes: iSCSI, FlexCache, Gemini

🚀 Google Cloud announced enhancements to NetApp Volumes, adding unified iSCSI block and file storage to support SAN migrations and NetApp FlexCache for high-performance local caching in hybrid environments. The service integrates with Gemini Enterprise as a data store for retrieval-augmented generation, and includes large-capacity volumes, SnapMirror replication, and auto-tiering to optimize performance and costs.

Amazon AppStream Adds License-Included Microsoft Apps

🧾 Amazon AppStream 2.0 now offers license-included Microsoft Office, Visio, and Project (2021/2024) in Standard and Professional editions, available in both 32‑bit and 64‑bit for On‑Demand and Always‑On fleets. Administrators can add or remove these applications from images and fleets to control availability, and end users access fully integrated Microsoft apps within AppStream sessions. Deployments require an AppStream Image Builder agent released on or after October 2, 2025, or managed image updates dated October 3, 2025 or later. Billing remains hourly for streaming and per-user per-month (non-prorated) for Microsoft apps.

The AI Fix #72 — Hype, Space Data Centers, Robot Heads

🎧 Hosts Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley review episode 72 of The AI Fix, covering GPT-5’s disputed training data, Irish police warnings about AI-generated home-intruder pranks, Jeff Bezos’s proposal for gigawatt-scale data centres in orbit, OpenAI’s drag-and-drop Agent Kit, and a Chinese company’s ultra-lifelike robot head. The episode questions corporate AI hype and highlights rising public disclosures of AI risk, urging attention to data provenance and realistic deployment expectations.

Amazon EBS Volume Clones for Instant Volume Copies

⚡ Amazon Web Services has launched general availability of Amazon EBS Volume Clones, enabling instant, point-in-time copies of EBS volumes within the same Availability Zone. Cloned volumes are immediately accessible with single-digit millisecond latency and support all EBS volume types. The capability integrates with the EBS Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver and is available via Console, CLI, SDKs, and CloudFormation across AWS Commercial and GovCloud (US) Regions.

AWS for Fluent Bit 3.0.0 Released with Fluent Bit 4.1.1

🚀 AWS for Fluent Bit 3.0.0, based on Fluent Bit 4.1.1 and built on Amazon Linux 2023, is now available for Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS customers. The release introduces native OpenTelemetry (OTel) support to ingest and forward OTLP logs, metrics, and traces with AWS SigV4 authentication, removing the need for additional sidecars. It delivers faster JSON parsing and higher log throughput per vCPU with lower latency, plus configurable TLS minimum versions and cipher controls to strengthen output security. Upgrade by pulling the 3.0.0 image from the Amazon ECR Public Gallery, updating your ECS FireLens task definition, or updating the DaemonSet/Helm release on EKS.

Amazon Route 53 Profiles Adds AWS PrivateLink Support

🔒 Amazon Route 53 Profiles now supports AWS PrivateLink, allowing customers to access and manage their Profiles privately over the Amazon network instead of the public internet. When accessed via PrivateLink, management operations such as creating, editing, listing, and deleting Profiles occur over private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on‑premises applications. This capability reduces control‑plane exposure and supports hybrid and regulated deployments.

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.

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.

AWS Expands Graviton4 M8g EC2 Instances to Regions

🚀 AWS announced that Amazon EC2 M8g instances, powered by Graviton4 processors, are now available in Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Canada (Central), and the Middle East (Bahrain). The M8g family delivers up to 30% better performance versus Graviton3-based instances and offers larger sizes with up to 3× more vCPUs and memory. Built on the AWS Nitro System, these instances provide enhanced networking and EBS bandwidth for general-purpose workloads such as application servers, microservices, gaming servers, and caching fleets.

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 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.

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.

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.