All news with #product release tag

Signal adds opt-in end-to-end encrypted backups for chats

🔒 Signal has introduced an opt-in secure cloud backups feature that creates end-to-end encrypted archives of users' messages and recent media. The capability is available now in the Android beta and will be rolled out to iOS and desktop after testing completes. The free tier stores messages and up to 45 days of media within a 100 MiB limit; a paid $1.99/month plan raises storage to 100 GB and extends media retention. Backups occur daily, exclude soon-to-disappear and view-once messages, and are protected by a 64-character recovery key generated on-device that Signal never receives.

Google Gen AI Training and Certification for Veterans

🎖️ Google Public Sector is opening registration for a no-cost, three-week virtual program, Google Launchpad for Veterans, offering foundational generative AI training and a path to the Gen AI Leader certification. The Gen AI Leader training includes a two-day kickoff on November 13–14, optional exam prep sessions, and a complimentary exam voucher. Participants will learn core LLM concepts, how to navigate the AI ecosystem, and practical business applications using Gemini and NotebookLM to drive organizational transformation.

BigQuery's CMETA: Column Metadata Index for Scale Performance

🔍 BigQuery's new Column Metadata (CMETA) index is an automated, highly scalable metadata index that improves query pruning and reduces compute for extremely large tables. CMETA stores snapshots of block- and column-level statistics and is maintained transparently by BigQuery with no user intervention. Early adopters report up to 60x faster queries and up to 10x lower slot usage for selective filters, particularly on clustered columns.

AWS WAF Adds Free Vended Logs Based on Request Volume

📣 AWS WAF now includes a free allocation of Vended Logs ingestion to CloudWatch: 500 MB for every 1 million WAF requests processed, provided at no additional cost. The allocation is applied automatically across WAF vended logs to CloudWatch, S3, and Firehose and is reconciled on your AWS bill at month end. Usage beyond the included allowance is charged at standard AWS WAF Vended Logs CloudWatch rates. This change helps reduce logging costs while preserving comprehensive security visibility and analytics.

Managed Tiered Checkpointing for Amazon SageMaker HyperPod

⚡ Amazon Web Services has announced general availability of managed tiered checkpointing for Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a hybrid checkpointing capability that caches frequent checkpoints in CPU memory and periodically persists them to Amazon S3 for durability. The approach reduces model recovery time and minimizes training progress loss on large-scale clusters. It integrates with PyTorch Distributed Checkpoint (DCP) and is enabled via a CreateCluster/UpdateCluster API parameter; customers can use the sagemaker-checkpointing Python library to adopt it with minimal code changes. Currently available for HyperPod clusters using the EKS orchestrator.

Running Node.js HTTP Servers on Cloudflare Workers Globally

🚀 Cloudflare has added support for the node:http client and server APIs in Workers, enabling developers to deploy existing Node.js HTTP applications at the edge with minimal code changes. This change makes frameworks like Express and Koa runnable on Workers with zero cold starts, automatic scaling, and reduced latency for global users. The client APIs are implemented on top of Workers' native fetch(), and server integration uses an internal bridge that registers listen(port) rather than binding TCP sockets. Some Node-specific features remain limited or unsupported (the Agent is effectively a no-op; trailers, early hints, 1xx responses, and TLS-specific options are not available).

Amazon Keyspaces supports now(), uuid(), and Duration types

🔧 Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports the now() and uuid() functions in SELECT clauses, extending prior support in WHERE, INSERT, and UPDATE. It also introduces a native Duration data type to represent elapsed time between timestamps, removing the need to store intervals as strings or bytes. These updates improve Apache Cassandra compatibility and simplify time-based operations and identifier generation across AWS Commercial and GovCloud regions.

Amazon Neptune Analytics Now Supported in NetworkX

🚀 NetworkX now supports Amazon Neptune Analytics as a graph store, enabling developers to use familiar NetworkX APIs while transparently offloading heavy graph-algorithm workloads to Neptune’s scalable analytics engine. The integration provides Zero-ETL data handling, automatic provisioning and teardown for a serverless-like experience, and preserves existing Python workflows without refactoring code.

Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio Adds Custom Blueprints

🔧 AWS announced general availability of Custom Blueprints in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio, enabling customers to supply their own managed IAM policies when creating project roles. Teams can replace or augment the default service-managed policies and use custom AWS CloudFormation templates to define infrastructure and parameters for resources such as Amazon EMR on EC2, AWS Glue Data Catalog, and Amazon Redshift. Sample templates are available in the SageMaker documentation, and the capability is offered in all AWS Commercial Regions where the next-generation SageMaker is available.

Horizon: Accelerating AAOS Development with Google Cloud

🚗 Horizon is an open-source, cloud-native software factory developed by Google and Accenture to standardize platform development for Android Automotive OS (AAOS) and related embedded vehicle software. It promotes a virtual-first workflow using high-fidelity cloud devices, VHAL, virtio, and scalable Cuttlefish instances to enable elastic testing and rapid developer feedback. Innovations such as the Android Build File System (ABFS), containerized reproducible builds, and integrated code tooling have produced 10x–50x faster feedback in early deployments, reducing build times and supporting high-frequency, higher-quality releases.

Improved AI Assistance in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio

🤖 Amazon Web Services announced enhancements to the Amazon Q Developer chat experience within SageMaker Unified Studio Jupyter notebooks and added a command-line interface for use in notebooks and the Code Editor. By integrating with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, the assistant becomes aware of project resources—data, compute, and code—and provides personalized, context-aware help. These updates aim to speed tasks like code refactoring, file edits, and troubleshooting while preserving transparency around assistant actions. The capabilities are available at no additional cost via the Amazon Q Developer Free Tier where SageMaker Unified Studio is offered; customers can enable Amazon Q Developer Pro for expanded functionality.

Google to Let Users Set AI Mode as Default Search Option

🔎 Google will let users set AI mode as their default search tab, replacing the traditional blue links view for those who opt in. The change will be user-controlled via a toggle or button so individuals can choose AI-driven summaries as their primary experience while the classic Web tab remains accessible. Google says it is studying the impact on ads and publishers.

ChatGPT makes Projects free, adds chat-branching toggle

🔁 OpenAI is rolling out two notable updates to ChatGPT: the Projects feature is now available to all users for free, and a new Branch in new chat toggle lets you split and continue conversations from a chosen message. Projects create independent workspaces that organize chats, files, and custom instructions with separate memory, context, and tools. The branching option spawns a new conversation that includes everything up to the split point, helping manage divergent topics and streamline brainstorming. Both changes aim to improve organization and continuity for repeated or evolving work.

AWS MediaConvert Adds Time-Addressable Media Store

🎬 AWS Elemental MediaConvert now integrates with Time-Addressable Media Store (TAMS), enabling customers to reference and extract precise, time-bound media segments as inputs to encoding workflows. The integration requires customers to operate their own TAMS servers—MediaConvert does not host or manage TAMS—and supports quick-turnaround use cases like live-event highlight clipping, near-real-time social publishing, and archive repurposing. This capability is aimed at media operations teams modernizing archives, automating editorial workflows, and connecting broadcast infrastructure and CMS directly into high-performance encoding pipelines.

Amazon CloudFront Adds Post-Quantum and TLS1.3 Policy

🔐 Amazon CloudFront now supports hybrid post-quantum key establishment across all existing TLS security policies for client-to-edge connections, enabling quantum-resistant key exchange without customer configuration. CloudFront also introduces a new TLS1.3_2025 policy that enforces TLS 1.3 only. Both features are enabled by default at all edge locations and incur no additional charges. These updates help organizations strengthen long-term in-transit protection and simplify compliance planning.

Gemini Cloud Assist for Dataproc: Troubleshoot Apache Spark

🛠️ Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations is now in public preview to help troubleshoot Dataproc and Serverless for Apache Spark workloads by automatically analyzing driver and executor logs, Spark UI metrics, configurations, and cross-product telemetry. Accessible from the Google Cloud console and via API, it produces prioritized summaries and clear remediation steps. The tool is tailored to data engineers, data scientists, SREs, and managers to reduce investigation time and accelerate fixes.

Amazon GuardDuty Adds Custom Entity Lists for Domains

🛡️ AWS announced general availability of Amazon GuardDuty custom threat detection using entity lists, extending support beyond IP-only lists to include malicious domains and IP addresses. GuardDuty introduces a new finding type, Impact:EC2/MaliciousDomainRequest.Custom, triggered when activity related to a listed domain is observed. Entity lists also allow suppression of alerts from trusted sources and simplify cross-region permission management, avoiding IAM policy size limits. The feature is available in all GuardDuty Regions except China and GovCloud (US).

Amazon RDS Proxy Adds IPv6 Support for Connections

🌐 Amazon RDS Proxy now supports IPv6 addresses for pooling and sharing database connections, while continuing to offer existing IPv4 endpoints for backwards compatibility. Customers may specify proxy target connections using either IPv4 or IPv6. The change reduces the need to manage overlapping VPC address spaces and helps mobile, IoT, and modern serverless applications that open many database connections. By pooling connections, RDS Proxy improves database efficiency and application scalability.

Google Cloud Expands Coverage for Compute Flex CUDs

🔔 Google Cloud has expanded its Compute Flexible Committed Use Discounts (Flex CUDs) to cover additional VM families and serverless offerings, delivering broader savings and greater deployment flexibility. The update adds enhanced discounts for memory‑optimized M1–M4 instances and HPC‑optimized H3 and H4D families, and extends coverage to Cloud Run request-based billing and Cloud Functions. A new spend-based billing model applies discounts directly to eligible usage rather than issuing credits, and introduces changes to the Billing UI, Cloud Billing export to BigQuery schema, and Cloud Commerce Consumer Procurement APIs. Customers can opt in immediately; those who do not will be auto-transitioned to the new model on January 21, 2026, while new Billing Accounts created on or after July 15, 2025 will default to the updated model.

Amazon GuardDuty Adds Custom Entity Lists for Detection

🛡️ AWS announced general availability of Amazon GuardDuty custom threat detection using entity lists, expanding support beyond legacy IP-only lists to include domains and mixed IP/domain lists. The service adds a new finding type, Impact:EC2/MaliciousDomainRequest.Custom, when activity involves a listed domain. Entity lists can also be used to suppress alerts from trusted sources, and they simplify permissions and cross-region management. The capability is available in all Regions where GuardDuty runs, excluding China and GovCloud (US).