All news with #product update tag

🧭 The Amazon SageMaker HyperPod console now validates AWS service quotas for your account before initiating cluster creation. The console automatically compares your requested cluster configuration—instance types, EBS volume sizes, and VPC-related resources—against account-level quotas and presents a clear table of expected utilization, applied quota values, and compliance status. If validation detects potential quota shortfalls, it issues a warning and provides direct links to the Service Quotas console so you can request increases before provisioning begins.

🔊 Amazon Lex now offers three configurable voice activity detection (VAD) sensitivity levels—Default, High, and Maximum—that can be set per bot locale. The Default setting suits typical background noise, High targets consistently moderate noise such as busy offices or retail spaces, and Maximum is designed for very noisy environments like manufacturing floors or outdoor locations. You configure VAD sensitivity when creating or updating a bot locale in the Amazon Connect Conversational AI designer, and the feature is available in all AWS commercial regions where Amazon Connect and Lex operate.

📢 Microsoft has begun retiring the Microsoft Lens PDF scanner app for iOS and Android, with removal from app stores set for February 9, 2026 and scanning functionality scheduled to stop on March 9, 2026. Microsoft updated its Microsoft 365 Message Center guidance and recommends users switch to OneDrive's built-in scan feature. Existing scans remain accessible via MyScans while the app stays installed and the user is signed into their last active account, though Microsoft will no longer support the app after the cutoff. No administrative action is required; administrators should notify users of the change.

🎥 Amazon Connect now publishes agent screen recording status to CloudWatch via Amazon EventBridge. Customers can subscribe to the Screen Recording Status Changed event to receive near‑real‑time updates on recording success or failure, failure codes and descriptions, client and browser versions, OS, and start/end timestamps. This enables supervisors to correlate recordings with calls, chats, or tasks for coaching and compliance reviews. The feature is available in all Regions where Amazon Connect operates.

🔍 Amazon Inspector now supports Java Gradle dependency inventory and vulnerability scanning for Lambda functions and ECR images, using gradle.lockfile content to build Java dependency inventories. The release also adds detection for MySQL, MariaDB, PHP, Jenkins-core, 7zip (Windows), Elasticsearch, and Curl/LibCurl. These enhancements improve detection of packages installed outside package managers, broadening coverage across languages and runtimes and helping teams reduce blind spots. The new capabilities are available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon Inspector is offered.

📚 Microsoft will retire the Send Documents to Kindle option in Microsoft Word, with the change rolling out after February 2026. The feature, formerly accessible from Word's Export menu, allowed .doc and .docx files to be transferred to a user's Kindle library while preserving page layout and most formatting. Microsoft notes that comments and tracked changes were not preserved when files were sent. After the retirement, users should use the Send to Kindle website to transfer documents.

🆕 Amazon Lightsail now offers two larger managed database bundles with up to 8 vCPUs, 32 GB memory, and 960 GB SSD storage. The new bundles are offered in both standard and high‑availability plans and support managed MySQL and PostgreSQL engines. They target production workloads and data‑intensive applications—such as e‑commerce, content management systems, business intelligence, and SaaS—by delivering increased storage and processing capacity. These sizes are available in all AWS Regions where Lightsail is provided.

🔧 Microsoft is testing a new Group Policy, RemoveMicrosoftCopilotApp, that enables IT administrators to uninstall the AI-powered Copilot app on managed Windows devices. The policy began rolling out in the Dev and Beta Insider channels with Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (KB5072046) and applies to endpoints managed via Microsoft Intune or SCCM. It targets systems where both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are installed, the app was not user-installed, and it hasn't been launched in the last 28 days. Admins can enable the setting at User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows AI -> Remove Microsoft Copilot App; users may still reinstall if they choose.

🤖 Amazon Quick now supports invoking third‑party AI agents from Box, Canva, and PagerDuty, enabling chat and automation tasks—such as querying documents, generating presentations, and extracting incident insights—directly within the Quick workspace. Quick has also expanded its built‑in actions to include integrations with GitHub, Notion, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, Intercom, and more, allowing users to create issues, summarize notes, and manage CRM workflows without switching apps. Customers can further connect thousands of additional applications using Model Context Protocol (MCP) and OpenAPI connectors. These features are available in all AWS Regions where Quick is offered.

🤖 Amazon Quick now supports invoking specialized third-party agents (Box, Canva, PagerDuty) and expands its built-in actions library with integrations for GitHub, Notion, Canva, Box, Linear, Hugging Face, Monday.com, HubSpot, and Intercom. Users can run agentic tasks—pull incident insights, generate presentations, or query documents—directly from a single workspace. Quick also continues to support custom MCP and OpenAPI connectors for broader application connectivity. These features are available in all regions where Amazon Quick is offered.

🚀 Amazon has expanded availability of Amazon EC2 M8i instances to the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Malaysia) regions. Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors exclusive to AWS, the M8i offers up to 15% better price-performance and 2.5x higher memory bandwidth than prior Intel-based instances. AWS reports up to 20% better performance versus M7i, with workload-specific gains—up to 30% for PostgreSQL, 60% for NGINX, and 40% for deep learning recommendation models. The SAP-certified family includes 13 sizes, two bare-metal options and a new 96xlarge for very large workloads.

🚀 AWS Lambda now supports creating serverless applications using .NET 10 as both a managed runtime and a container base image, with AWS automatically applying updates to the managed runtime and base image as they become available. .NET 10 is a long-term support release with security and bug fix coverage through November 2028, and it brings features such as file-based apps. The release also adds support for Lambda Managed Instances, enabling functions to run on Amazon EC2 while retaining serverless operational simplicity, and Powertools for AWS Lambda (.NET) supports the new runtime. The runtime is available in all Regions, including AWS GovCloud (US) and China, and you can deploy using the Lambda console, AWS CLI, AWS SAM, AWS CDK, and CloudFormation.

🛡️ AWS has introduced a simplified onboarding Quickstart for AWS Client VPN that reduces endpoint setup to three required inputs: IPv4 CIDR, server certificate ARN, and subnet selection. The Quickstart provides pre-defined default configurations so teams can create endpoints quickly and immediately download the client configuration to connect. It is offered alongside the existing Standard Setup and is suggested automatically when a VPC is created. The workflow is available at no additional cost in Regions where Client VPN is generally available.

🌐 AWS now enables IPv6 connectivity to IAM Identity Center via newly introduced dual‑stack endpoints. Clients can connect using IPv6, IPv4, or dual‑stack, while existing IPv4-only endpoints remain available for backward compatibility. Dual‑stack endpoints resolve to an IPv4 or IPv6 address based on the client and network, helping organizations meet IPv6 compliance and reduce NAT complexity. Support is available in all Regions where the service operates, except AWS GovCloud (US) and Taipei.

☁️Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) now supports creating Apache Airflow 2.11 environments and offers support for Python 3.12. Airflow 2.11 introduces trigger-based scheduling for delta intervals and consistent metric reporting in milliseconds to help prepare for an upgrade to Airflow 3. You can launch new 2.11 environments from the AWS Management Console in all currently supported MWAA regions.

🚀 Starting today, Amazon EC2 C8i and C8i‑flex instances are available in Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Powered by AWS-exclusive custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, these instances deliver up to 15% better price‑performance and 2.5x higher memory bandwidth compared with prior Intel-based instances. AWS reports up to 20% higher general performance versus the C7i family, with workload-specific gains — up to 60% for NGINX, 40% for deep learning recommendation models, and 35% for Memcached. C8i‑flex targets common sizes (large to 16xlarge) for cost-efficient compute, while C8i offers 13 sizes including two bare-metal and a new 96xlarge for memory‑intensive or continuous high‑CPU workloads.

🔍 Google Cloud has enhanced Gemini CLI telemetry with pre-configured Google Cloud Monitoring dashboards that provide immediate visibility into adoption, usage patterns, and performance. By exporting data via OpenTelemetry, teams can use out-of-the-box visualizations or analyze raw logs and metrics to build custom views. Setup is simplified through direct GCP exporters and a three-step flow—project ID, authentication and IAM roles, and updating .gemini/settings.json—so telemetry can be live quickly.

📣 OpenAI is reportedly preparing to test ads within ChatGPT, beginning with internal trials limited to employees. Reports say the company is evaluating multiple ad formats — including sponsored content prioritized in AI answers and sidebar placements — while details on how ads would affect paid plans like Go, Plus, and Pro remain unclear. OpenAI has confirmed it is exploring ads and says any approach would be designed to respect users' trust, though the timeline and implementation remain unspecified.

🤖 OpenAI has begun rolling out a new variant of its coding agent, labeled GPT-5.2-Codex-Max, to a subset of paying users who have spotted the model identifier when querying Codex. The release follows December’s introduction of Codex with GPT-5.2 and appears to deliver enhanced long-task persistence, repository context compaction, improved tool reliability, better Windows workflow handling, and stronger vision for interpreting screenshots, UI bugs, and diagrams. Given the prior uplift seen with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, this Max tier is expected to provide another notable performance bump, and OpenAI may publish formal details in the coming days.

📭 Microsoft has canceled plans to impose a new daily limit of 2,000 external recipients on Exchange Online bulk senders after receiving negative customer feedback. The External Recipient Rate (ERR) cap was announced in April 2024 and was scheduled to begin in January 2025 with phased enforcement through late 2025. Microsoft said it will pursue "smarter, more adaptive approaches" to balance security and usability, while existing recipient limits remain unchanged.