All news with #product update tag

⚙️ AWS Step Functions now expands Distributed Map input sources and adds visibility metrics. Distributed Map can now iterate S3 objects via S3ListObjectsV2, read AWS Athena data manifests and Parquet files directly, and extract arrays from JSON stored in S3 or passed as state input. New observability metrics — Approximate Open Map Runs Count, Open Map Run Limit, and Approximate Map Runs Backlog Size — provide operational insight. These features are available in all commercial AWS Regions; enable Distributed Map mode in the Step Functions console and consult the developer guide for examples.

🚀 AWS has expanded availability of OpenAI open weight models on AWS Bedrock to eight additional AWS Regions worldwide. The update brings the models to US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Mumbai), Europe (Stockholm, Ireland, London, Milan) and South America (São Paulo), alongside existing US West (Oregon) support. This broader footprint aims to lower latency, improve model performance and help customers meet data residency requirements. To get started, use the Amazon Bedrock console or consult the documentation.

📝 Microsoft is adding free AI-powered text features to Notepad on Copilot+ PCs running Windows 11, rolling out now to Windows Insiders in the Canary and Dev channels on Notepad version 11.2508.28.0. The new Summarize, Write, and Rewrite tools were previously part of Microsoft 365 subscriptions but are available without an extra subscription on Copilot+ devices. Features support English only; subscribers can switch between local and cloud models while unsigned users use the local model. Users may disable the AI options in settings or uninstall the updated Notepad to use classic notepad.exe. Paint and Snipping Tool also received recent updates.

🛠️ Amazon SageMaker HyperPod now supports managed node autoscaling using Karpenter, enabling automated cluster scaling for both inference and training workloads. This managed capability removes the operational burden of installing and maintaining autoscaling infrastructure while providing integrated resilience and fault tolerance. Customers gain just-in-time GPU provisioning, scale-to-zero during low demand, workload-aware instance selection, and cost reductions through intelligent consolidation.

🌐 AWS Step Functions now supports IPv6 via new dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 endpoints, enabling customers to send IPv6 traffic directly to the service. The enhancement preserves backwards compatibility with existing IPv4 endpoints and enables PrivateLink interface VPC endpoint connectivity so workloads can access Step Functions privately without traversing the public internet. IPv6 support is generally available in several US commercial and GovCloud regions.

🔍 Amazon has added disk-optimized vector storage to OpenSearch Serverless, offering a lower-cost alternative to memory-optimized vectors while maintaining equivalent accuracy and recall. The disk-optimized option may introduce slightly higher latency, so it is best suited for semantic search, recommendation systems, and other AI search scenarios that do not require sub-millisecond responses. As a fully managed service, OpenSearch Serverless continues to automatically scale compute capacity (measured in OCUs) to match workload demands.

🌐 Amazon EVS now supports VMware HCX migrations over the public internet using Elastic IP Addresses (EIPs) to provide stable endpoints and faster setup. This option supplements existing private connectivity methods such as AWS Direct Connect and VPN, enabling secure layer‑2 network stretch and workload migration when private links are unavailable. Public HCX connectivity is available in all AWS Regions where EVS is offered and can be a cost‑effective alternative for workloads that do not require private connection performance.

🔒 AWS Network Firewall now delivers expanded console monitoring and enhanced TLS inspection capabilities to improve outbound security. The monitoring dashboard adds visibility into traffic to AWS services such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and AWS Backup, including traffic sent over PrivateLink, and surfaces top source and destination IPs by packets and bytes. Customers can filter views by IP and protocol for targeted analysis. A new session holding feature for TLS Inspection prevents TCP/TLS establishment from reaching servers until SNI-based rules are evaluated, strengthening controls against malicious endpoints.

🔧 Amazon Web Services has added native support for EC2 Capacity Blocks in the Parallel Computing Service (PCS), enabling use of reserved EC2 instances directly within PCS Slurm clusters. This integration lets Capacity Blocks be associated with PCS compute node groups via an EC2 Launch Template, simplifying capacity planning for GPU‑based ML workloads. The feature is available in all Regions where both services are offered and aims to improve availability and predictability for cutting‑edge GPU jobs.

📩 AWS End User Messaging SMS now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling customers to deploy and manage SMS resources using templates. Phone numbers, sender IDs, configuration sets, protection configurations, opt-out lists, resource policies, and phone pools can be provisioned and managed declaratively alongside other AWS resources. This support is available in all Regions where End User Messaging is offered, simplifying deployments and delivery pipelines.

🔒 Falcon for IT introduces Risk-based Patching to unite security and IT teams within the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. By combining Falcon Exposure Management telemetry, AI-powered patch scheduling, Patch Safety Scores, and sensor intelligence, the feature prioritizes vulnerabilities by real-world exploitability and reduces time to remediation. Ring-based deployments, smart rollout coordination, and pre-deployment safety checks help avoid system-breaking updates while accelerating fixes. Delivered through the existing lightweight Falcon agent, it replaces manual handoffs with a single, unified workflow.

🔐 AWS introduces Multi-Region keys for AWS Payment Cryptography, a built-in option to automatically synchronize exportable symmetric payment keys from a primary Region to one or more replica Regions. You can choose account-level defaults or per-key replication targets, keep consistent key IDs across Regions, and rely on asynchronous replication with monitoring via new CloudTrail events. The feature improves availability and disaster recovery for global payment operations while preserving granular control over replication.

💬 Microsoft is rolling out Copilot Chat to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote for eligible Microsoft 365 business customers. Unlike Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat is web-grounded and uses only web data by default, though it is content-aware and tailors responses to the file you have open. Microsoft says the feature is included at no additional cost for qualifying licenses, and admins can opt out of automatic installs; organizations can purchase a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to unlock full access to organizational data.

🔒Amazon EKS now offers a curated catalog of community add-ons for AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The catalog includes popular open-source components such as metrics-server, kube-state-metrics, cert-manager, prometheus-node-exporter, fluent-bit, and external-dns, all packaged, scanned, and validated for compatibility by EKS. Container images are hosted in an EKS-owned private ECR repository, and you can install and manage add-ons via the EKS Console, API, CLI, eksctl, or infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation.

🚀 Amazon Web Services has announced the availability of high-performance, storage-optimized EC2 I7i instances in the South America (São Paulo) and Canada West (Calgary) regions. Powered by 5th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 3rd-generation AWS Nitro SSDs, these instances deliver up to 23% better compute and improved price performance versus I4i. I7i offers up to 45TB NVMe, lower latency, and enhanced real-time storage performance, with support for bare-metal sizes and up to 100Gbps networking for I/O-intensive, latency-sensitive workloads.

🔒 Amazon S3 now supports conditional deletes in S3 general purpose buckets. You can include an HTTP If-Match header with an object's ETag when calling DeleteObject or DeleteObjects; S3 will only delete the object if the provided ETag matches, reducing accidental removals in high-concurrency, multi-writer environments. Administrators can also enforce conditional deletes using the s3:if-match bucket policy condition. The capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions and accessible via the API, SDKs, and CLI.

📢 At FabCon Vienna, Microsoft unveiled a broad set of Microsoft Fabric enhancements to accelerate data-rich agents and enterprise adoption. Key updates include expanded OneLake shortcuts and mirroring (preview for Oracle and BigQuery), a preview Graph database and Maps for geospatial context, developer tooling (MCP, Extensibility Toolkit, CI/CD) and strengthened security controls like Azure Private Link and customer-managed keys. These features focus on zero-copy data access, governance, and operational scalability for mission-critical workloads.

🔧 Amazon OpenSearch Service announced support for Derived Source, an opt-in feature that lets you omit persisting the document _source and reconstruct it dynamically when needed. The capability, available with OpenSearch 3.1, reduces domain storage by skipping stored _source fields while still supporting search, get, mget, reindex, and update operations. Enable Derived Source at index creation using composite index settings.

⚡ OpenSearch introduces the Star-Tree Index, an opt-in index type that pre-aggregates data at ingestion to enable sub-second responses for frequent high-cardinality and multi-dimensional aggregations such as terms, histogram, and range. The feature is designed for real-time analytics and requires no query syntax changes; OpenSearch automatically routes supported queries to the optimized path. Early benchmarks indicate markedly faster aggregation performance on large datasets with minimal impact to ingestion throughput. Available in regions that support OpenSearch 3.1 and enabled at index creation via composite index settings.

📦 Amazon S3 Batch Operations now allows users to target all objects within an S3 bucket, or refine selection by prefix, suffix, creation date, or storage class directly from the AWS Management Console. Instead of providing a manifest, customers can specify these filters when creating a job and S3 will apply the chosen operation to every matching object and produce a detailed completion report. Typical use cases include copying between buckets, restoring archived data from Glacier classes, and computing checksums for datasets. The capability is available in all AWS Regions and can also be accessed via the AWS CLI or SDK.