Welcome to above the clouds

AWS – Amazon SageMaker HyperPod announces health monitoring agent support for Slurm clusters
Today, Amazon SageMaker HyperPod announces the general availability of the health monitoring agent for Slurm clusters. SageMaker HyperPod helps you provision resilient clusters for running machine learning (ML) workloads and developing state-of-the-art models such as large language models (LLMs), diffusion models, and foundation models (FMs). The health monitoring agent performs passive, background health checks of […]

GCP – Cloud CISO Perspectives: APAC security leaders speak out on AI and key topics
Welcome to the first Cloud CISO Perspectives for September 2025. Today, Daryl Pereira and Hui Meng Foo, from our Office of the CISO’s Asia-Pacific office, share insights on AI from security leaders who attended our recent Google Cloud CISO Community event in Singapore. As with all Cloud CISO Perspectives, the contents of this newsletter are […]

AWS – Amazon Connect Cases now supports date range filters in the case list view
Amazon Connect Cases now supports filtering by date ranges in the case list view, enabling contact center managers and agents to efficiently manage their case workloads. For example, users can filter cases created in the last 30 days for monthly reporting, view cases modified in the last 24 hours to monitor recent activity, or surface […]

AWS – Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports OpenSearch version 3.1
You can now run OpenSearch version 3.1 in Amazon OpenSearch Service. OpenSearch 3.1 introduces several improvements in areas like search relevance and performance, and introduces features that simplify development of vector-driven applications for generative AI workloads. This launch incorporates Lucene 10 that enables optimized vector field indexing resulting in faster indexing times and reduced index […]

AWS – Announcing on-demand deployment for custom Meta Llama models in Amazon Bedrock
Starting today, customers can use the on-demand deployment option in Amazon Bedrock for their Meta Llama 3.3 models that have been fine-tuned or distilled in Bedrock. Models customized on or after September 15, 2025 will be eligible. This enables Bedrock customers to reduce costs by processing requests in real time without requiring pre-provisioned compute resources. […]

AWS – AWS Organizations now provides account state information for member accounts
AWS Organizations provides a new State field in the AWS Organizations Console and APIs (DescribeAccount, ListAccounts, and ListAccountsForParent) to enhance AWS account lifecycle visibility. With this launch, the account state, a new State field replaced the existing account status, Status field in the AWS Organizations Console, however both Status and State fields will remain available […]

GCP – Supercharge ML performance on xPUs with the new XProf profiler and Cloud Diagnostics XProf library
Are you spending more time debugging ML model performance than you are building? You’re not alone. In today’s fast-paced AI landscape, optimizing models is a complex challenge, from navigating new model architectures to dealing with the ever-changing hardware and software stacks. Even at Google, where we optimize models for products like Gemini, Search, and YouTube, […]

AWS – Amazon ECS Service Connect adds support for cross-account workloads
Amazon ECS Service Connect now supports seamless communication between services residing in different AWS accounts through integration with AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM). This enhancement simplifies resource sharing, reduces duplication, and promotes consistent service-to-service communication across environments for organizations with multi-account architectures. Amazon ECS Service Connect leverages AWS Cloud Map namespaces for storing information […]

AWS – AWS Direct Connect support for 4-byte Autonomous System numbers for Virtual interfaces
AWS Direct Connect now supports 4-byte Autonomous System (AS) numbers for virtual interfaces. Direct Connect uses the standard Border Gateway Protocol to provide customers with private connectivity to the AWS global network. However, customers with complex, multi-tenant network topologies or who need to maintain consistent AS numbering across their entire network can run into challenges […]
GCP – AlloyDB on Axion-powered C4A instances is generally available
At Google Cloud Next ’25, we announced the preview of AlloyDB on C4A virtual machines, powered by Google Axion processors, our custom Arm-based CPUs. Today, we’re glad to announce that C4A virtual machines are generally available! For transactional workloads, leveraging C4A, AlloyDB provides nearly 50% better price-performance compared to N series machines for transactional workloads, […]