Welcome to above the clouds

AWS – Amazon EC2 M7i-flex 12xlarge and 16xlarge instances are now available in AWS Europe (London) Region
Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M7i-flex 12xlarge and 16xlarge instances powered by custom 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids) are available in Europe (London) region. The new sizes expand the EC2 Flex portfolio, providing additional compute options to scale-up existing workloads or run larger sized applications that need additional […]

AWS – AWS Backup launches Multi-party approval support for logically air-gapped vaults
AWS Backup announces support for Multi-party approval in AWS Organizations for logically air-gapped vaults to enhance data recovery. This new AWS Backup feature enables customers to authorize access to backups for approved accounts in logically air-gapped vaults, even when the owning account becomes inaccessible due to inadvertent or malicious events. Multi-party approval is a new […]

AWS – Express.js developers can now add authorization in minutes with Amazon Verified Permissions
Today, AWS announces the release of @verifiedpermissions/authorization-clients-js, an open source package that enables developers to implement authorization in their Express.js web application APIs in minutes. This simplifies development and improves application security by significantly reducing the custom authorization code compared to traditional approaches where authorization logic was embedded into the application. With this package, developers […]

AWS – AWS WAF reduces web application security configuration steps and provides expert-level protection
Today, AWS announces general availability of the AWS WAF simplified console experience that reduces web application security configuration steps by up to 80% and provides expert-level protection to help you optimize application security. AWS WAF helps protect web applications and APIs against common web exploits and bots that could affect availability, compromise security, or consume […]

GCP – Gemini momentum continues with launch of 2.5 Flash-Lite and general availability of 2.5 Flash and Pro on Vertex AI
The momentum of the Gemini 2.5 era continues to build. Following our recent announcements, we’re empowering enterprise builders and developers with even greater access to the intelligence, and flexibility of our most capable models yet, directly within Vertex AI, our unified platform for enterprise-scale AI development. The significant updates announced today are designed to help […]

GCP – Graduating the Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First in Europe & Israel
Today, we’re incredibly proud to announce the graduation of the latest cohort from the Google for Startups Accelerator: AI First from Europe & Israel! This milestone marks the culmination of an intensive three-months journey for these 14 innovative startups, who’ve dedicated themselves to growing their businesses and pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence. The hybrid […]

GCP – Spanner’s enduring impact: Celebrating the 2025 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award
Earlier this year, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data (ACM SIGMOD) announced that Spanner, Google’s globally distributed database, was awarded the 2025 SIGMOD Systems Award. The SIGMOD Systems Award specifically honors systems whose technical contributions have profoundly impacted the theory or practice of large-scale data management. On behalf of […]

GCP – GKE workload scheduling: Strategies for when resources get tight
As a customer of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), you’ve selected a container runtime with a high degree of managed operations, encompassing everything from automatic upgrades to effortless node management. This inherent efficiency allows you to focus more on your applications, and less on the underlying infrastructure. In an ideal world, this streamlined experience, coupled with […]

AWS – Introducing AWS Security Hub for risk prioritization and response at scale (Preview)
AWS announces an enhanced AWS Security Hub to prioritize your critical security issues and help respond at scale to reduce security risks, improve your team’s productivity, and protect your cloud environment. It detects critical issues by correlating and enriching security signals, for example, from threat detection and vulnerability management. This enables you to quickly surface […]
AWS – AWS Shield introduces network security director (preview)
Today, AWS Shield announces the preview of network security director, a new capability that provides visibility into the AWS resources in your network, identifies missing or misconfigured network security services, and recommends remediation steps. As threats continue to evolve, AWS Shield has expanded its capabilities beyond DDoS protection to help you easily identify resources requiring […]