Welcome to above the clouds
AWS – Announcing AWS Neuron SDK 2.27.0
Today, AWS announces Neuron SDK 2.27.0, introducing support for Trainium3 UltraServer with expanded open source components. Neuron also introduces the Neuron Explorer tools suite, Enhanced NKI with open source NKI Compiler built on MLIR (private beta), the NKI Library of optimized kernels, native PyTorch support through TorchNeuron (private beta), and Neuron DRA for Kubernetes-native resource […]
AWS – AWS Wickr launches admin APIs for programmatic network management at scale
AWS Wickr now provides a suite of admin APIs that empower administrators to programmatically manage secure communication networks at scale. These APIs enable you to automate critical administrative workflows including user lifecycle management, network configuration, and security group administration. With user lifecycle management APIs, you can automatically create users and assign security groups when employees […]
GCP – The Year in Google Cloud — 2025
In the AI era, when one year can feel like 10, you’re forgiven for forgetting what happened last month, much less what happened all the way back in January. To jog your memory, we pulled the readership data for top product and company news of 2025. And because we publish a lot of great thought […]
GCP – New in Looker: self-service Explores, tabbed dashboards, and custom themes
Data teams seem to be constantly balancing the need for governed, trusted metrics with business needs for agility and ad-hoc analysis. To help bridge the gap between managed reporting and rapid data exploration, we are introducing several new features in Looker, to expand users’ self-service capabilities. These updates allow individuals to analyze local data alongside […]
GCP – Cloud CISO Perspectives: 2025 in review: Cloud security basics and evolving AI
Welcome to the second Cloud CISO Perspectives for December 2025. Today, Google Cloud’s Nick Godfrey, senior director, and Anton Chuvakin, security advisor, look back at the year that was. As with all Cloud CISO Perspectives, the contents of this newsletter are posted to the Google Cloud blog. If you’re reading this on the website and […]
AWS – Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports SOCI indexing for faster container startup times
Today, AWS announces SOCI (Seekable Open Container Initiative) indexing support for Amazon SageMaker Studio, reducing container startup times by 30-50% when using custom images. Amazon SageMaker Studio is a fully integrated, browser-based environment for end-to-end machine learning development. SageMaker Studio provides pre-built container images for popular ML frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Scikit-learn that enable […]
AWS – Amazon Application Recovery Controller region switch now supports three new capabilities
Amazon Application Recovery Controller (ARC) Region switch allows you to orchestrate the specific steps to switch your multi-Region applications to operate out of another AWS Region and achieve a bounded recovery time in the event of a Regional impairment to your applications. Region switch saves hours of engineering effort and eliminates the operational overhead previously […]
AWS – AWS Private CA OCSP now available in China and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions
AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS Private CA) now supports Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) in China and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. AWS Private CA is a fully managed certificate authority service that makes it easy to create and manage private certificates for your organization without the operational overhead of running your own CA infrastructure. OCSP […]
AWS – Amazon RDS enhances observability for snapshot exports to Amazon S3
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now offers enhanced observability for your snapshot exports to Amazon S3, providing detailed insights into export progress, failures, and performance for each task. These notifications enable you to monitor your exports with greater granularity and enables more predictability. With snapshot export to S3, you can export data from your RDS […]
GCP – Agent Factory Recap: Supercharging Agents on GKE with Agent Sandbox and Pod Snapshots
In the latest episode of the Agent Factory, Mofi Rahman and I had the pleasure of hosting, Brandon Royal, the PM working on agentic workloads on GKE. We dove deep into the critical questions around the nuances of choosing the right agent runtime, the power of GKE for agents, and the essential security measures needed […]