Welcome to above the clouds
GCP – Google I/O 2025: Innovation that drives mission impact
At Google I/O 2025 we unveiled a suite of groundbreaking AI advancements, signaling a new frontier in how technology will empower organizations everywhere. The new era of innovation is here. Over the two day event, Google showcased everything from industry leading reasoning models to AI-assistants in your glasses. For public sector agencies, these innovations promise […]
AWS – Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now supports write-back mode for ONTAP FlexCache volumes
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, a service that provides fully managed shared storage built on NetApp’s popular ONTAP file system, now supports write-back mode for ONTAP FlexCache volumes. Write-back mode is a new ONTAP capability that helps you achieve faster performance for your write-intensive workloads that are distributed across multiple AWS Regions and on-premises file […]
AWS – AWS Network Firewall Adds Support for Multiple VPC Endpoints
AWS Network Firewall now supports configuring multiple VPC endpoints for a single firewall. This new capability gives you more options to scale your Network Firewall deployment across multiple Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), using a centralized security policy. AWS Network Firewall is a managed, cloud-native firewall service that makes it easy to deploy essential network […]
AWS – Cost Optimization Hub now supports Savings Plans and reservations preferences
Cost Optimization Hub, a feature within the Billing and Cost Management Console, now allows you to configure preferred Savings Plans and reservation term and payment options preferences, so you can see your resulting recommendations and savings potential based on your preferred commitments. Cost Optimization Hub allows you to easily identify, filter, and aggregate AWS cost […]
AWS – Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Announces 99.99% Service Level Agreement
Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) announces an updated Service Level Agreement (SLA), promising a 99.99% availability when using a Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) configuration. Previously, Amazon DocumentDB offered a 99.9% SLA. Now, Amazon DocumentDB has updated the SLA to 99.99%, increasing our commitment to service availability. Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fully managed native […]
AWS – AWS Backup enhances Amazon EC2 restores with custom volume configuration support
AWS Backup now offers enhanced Amazon EC2 restore capability that allows you to customize volume configurations during the restoration process. This new feature enables users to specify custom settings for all the attached Amazon EBS volumes to an EC2 AMI, including volume type, size, IOPS, AWS KMS encryption keys and others, directly through AWS Backup. […]
AWS – Amazon Neptune announces MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server
Today, AWS announces the launch of the Amazon Neptune MCP Server, now available in the AWS MCP open-source repository. This new server makes it easier for developers and AI assistants to interact with Amazon Neptune, enabling seamless integration of graph queries into generative AI workflows. Part of AWS’s growing suite of Model Context Protocol (MCP) […]
AWS – Amazon EC2 C8gd, M8gd, and R8gd instances are now available Europe (Spain) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C8gd instances, M8gd instances, and R8gd instances with up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage are now available in AWS Regions Europe (Spain) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). These instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors, delivering up to 30% better performance over Graviton3-based instances. They have […]
AWS – Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics Adds Java Runtime for Lightweight API Monitoring
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports the Java programming language for authoring canaries, enabling developers to write monitoring scripts using the Java 21 runtime environment. This new runtime, syn-java-1.0, allows customers to leverage existing Java expertise to continuously monitor the availability and performance of their services and applications using CloudWatch Synthetics. With Java support, customers can […]
GCP – Google Cloud’s open lakehouse: Architected for AI, open data, and unrivaled performance
The Google Data Cloud is a uniquely integrated platform built on Google’s planet-scale infrastructure, infused with AI, and features an open lakehouse architecture for multimodal data. Already, organizations like Snap Inc. credit Google’s Data Cloud and open lakehouse architecture with empowering their data engineers and data scientists to do more with their data assets. “Partnering […]