Cloud · Top stories
AWS European Sovereign Cloud Demonstrates Independent Operation in EU-Only Exercise
AWS conducted an exercise on October 24, 2026, demonstrating that its European Sovereign Cloud can operate without relying on infrastructure outside the European Union. During the exercise, global network backbones and operational data transfer systems were disconnected, with traffic rerouted over the public internet, while customer workloads and data access remained unaffected. This exercise validates the cloud's independence and its commitment to digital sovereignty for EU customers.
National Grid to build UK's largest substation in Teesside for AI datacentre
National Grid purchased 29.5 hectares of land in Teesside to build Britain's largest electricity substation, which will supply power to a planned AI datacentre. This development aims to provide up to 3.2GW of capacity, enabling the UK to compete for AI infrastructure investments and store sensitive data domestically.
AWS Cloud Capacity Largely Sold Out Through 2027, On-Demand Headroom Reserved
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy stated that AWS's large committed cloud capacity is largely sold out through 2027, with portions of 2028 also allocated, while maintaining headroom for On Demand, EC2, and Bedrock services. This indicates high demand for long-term cloud resource commitments, particularly for GPU instances, though some analysts suggest the 'sold out' claim may not apply to typical day-to-day enterprise allocations.
LocalStack Azure Emulator Enters Public Preview, Lacks Security Enforcement
LocalStack launched its Azure emulator into public preview, offering a free, self-serve tool for local Azure development and testing. While it supports various Azure services and templates, the emulator currently stores but does not enforce many security and networking configurations, impacting its fidelity for certain testing scenarios.
GitHub Actions, Pages, and Webhooks Experienced Degraded Performance
GitHub reported and resolved an incident causing degraded performance for Actions workflows, Pages deployments, and webhook events. The issue also affected code search and live updates, but services have since recovered.
Google Cloud Spend Caps Now Generally Available with API, Real-time Visibility, and Automated Resets
Google Cloud has made spend caps on Cloud Budgets generally available, introducing an API for programmatic management, real-time cost visibility in reports, and automated monthly resets. These updates allow users to set financial boundaries for eligible services, monitor spending more closely, and automate the lifting of caps without manual intervention.
Cloudflare Services for Private Origins Now Generally Available
Cloudflare has made its services for private origins generally available, allowing users to proxy DNS records to private IPs and access Cloudflare's application services. This enables WAF, caching, bot management, and Workers to function for internal APIs and tools without exposing them to the public internet, addressing a previous gap in security and control for private applications.
Netflix details GPU reliability platform for large-scale AI training and inference
Netflix developed a reliability platform for its large-scale GPU training and inference workloads, addressing hardware failures in distributed AI jobs. The platform uses layered health checks, automated remediation, and fault-tolerant training to maintain job continuity. This approach resulted in over 99.95% GPU-node availability and increased job success from 98% to over 99.5%.
Netflix Titus Adds Single-Tenant VM Isolation for Containers for Performance-Critical Workloads
Netflix has introduced a single-tenant mode for its Titus container platform, allowing specific tasks to run in isolation on dedicated EC2 instances. This change addresses performance interference issues in multi-tenant environments for stateful, high-throughput streaming workloads, while maintaining the same API and deployment path for application teams.
Microsoft Retires Azure Deployment Environments and Dev Box with No Direct Replacements
Microsoft is discontinuing Azure Deployment Environments by February 2027 and Microsoft Dev Box by September 2028. Azure Deployment Environments will have no direct successor, with Microsoft advising customers to use infrastructure-as-code tools, while Dev Box users are directed to Windows 365, which is not an equivalent service. This move removes a self-service developer environment offering, shifting the responsibility for catalog and portal management back to customers or third-party solutions.
EU Plans First Undersea Internet Cable Directly Connecting Europe to Greenland
The European Union is planning the Pan-Arctic Cable, the first direct undersea internet link between Europe and Greenland, with potential extensions to Canada and Asia. This initiative aims to establish a sovereign and secure connection, bypassing existing routes and reflecting geopolitical shifts and increased risks in current communication pathways.
AWS Ray Train DLCs and EFA on EKS simplify distributed PyTorch training
AWS provides Ray Train Deep Learning Containers (DLCs) that integrate necessary components for distributed PyTorch training on Amazon EKS, including CUDA, PyTorch, NCCL, EFA, and the AWS OFI NCCL plugin. This offering simplifies the setup and maintenance of distributed training environments by providing pre-built and tested container images, removing the need for users to manage complex dependencies.
Cloud SQL for MySQL introduces blue-green deployments for near-zero downtime upgrades
Google Cloud SQL for MySQL now offers fully managed blue-green deployments in preview. This feature allows major version upgrades and configuration updates with minimal downtime by synchronizing a parallel environment for testing and a seamless cutover.
Google partners with Oracle to offer TPUs outside its own cloud infrastructure
Google will allow Oracle to offer its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to customers, marking the first time these custom AI chips are available outside Google's cloud. This move expands Google's AI chip market reach beyond its own infrastructure, aiming to compete more directly with Nvidia.
FCC Approves Amazon Leo's Acquisition of Globalstar for Direct-to-Device Services
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved Amazon Leo's $11.5 billion acquisition of mobile-satellite operator Globalstar. This deal expands Amazon Leo's satellite network capabilities, enabling direct-to-device services and enhancing data coverage, particularly in underserved areas.
Cloudflare releases Quicksilver as Workers KV Instant, offering faster reads with new limits
Cloudflare has made its internal Quicksilver key-value store available to customers as Workers KV Instant, a new mode for Workers KV. This new mode offers significantly faster read times, with 99th percentile reads resolving in 1.62 ms, compared to 287 ms for classic KV. However, it introduces new limitations on storage size, key-value pairs, write rates, and higher costs for writes and storage.
AWS Network Firewall Gains Route 53 Resolved IP Validation for Enhanced Traffic Filtering
AWS Network Firewall now integrates with Amazon Route 53 Resolver to validate resolved IP addresses, allowing domain-based filtering for non-web traffic and preventing SNI manipulation without TLS inspection. This feature addresses the challenge of filtering traffic for protocols that do not carry domain names, where firewall rules previously relied on IP addresses that change over time.
VMware Solution on Google Cloud Reaches General Availability, Offering Self-Managed VCF
Google Cloud announced the general availability of the VMware solution on Google Cloud, providing customers with direct administrative control over VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on dedicated Google Cloud bare metal. This new self-managed option complements Google's existing managed service, allowing organizations to maintain their operational practices and leverage Broadcom's latest VCF innovations.
AWS Completes Cloud High Security Assessment for 172 Services in Canada
AWS is the first cloud service provider to complete the Cloud High security assessment in Canada, covering 172 services and features. This achievement allows AWS to host Canadian government and commercial workloads requiring the highest security standards.
Uber Introduces Normalized Compute Units for Consistent CPU Allocation Across Heterogeneous Fleet
Uber implemented Normalized Compute Units (NCUs) within its Odin orchestration platform to standardize CPU allocation for stateful workloads across its diverse server infrastructure. This system accounts for varying processor performance, ensuring consistent compute capacity regardless of the underlying hardware and preventing resource waste or under-provisioning.
Crypto Finance Group Pilots Swiss Franc Tokenized Transfers on Google Cloud Universal Ledger
Crypto Finance Group completed a pilot program enabling instant Swiss Franc account-to-account transfers between two Swiss banks using Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL). This initiative demonstrates how regulated financial institutions can issue and settle tokenized deposits on a blockchain infrastructure, addressing the need for faster, 24/7 programmable payments within commercial banking while maintaining regulatory compliance.
Meta Details AI Networking Innovations at OCP Global Summit 2026
Meta presented its latest networking advancements at the 2026 OCP Global Summit, including liquid-cooled network racks, a multi-plane scale-out fabric, and a petabit-scale super-spine. These innovations support Meta's AI models and gigawatt-scale Prometheus cluster, addressing the increasing demands of AI infrastructure.
SLB Releases Agile Reservoir Modeling (ARM) on Azure for Subsurface Uncertainty Analysis
SLB has made its Agile Reservoir Modeling (ARM) solution generally available, integrated with Azure Data Manager for Energy (ADME). This co-engineered cloud-scale solution aims to improve reservoir uncertainty analysis for drilling campaigns by connecting ensemble-centric reservoir modeling with Azure's high-performance computing and scalable storage.
Cloudflare Reduces Memory Footprint by 100 TB with Consistent Hashing Optimization
Cloudflare optimized its Rust implementation of consistent hashing in pingora-ketama, reducing the memory footprint of its internal load-balancing service by over 100 TB. This was achieved by compacting hash-ring entries and statistically analyzing hash distribution to decrease the number of hashes per backend by approximately 90% while maintaining load-balancing accuracy.
Cloudflare launches Origin Range Requests for efficient large file delivery
Cloudflare released Origin Range Requests, a new self-service feature that optimizes how its CDN handles HTTP range requests for large files. This update reduces wasted bandwidth and disk operations by dynamically adjusting range sizes, improving performance for services like R2 object storage.
TikTok U.S. Seeks Multiple Gigawatts of Computing Capacity for AI Workloads
TikTok's U.S. entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, is seeking to secure four gigawatts of computing capacity by the early 2030s. This initiative is driven by the increasing demands of artificial intelligence workloads and the company's plans for a flagship B2B AI product.
CSIRO Develops Serverless Beacon on AWS for Genomic Variant Querying
CSIRO developed Serverless Beacon (sBeacon), a serverless architecture on AWS that queries genomic variant data directly from Amazon S3 without requiring data copies. This system uses AWS Lambda, Amazon Athena, and Amazon DynamoDB to implement the GA4GH Beacon standard, enabling efficient genomic queries across large datasets while keeping data in its original compressed format.
Amazon scraps plans for four new data centers in Northern Virginia due to local opposition
Amazon will not build four new data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia, on the former George Washington University campus. The decision follows significant community pushback regarding noise and power consumption, leading Amazon to repurpose the land for mixed-use development and donate a portion to the county.
Microsoft Provides Fix for Broken Exchange Online EWS Apps After API Disablement
Microsoft has issued guidance for IT administrators to re-enable the retired Exchange Web Services (EWS) API in Exchange Online, addressing issues with EWS-dependent applications that have ceased functioning. This temporary re-enablement allows apps like Outlook add-ins and Apple Mail to work again, but Microsoft urges developers to migrate to the Microsoft Graph API before EWS is permanently disabled in April 2027.
Microsoft withdraws from UK AI datacentre project in Essex due to power supply issues
Microsoft has pulled out of a planned AI datacentre project in Loughton, Essex, developed by Nscale, citing concerns over power supply availability. This withdrawal removes the anchor tenant from what was intended to be the UK's largest AI datacentre, potentially impacting Nscale's planned Wall Street flotation.
Texas Data Centers Could Reverse Decades of Air Quality Gains by 2030
New research from the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) indicates that the rapid expansion of data centers in Texas, particularly those supporting generative AI, could triple soot pollution and increase smog-forming NOx emissions by 136% within five years. This increase would reverse air quality improvements made since the early 2000s, depending on how these facilities source their electricity.
Netflix Develops Workload Attestation for AWS EMR Spark Jobs to Bridge IAM and Internal PKI
Netflix created a workload attestation mechanism that allows Apache Spark jobs on Amazon EMR to exchange their AWS execution identity for an internal workload identity. This system connects AWS IAM with Netflix's Metatron PKI, enabling managed compute workloads to authenticate to internal services without manual credential injection.
Google Public Sector expands partner investments for government and education adoption
Google Public Sector announced increased investments and new initiatives for its partners to drive adoption of Google technologies, including Gemini, within government agencies and education institutions. These updates focus on enhanced incentives, partner-led user success programs, and accelerated pre-sales and post-sales adoption efforts, aiming to scale impact through its partner community.
Google Cloud's Confidential G4 Instances with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs are Now Generally Available
Google Cloud has announced the general availability of Confidential G4 instances, powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server edition GPUs. This integration provides hardware-backed security for AI workloads, protecting sensitive data during computation across 36 zones on Compute Engine VMs and GKE nodes.
NextDC Shares Plunge 40% After Slashing Earnings Forecast Due to Power Delays
Australian data center operator NextDC's shares fell 39.5% after it significantly lowered its fiscal 2027 revenue and EBITDA forecasts. The revision is due to power supply delays at its M3 Melbourne data center, caused by community opposition and suspended infrastructure upgrades.
Google Proposes AI Data Center in Minnesota with Renewable Energy Investment
Google plans to build a 780-megawatt AI data center in Pine Island, Minnesota, and will finance 1,900 megawatts of new wind, solar, and battery storage capacity for Xcel Energy's grid. This initiative aims to power the data center with carbon-free energy and contribute to Google's 2030 clean energy goal, while addressing public concerns about data center energy consumption.
BigQuery Python UDFs Now Support Standard Logging to Cloud Logging
BigQuery Python User-Defined Functions (UDFs) now integrate directly with Python's standard logging library, allowing structured logs to be emitted into Cloud Logging without external tools. This feature enables developers to build more fault-tolerant data pipelines by capturing row-level diagnostics, facilitating real-time alerting and issue triage via SQL.
Google Cloud and RemotiveLabs Partner to Virtualize Automotive Software Development
Google Cloud and RemotiveLabs are collaborating to enable full virtualization of automotive software development, from Android Automotive OS (AAOS) to microcontrollers. This initiative addresses the bottleneck of hardware-dependent development for vehicle control modules, allowing for faster iteration and updates.
Pinterest Implements Event Time Watermarks for Petabyte-Scale Data Partition Finalization
Pinterest introduced an event time-based partition finalization mechanism for its database ingestion framework, utilizing Apache Flink and Apache Iceberg. This allows downstream jobs to reliably determine when streaming data partitions are complete, addressing late-arriving data in continuous Change Data Capture (CDC) ingestion. The system supports petabyte-scale data from MySQL, TiDB, and KVStore, making online changes available within 15 minutes to an hour.
Norwegian firm proposes 2,800-mile transatlantic data cable bypassing the US
Bulk, a Norwegian company, is seeking partners to fund and build Project Leif Erikson, a 2,800-mile undersea data cable connecting Norway and Canada. This project aims to provide Canada with a direct, secure data link to Europe, reducing reliance on US infrastructure amid worsening US-Canada relations.