Nebius has released Aether 3.6, its latest quarterly update to Nebius AI Cloud, introducing an AI agent to control infrastructure in natural language, new security controls, and significant storage improvements.
Aether 3.6 is this quarter’s major platform update for Nebius AI Cloud, covering everything from a natural-language cloud management agent to block storage enhancements. The release is driven by customer feedback around the practical realities of running AI workloads at scale.
The headline feature is Nebius Echo, an AI agent embedded directly into the web console. As a result, there’s no setup required. It answers questions about a user’s infrastructure in context and executes commands with guardrails to prevent unintended actions. Echo runs on open-source models hosted on Token Factory, Nebius’s own inference platform, giving the company direct control over response quality and latency.
In May, Nebius acquired inference optimization specialist Eigen AI for $643 million, integrating its technology directly into said Token Factory. We also know a bit about who might be using tools like Echo, as in March, the company signed a $27 billion deal with Meta for five years of AI cloud capacity.
Smoother workflows for ML engineers
Nebius says Aether 3.6 reduces day-to-day friction with a Managed Service for SkyPilot. This is a one-click deployment of the widely used open-source framework for running batch jobs across cloud environments. Normally, getting SkyPilot running requires manually spinning up a VM and configuring a control plane. Now engineers can start scheduling jobs within minutes of enabling the service. The instance creation workflow for Kubernetes clusters and VMs has been redesigned with step-by-step guidance, and a pricing calculator is now embedded in the flow. A unified Notification Center and a Global Search bar complete the console updates.
Security, governance, and storage gains
A new Key Management Service (KMS) follows the customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) model, letting organizations in healthcare and financial services control their own cryptographic key lifecycle. This is something that has blocked cloud adoption for many, as Nebius implies. Workload Identity Federation replaces long-lived credentials in multi-cloud setups with short-lived federated identities. IAM-based access to Soperator, Nebius’s managed Slurm-on-Kubernetes solution, replaces manual credential distribution for large ML teams.
At a more basic yet critical level, the storage improvements for 3.6 are substantial. A new Intelligent object storage class automatically shifts data to a lower-cost tier after 30 days of inactivity, with no egress fees. Object Storage with the Enhanced class now shows a 30 percent read bandwidth improvement for single-threaded connections, while Shared Filesystem delivers three times faster 4 KB file operations and up to 100 times more IOPS for metadata-heavy workloads.
Alongside Aether 3.6, Nebius is launching the Builder Program in early preview and a Certification Program whose first credential, AI Cloud Ops (Associate), is available for $1 during the early-bird period.