Amazon EC2 z1d instances deliver a sustained all core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz, the fastest of any cloud instance. z1d instances feature a custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor that can run all cores at up to 4.0 GHz sustained. z1d instances include up to 1.8TB of local instance storage and are available in 6 sizes with up to 48 vCPUs and 384 GiB memory. Support for a z1d bare metal instance size will be available soon.

Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in the AWS GovCloud (US) region to help protect your AWS accounts and workloads.

You can now configure an Elastic Beanstalk environment to ignore application HTTP 4xx responses in enhanced health monitoring. It helps in avoiding impact to Elastic Beanstalk environment health because of client-side errors.

Smart lighting is struggling to lift off in a big way. It needs a boost in corporate access and partnerships. Ingy wants to provide just that.

Look ma, no lights: Current is supplying sensors and data analytics to help the telecommunication company win smart city jobs in Canada. Not a luminaire in sight in the announcement.

Following prior suits in the US, Nitride Semiconductors is suing RayVio and its distributor Digi-Key in the Tokyo District Court for infringing a Japanese patent covering manufacturing UV LEDs.

Bastiaan de Groot, who has spearheaded many smart lighting initiatives, is now CEO at Amsterdam-based Ingy.

The infrared chip’s narrow beam eliminates the need for secondary optics, the company says, as it continues to drive LEDs beyond general illumination.

AWS CodeBuild now helps you monitor your builds with Amazon CloudWatch. Previously, you could use the console or API to view your build’s results. Now, you can set a CloudWatch Alarm to notify you if a build fails or is unexpectedly slow. Additionally, CodeBuild now provides a dashboard that displays the performance of past builds to help you troubleshoot and spot trends.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights, an advanced database performance monitoring feature that makes it easy to diagnose and solve performance challenges on Amazon RDS databases, is now generally available on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, for PostgreSQL major version 10. It offers a free tier with 7 days of data retention and a paid long-term data retention option.