The AWS Systems Manager Agent is now installed by default on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, in the 2018.07 version and later, and in all 18.04 LTS AMIs.

Build scripts for the optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) worker nodes are now available on GitHub.com.

Since we made Amazon EC2 F1 instances generally available last year, we have seen exciting adoption by customers, partners and the developer and research community. Customers are using F1 for accelerating a diverse set of applications such as genomic processing, data analytics, security, image and video processing and machine learning.

Today we are announcing new features and updated capabilities that allow developers to create more performant and feature-rich hardware accelerators using Amazon EC2 F1 instances.

For software developers looking to harness the power of FPGAs and build custom hardware accelerations, we have upgraded the Amazon FPGA software defined development flow with a new FPGA Developer AMI version . The new development tools now support up to 60 kernels (compared to 16 in previous versions) enabling more compute for C /C++ based accelerators.

In addition, based on customer feedback, the direct memory access (DMA) performance has been improved by 5x, allowing the FPGA acceleration engine to stream data to/from the CPU at high speed and increase application performance.

To help offload the non-differentiated tasks of building an FPGA application such as transferring data to/from the host CPU and accessing onboard DRAM from the FPGA, we provide an Amazon FPGA Shell that provides pre-configured, pre-tested, and secure I/O components. With this release we are making the new Amazon FPGA v1.4 Shell reconfigurable, allowing developers to have future-proof designs. Simply put, this means that developers can decide if they’d like to upgrade Shell versions as they become available, compared to previous Shells that were mandatory upgrades. We also added a new capability that allows developers to retain data in the FPGA attached DRAM while swapping Amazon FPGA Images (AFIs) at runtime, which effectively decreases load times of certain AFIs, as there is no need to move data to/from the host into the FPGA DRAM when a new AFI is loaded.

Developers can also take advantage of the growing marketplace of F1 instances based offerings from AWS Partners and other developers, ranging from video encoding to data analytics. All of these new features and upgrades are available for F1 instances in 4 AWS regions – US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland) and AWS GovCloud (US) regions.

For a complete list of new feature and upgrades, please click here .

You can now crawl your Amazon DynamoDB tables, extract associated metadata, and add it to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You can also create Glue ETL jobs to read, transform, and load data from DynamoDB tables into services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift for downstream analytics. To learn more, please visit our documentation . 

The AWS Solutions team has updated the Data Lake Solution, an automated reference implementation that deploys a highly available, cost-effective data lake architecture on the AWS Cloud along with a user-friendly console for searching and requesting datasets. The solution now leverages AWS Glue and Amazon Athena to transform and analyze uploaded datasets with searchable metadata.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility has been updated to version 1.2 in support of Release 9.6.8 of the PostgreSQL database . This release includes a number of reliability and performance improvements, along with a number of bug fixes.

Meanwhile, more details emerge on why the automaker used infrared rather than visible light in its trial: It’s faster.

Jes Munk Hansen takes over as CEO of Osram US and head of global Osram sales, while an automotive OEM joins Osram in an automotive lighting joint venture, and Adesto acquires smart-SSL specialists Echelon.

You can now develop your AWS Lambda function code in C# using the .NET Core 2.1 runtime which will soon be the Long Term Support (LTS) version of .NET Core. You can use any of the new runtime features such as the more performant HTTP client implementation and types for representing contiguous regions of arbitrary memory. For more details, read the Lambda documentation . 

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to grant permissions to an administrative user to access and manage AWS Organizations master account resources. Previously, AWS SSO only allowed users to access Organizations member account resources. Now, users can sign in to the AWS SSO user portal with their corporate credentials and access resources in their assigned accounts, regardless if the account is a master or member account.