The cash and stock deal is the latest in a swirl of industry acquisition activity, as the IoT continues to redefine business.

With AWS Elemental MediaLive you can now suppress the delivery of one or both MediaLive encoding pipelines to their configured destinations on a schedule. The live channel continues to be processed while delivery is “paused” and will continue to incur non-idle charges, but content will not be sent to any destination packagers or origins. This can be used to change the input source in AWS Elemental MediaPackage when using the input redundancy feature . You can also suppress output completely and resume it at a scheduled time, which lets you start the delivery of the channel at a precise time.

Starting today, Amazon GameLift, a managed service for deploying, operating, and scaling dedicated game servers for session-based multiplayer games, allows you to utilize an IAM role you own to securely give Amazon GameLift access to other AWS services, such as Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon DynamoDB. You now have more flexibility in how your game server process connects to other AWS services.

To learn more about how to get started with IAM roles and Amazon GameLift, take a look at the release notes or visit the Amazon GameLift product page for more information.

You can now use Customer Voice Stream with Amazon Connect in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Region. With the customer voice stream feature, your customer audio is automatically sent to Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, where it can be accessed by the integrations that you allow. For example, you could integrate customer voice stream with real-time text transcription and sentiment analysis for immediate feedback on call quality, or use this feature with a 3rd party voice biometric product to authenticate the caller automatically without having to enter a password or confirm personal information.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) introduces additional task definition parameters that enable you to define dependencies for container startup and shutdown as well as a per-container start and stop timeout value.

AWS announces the availability of preupgrade assistant that makes it easier to migrate to Amazon Linux 2 from Amazon Linux AMI .  

AWS IoT Greengrass v1.8.0 is now available. Now you can configure your IoT Greengrass device to send all messages over Port 443, change the user and group IDs associated with IoT Greengrass application Lambdas, and integrate with AWS IoT Lifecycle events.

AWS License Manage r has added support for attaching license configurations to instances running on premises. This new capability further simplifies how customers can use License Manager to centrally manage licenses across their hybrid IT environments.

License Manager integrates with AWS Systems Manager Inventory to support instances on premises. Previously, customers could use AWS License Manager to discover instances running on premises and search inventory of installed operating system and application software. With this new capability, License Manager is now able to track licenses as the state of an on-premises instance changes. Once a license configuration is attached to an on-premises instance, License Manager periodically collects software inventory, updates licensing information, and refreshes its built-in dashboards to report usage.

AWS License Manager is offered at no additional charges and is currently available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Europe (London). To learn more, visit the product documentation , and AWS License Manager FAQ page .

AWS has enhanced the license counting methods available in AWS License Manager by adding support for two new scenarios. First, License Manager can now track licenses that are based on number of instances. This is useful for tracking licenses for software such as load balancers and firewalls. Second, License Manager now integrates with Optimize CPU capability to track the custom number of vCPUs that are in use on an instance. This enables customers to continue to save on vCPU-based licensing costs while benefitting from the centralized license tracking provided by the License Manager.

AWS License Manager makes it easier to manage licenses in AWS and on premises servers from software vendors such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM. It is offered at no additional charge and is currently available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Europe (London). To learn more, visit the product documentation , and AWS License Manager FAQ page .

You can now select an AWS Elemental MediaPackage channel as the destination for AWS Elemental MediaLive channel outputs. Previously, you had to enter MediaPackage endpoints and credentials into the MediaLive channel’s HLS configuration. Now, you simply select MediaPackage as your MediaLive output group and assign an existing MediaPackage channel as the destination, and the configuration is completed automatically.