The PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora is now available in four additional AWS regions: Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai). This increases the number of available regions to eight, as the service launched on October 24, 2017 in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland).

Now, you can use AWS Certificate Manager DNS validation to establish that you own or control a domain name when requesting certificates with ACM. Certificates are used to secure network communications and establish the identity of websites over the Internet. Before issuing a certificate for your site, Amazon must validate that you own or control the domain name for your site. Previously ACM supported only email validation, which required the domain owner to receive an email for each certificate request and validate the information in the request before approving it. With DNS validation, you simply write a CNAME record to your DNS configuration to establish ownership or control of your domain name. The ACM management console can configure the DNS records for you if you manage your DNS records with Amazon Route 53. This makes it easy to validate your domain with a few mouse clicks. Once the CNAME record is configured, ACM can automatically renew DNS-validated certificates that are in use (associated with other AWS resources) before they expire, as long as the DNS record remains in place. Renewals are fully automatic and touchless. 

You can now scale the storage of your Amazon RDS for SQL Server database instances up to 16TB. An instance must use the Provisioned IOPS or General Purpose (SSD) storage types to be eligible. Some instances with older storage configurations are not eligible.

You can now use message filtering on Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to build simpler and more streamlined pub/sub architectures. Message filtering enables Amazon SNS topic subscribers to selectively receive only a subset of the messages they are interested in, as opposed to receiving all messages published to a topic. This new approach removes the design complexity of implementing message filtering logic in your subscribers, or message routing logic in your publisher systems.  

Today, Amazon CloudFront announces the addition of six new Edge Locations to its global content delivery network. The new Edge Locations are located in: Helsinki, Finland; Madrid, Spain; Manchester, England; Denver, Colorado; Newark, New Jersey; and Phoenix, Arizona. 

Starting today, you can create Amazon RDS database instances for MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and PostgreSQL database engines with up to 16TB of storage. Existing database instances can also be scaled up to 16TB storage without any downtime.

You can now launch R4, and db.M4.16xlarge instances types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for SQL Server. 

You can now use EFS File Sync to efficiently and securely sync files from on-premises or in-cloud file systems to Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) at speeds of up to 5x faster than standard Linux copy tools. Amazon EFS provides simple, scalable file storage for use with Amazon EC2 instances in the AWS Cloud. 

SQL Server 2017 is now available for Amazon EC2 instances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.4 as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from the AWS Marketplace . With this release, you can now launch RHEL instances on-demand using SQL Server 2017 Enterprise License Included AMIs without having to bring your own license. SQL Server 2017 on RHEL 7.4 AMI is available in all public AWS regions starting today.

GMVP recently opened the SWRO-PRO pilot plant at Nambu wastewater treatment plant located in Korean port city of Busan. The pilot is used to demonstrate the technical feasibility of PRO (pressure retarded osmosis) to recover the salinity gradient energy.