We’re beginning our countdown to the Strategies in Light conference and co-located events — The LED Show, Lightspace California, and the LEDs Magazine Sapphire Awards — with a nice round number of things to get excited about.

Amazon ElastiCache now supports R4 node types. R4 nodes are optimized for latency sensitive and memory intensive workloads. They come in six sizes, providing 12.3GiB to 407GiB of available in-memory capacity. By setting up a 15-shard cluster for Redis, you can scale up to 6.1TiB of in-memory capacity. For Memcached, you can set up a 20-node cluster to support up to 8.14 TiB in-memory workloads. Equipped with the Intel Broadwell processor, and improved networking, R4 node family offers superior performance over the popular R3 node family. 

You can now launch R4, db.t2.xlarge, db.t2.2xlarge, and db.m4.16xlarge instances types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB.

AWS X-Ray now supports the ability to zoom and pan your service map. This allows you to focus on a particular service of interest and visualize service maps with large number of service nodes on a single screen. 

You can now enable authentication with Kerberos and fine-grained EMRFS authorization for Amazon S3 access on your Amazon EMR clusters. You can use Kerberos to authenticate requests between services running on your cluster, user actions on your cluster, and external client requests from remote services. Amazon EMR will create a MIT KDC on the master node of your cluster, and utilize the open-source Kerberos authentication settings for certain application components on your cluster. Additionally, you can easily enable a cross-realm trust with a Microsoft Active Directory to seamlessly allow users in the directory to authenticate using Kerberos to access and run workloads on a cluster. 

Now, AWS CodeBuild supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) resources. The new capability allows CodeBuild to access VPC resources without being exposed to the public internet. This enables you to use CodeBuild to compile your software code within your VPC and access resources including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS), as well as any service endpoints that are only reachable from within a specific VPC. To learn more, visit our blog here .

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.1.26 and 10.0.32 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MariaDB database engine.

Starting today, you can now use AWS Shield Advanced to get higher levels of protection for your applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Network Load Balancer (NLB) against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Simply enable AWS Shield Advanced on an AWS Elastic IP address attached to an internet-facing EC2 instance or NLB. AWS Shield Advanced will automatically detect the type of AWS resource behind the Elastic IP address and apply the relevant DDoS protections.

Amazon Rekognition added three new features today: detection and recognition of text in images; real-time face recognition across tens of millions of faces; and detection of up to 100 faces in challenging crowded photos. Customers who are already using Amazon Rekognition for face verification and identification will experience up to a 10% accuracy improvement in most cases. 

Amazon Redshift improves performance for repeat queries by caching the result and returning the cached result when queries are re-run.