We are excited to announce that Amazon EC2 P2 instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore) and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions.

You can now provision Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) clusters using AWS CloudFormation, a service that allows you to easily provision, manage and update a collection of related AWS resources. Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is a fully managed, highly available, in-memory cache for DynamoDB that delivers up to a 10x performance improvement – from milliseconds to microseconds – even at millions of requests per second.

You can now leverage Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query data stored in Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) and Grok file formats. Amazon Redshift Spectrum also supports multiple other open file formats, including Avro, CSV, Parquet, RCFile, RegexSerDe, SequenceFile, TextFile, and TSV. For more information, see supported file formats  in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.

Amazon EC2 G3 Instances, the latest generation of Amazon EC2 Accelerated Compute Instances, make it easy to procure a powerful combination of GPU, CPU, and host memory. Backed by the NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs, G3 instances offer double the CPU power per GPU, and double the host memory per GPU when compared to the most powerful GPU cloud instance available today. This makes G3 instances ideal for workloads such as 3D rendering, 3D visualizations, graphics-intensive remote workstations, video encoding, and virtual reality applications.

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly. Step Functions is a reliable way to coordinate components and step through the functions of your application.

You can now use OCTET_LENGTH to count the number of bytes (octets) in a specified string.

Finland-based Picote has developed a range of cleaning equipment and accessories that has either been specifically designed to work in PVC or can be adapted to clean PVC without detriment to the pipe. 

The Allegro Sludge Pump has been designed for pumping standing water containing sand, solids, leaves or debris at a maximum of 50 gallons per minute. 

NETZSCH Pumpen & Systeme GmbH has developed the full service-in-place (FSIP) Tornado T2 rotary lobe pump designed for the various sludge conveyances in sewage treatment plants.

Trelleborg’s pipe seals operation has launched a new online tool to enable pipe rehabilitation contractors to calculate the precise amount of resin and hardener needed to build a leak-free, hassle-free network of pipes.