Amazon Lex is now generally available for all customers. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into your application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa are now available to developers, enabling you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language conversational bots.

AWS X-Ray is now available for all customers. AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. You can use X-Ray to analyze both applications in development and in production, from simple three-tier applications to complex microservices applications consisting of thousands of services.

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. DAX does all the heavy lifting required to add in-memory acceleration to your DynamoDB tables, without requiring developers to manage cache invalidation, data population, or cluster management. Now you can focus on building great applications for your customers without worrying about performance at scale. You do not need to modify application logic, since DAX is compatible with existing DynamoDB API calls. You can enable DAX with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console or using the AWS SDK. Just as with DynamoDB, you only pay for the capacity you provision.

You can now access Amazon DynamoDB from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using VPC endpoints, enabling you to have all network traffic between your application and DynamoDB traverse the public Internet or stay within the AWS cloud.

Pricing will be key consideration for municipalities when choosing external vendors, finds Frost & Sullivan’s Environment & Water Team.

 

Oilfield services company deploys cost-saving mobile wastewater evaporation technology.

The Governments of Canada and Quebec are supporting two projects in the Montréal area.

 

Illinois American Water and Village of Ransom’s project included $2 million investment, installation of 10 miles of water main.

Mayor Karen Weaver calls water switch ‘too risky’ after lead crisis.

Talks on building a large scale desalination plant in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, have begun between Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality, beer maker SABMiller, and salt producer Marina Sea Salt, reports Construction Review Online.