The Internet of Things sector is increasingly focused on Internet Protocol networks for connecting devices such as intelligent LED luminaires, and the ZigBee Alliance is moving to establish its value at the application layer of the network stack.

Our annual top 20 list of most-read stories reveals that business deals dominated reader interest in 2016 while the Internet of Things, packaged LED advancements and horticultural solid-state lighting followed closely.

In this week’s breaking LED business news, after a long-running patent and intellectual property dispute, Cree and Feit Electric cross-license technology with Feit paying a license fee and royalties, while Gooee adds another Internet of Things partner and Telensa adds an Asia presence.

We are pleased to announce that Amazon ElastiCache now supports Memcached version 1.4.33. You can now launch new clusters with Memcached 1.4.33, as well as upgrade existing ones to the new version. Compared to version 1.4.24 (previous version supported by ElastiCache for Memcached), this version adds support for new commands and parameters, better management of large items (512 MB or higher), improved memory management (memory reclaim, dynamically increase memory available to Memcached), enhanced item log management, and miscellaneous bug fixes. 

You can now respond to Amazon EMR cluster state changes with Amazon CloudWatch Events . The new Amazon EMR event types in Amazon CloudWatch Events provide information including state and related severity for Amazon EMR clusters, instance groups, steps, and Auto Scaling policies. Using simple rules that you can quickly set up, you can match events and route them to Amazon SNS topics, AWS Lambda functions, Amazon SQS queues, streams in Amazon Kinesis Streams, or built-in targets. Additionally, you can view events for a cluster on the Cluster Details page in the Amazon EMR console.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), which provides simple and scalable file storage in the AWS Cloud, now provides a simpler way for you to mount your file systems on EC2 instances. 

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now allows you to access your file data in the US East (N. Virginia) region from on-premises datacenters. This new capability was announced for all other Amazon EFS regions at AWS re:Invent 2016. On-Premises access is now available in all Amazon EFS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). 

Starting today, you can seamlessly move snapshots of your encrypted and unencrypted RDS databases across commercial AWS regions and between various accounts, which can be used to create a robust disaster recovery for your RDS database instances. Previously, RDS supported copying your unencrypted DB snapshots across multiple regions and accounts, and copying your encrypted DB snapshots between accounts within the same region. Now, you can also copy your encrypted DB snapshots between accounts and across multiple regions as seamlessly as unencrypted snapshots.  

We are pleased to announce that the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) has even tighter integration with AWS Database Migration Service. Once SCT has converted your database schema, for supported DMS source/target combinations, SCT can now create the appropriate endpoints in DMS. With the endpoints created, SCT then offers the ability generate the migration tasks necessary to move the data for the converted schema in DMS. The migration tasks can be monitored from SCT and re-run as required. This integration offers database engineers a convenient workspace to handle a migration from end-to-end. 

Starting today, you can migrate your Amazon RDS for MySQL version 5.6 database snapshot to an RDS for MariaDB 10.1 database instance with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console.