Four Dutch growers have deployed horticultural SSL products powered by Plessey to grow tomatoes, and a variety of flowering plants in four trials slated to run through summer.

Amazon EMR now supports a variety of new Amazon EC2 Spot instance management features with instance fleets. Instead of specifying a specific Amazon EC2 instance type for an Amazon EMR instance group or Amazon EC2 availability zone for your Amazon EMR cluster, you can now provide a list of possible choices and allow Amazon EMR to automatically select an optimal combination. When creating clusters with instance fleets, Amazon EMR can now automatically provision Spot capacity across a variety of instance types, select optimal Amazon EC2 availability zones, and blend Spot and On-Demand capacity to minimize overall cost.

AWS Device Farm now enables you to choose Appium 1.6.3 when scheduling your tests.

Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports Amazon EC2 Run Command as an event target. This allows you to route system events that describe changes in your AWS environment to Run Command for processing. Run Command, a part of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, provides a simple way of remotely executing common administrative tasks like running scripts, installing software, and managing patches. Now, you can perform ad-hoc actions through Run Command on your instances based on changes in your AWS environments. For example, you can now collect instance logs when instances in an Auto Scaling group are terminated by creating a CloudWatch Events rule with Auto Scaling as the source and Run Command as the target. To learn more, see the CloudWatch Events documentation here .

AWS CodeBuild is now available in the Asia (Tokyo, Singapore), EU (Frankfurt) and Australia (Sydney) Regions.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region.

The Amazon CloudWatch Events service now supports AWS Step Functions state machines as event targets. Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or configuration changes that might impact performance or security by notifying you of AWS resource changes in near-real-time. You simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event. You can, for example, invoke AWS Lambda functions or notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. Now, you can also send the matching events to an AWS Step Functions state machine to start a workflow responding to the event of interest, such as managing copies of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots upon snapshot completion .

The Oracle January 2017 Patch Set Updates (PSU) are now available for Amazon RDS for Oracle. To learn more about Oracle PSUs supported on RDS, visit the RDS patch update documentation .

The AWS Cryptography team has released the AWS Encryption SDK for Python. This new SDK joins the Java version launched in 2016 to make encryption easier for developers while minimizing errors that could lower the security of their applications. Developers using encryption often face two problems: a. how to correctly generate and use a key to encrypt data, and b. how to protect the key after it’s been used. The AWS Encryption SDK addresses the first problem by transparently implementing the low-level details using the cryptographic provider available in a developer’s environment. The SDK addresses the second problem by providing intuitive interfaces to let developers choose how they want to protect their encryption keys after use. By using the AWS Encryption SDK, developers can focus on the core of the application they’re building instead of the complexities of encryption. We’ve provided ready-to-use samples in the SDK for AWS customers who use AWS CloudHSM or AWS Key Management Service, however the open source SDK can be extended to support other key providers.

Dept. of Natural Resources names facilities for producing high quality data.