AWS Config is pleased to announce increased default limits for AWS Config rules for all customers in all Regions. Customers can now create 150 AWS Config rules per account per Region by default, increased from 50 AWS Config rules per account per Region. The full list of AWS service limits can be found on the AWS Service Limits page.

Amazon Cognito is now available in the AWS Canada (Central) Region. Amazon Cognito is the easiest way to add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via SAML 2.0.

AWS has published a service level agreement (SLA) for Amazon Cognito, which provides availability guarantees.

You can now develop your Elastic Beanstalk applications using Ruby 2.6. The latest Ruby 2.6 comes with numerous performance improvements and new features such as a new JIT (Just-In-Time) compiler and endless ranges. For a complete list of Ruby 2.6 features, visit the official Ruby 2.6 release announcement . You can upgrade your existing Elastic Beanstalk Ruby environment to Ruby 2.6 using the Elastic Beanstalk console or through the AWS CLI and Elastic Beanstalk API. See Updating Your Elastic Beanstalk Environment’s Platform Version for additional details.

You can now run Amazon WorkSpaces in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, an isolated AWS Region designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the cloud for customers who have U.S. federal, state, and local government compliance requirements. With this launch, you can now use Amazon WorkSpaces cloud desktops to better meet data sovereignty requirements without the cost and complexity of building on-premises Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). You can quickly add or remove WorkSpaces to meet the need of your dynamic workforce and still provide a more responsive experience to end users. 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 6.4 and Kibana 6.4. The new version of Elasticsearch and Kibana offers several new features and improvements, including weighted average aggregation, option to multiplex token filters, support for field aliases, and improved workflow for inspecting the data behind a visualization. 

Amazon Neptune is now available in the Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.

Out for a walk in rare sunshine, I stumbled across machinery in the woods – in the ruins of an old hut, to be precise. Winter has thinned the undergrowth, and a small brick chimney gave it away. I am guessing it is a water pump, and I am pretty sure there are the remains …

This story continues at Ancient mechanics lurking in the woods

Or just read more coverage at Electronics Weekly

I woke in the dead of night with a feeling that still hasn’t left me – that ‘they’ managed to get into my PC. Last year, sick of using knackered old PCs, and Windows 10, I bought an nearly new ex-business many-GHz quad core i7 Dell desktop with a solid-state drive and a Windows 7 …

This story continues at PC paranoia – did ‘they’ get into my machine

Or just read more coverage at Electronics Weekly

At Strategies in Light, sustainability analyst Jed Dorsheimer will present a view of the challenges and opportunities for the LED and lighting sectors. Here extends his perspective on the value proposition of SSL in the current business environment.