The AWS Solutions team has updated the Data Lake Solution, an automated reference implementation that deploys a highly available, cost-effective data lake architecture on the AWS Cloud along with a user-friendly console for searching and requesting datasets. The solution now leverages AWS Glue and Amazon Athena to transform and analyze uploaded datasets with searchable metadata.

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility has been updated to version 1.2 in support of Release 9.6.8 of the PostgreSQL database . This release includes a number of reliability and performance improvements, along with a number of bug fixes.

Meanwhile, more details emerge on why the automaker used infrared rather than visible light in its trial: It’s faster.

Jes Munk Hansen takes over as CEO of Osram US and head of global Osram sales, while an automotive OEM joins Osram in an automotive lighting joint venture, and Adesto acquires smart-SSL specialists Echelon.

You can now develop your AWS Lambda function code in C# using the .NET Core 2.1 runtime which will soon be the Long Term Support (LTS) version of .NET Core. You can use any of the new runtime features such as the more performant HTTP client implementation and types for representing contiguous regions of arbitrary memory. For more details, read the Lambda documentation . 

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to grant permissions to an administrative user to access and manage AWS Organizations master account resources. Previously, AWS SSO only allowed users to access Organizations member account resources. Now, users can sign in to the AWS SSO user portal with their corporate credentials and access resources in their assigned accounts, regardless if the account is a master or member account.

Starting today, Application Auto Scaling can be used to add scaling to any services that you build on AWS.

Following a launch of the Apple Siri-compatible line under the Sylvania brand in the US, the German smart lighting company offers it under the Osram name elsewhere. Some people must be buying it.

You can now activate Amazon GuardDuty across multiple accounts and regions as well as link those accounts back to a master account by using AWS CloudFormation StackSets. Your security team can now automate the provisioning of GuardDuty across hundreds of accounts.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.0.35, 10.1.34, and 10.2.15 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MariaDB database engine.