Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can now utilize AWS PrivateLink to securely ingest data.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce Zeina, the first Arabic voice for Amazon Polly. Zeina is a clear and natural-sounding female voice.

Used by over 400 million people, Arabic is one of the most spoken languages in the world. It consists of 30 dialects, including its universal form, which is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Zeina follows the MSA pronunciation, which is the common broadcasting standard across the region. MSA might sometimes sound formal because it differs from day-to-day speaking style. However, it’s the linguistic thread that links the Arabic native-speakers worldwide.

Amazon Polly customers who plan to use Zeina’s voice include Emirates NBD – a leading bank in the Middle East who has introduced an AI powered virtual assistant, Duolingo – a globally operating eLearning platform offering a portfolio of 84 language courses for more than 30 distinct languages, and iTranslate – a leading translation and dictionary app that offers text translation as well as voice-to-voice conversations in over 100 languages.

With the addition of Arabic language support, the Amazon Polly portfolio now includes 59 voices across 29 languages. You can check out the full list in the Voices in Amazon Polly section of our documentation.

For the second time in a month, Bluetooth appears to take a backseat at the Dutch lighting giant, which picks up Hong Kong’s WiZ Connected.

Amazon CloudFront announces the launch of CloudFront in China with three new Edge locations (POPs) located in Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhongwei, operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Co. Ltd. (NWCD). Customers can now serve content to end viewers in Mainland China with improved latency, availability and security.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the availability of the new AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty certification, the industry’s first and only certification that validates your ability to build, test, and publish Amazon Alexa skills. With the new AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty certification, Alexa developers can more confidently publish skills that have the potential to reach customers through over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices in use globally.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports Multi Major Version Upgrades for PostgreSQL which allows you to perform major version upgrades across multiple different major versions.

Previously, major version upgrades could only be done to one higher version at a time. For example, PostgreSQL version 9.6 could only be upgraded to PostgreSQL 10, and PostgreSQL version 9.4 to PostgreSQL version 9.5. So, if you wanted to upgrade your older instances to the latest major version, you would have to perform multiple major version upgrades until you reached your target version. For example, upgrading PostgreSQL 9.4 to PostgreSQL 11 involved upgrading from version 9.4 to 9.5, then 9.5 to 9.6, and then 9.6 to 10 and finally from 10 to 11. This caused extended downtime for each of the upgrade operations.

With the new multi major version upgrade feature you can perform any of the following upgrades seamlessly in a single step, thus reducing downtime substantially.

• Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.4 to PostgreSQL version 11
• Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.5 to PostgreSQL version 11
• Upgrade from PostgreSQL version 9.6. to PostgreSQL version 11

In addition, if you are still running any PostgreSQL version 9.3 which has already been out of support , you can upgrade your instance(s) to 9.5 or 9.6 directly.

Please refer to the major version upgrade documentation on details around the PostgreSQL versions that are supported as source and target versions and also any limitations associated with the upgrade process.

With this release, RDS for PostgreSQL now also supports upgrading from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 11.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale PostgreSQL deployments in the cloud. Learn more about upgrading your database instances from the Amazon RDS User Guide. See Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Pricing for pricing details and regional availability.

We are pleased to announce the release of NICE DCV version 2017.4.

The DCV 2017.4 release introduces the following features:

• New native client for MacOS devices
• Hardware decoding support for Windows client

AWS Client VPN is now available in the EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions. AWS Client VPN was already available in US East (Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) AWS Regions. Support for other AWS Regions is coming soon.

You can now assign tags to Amazon FreeRTOS Over-The-Air (OTA) update and customer configuration resources. This helps to search and manage access control of these resource based on resource tagging. This support builds upon previously-released support for resource tagging in AWS IoT Core.

For the second time in a year, the Lighting Research Center implicates light levels and duration as greater villains than blue frequencies in poor sleep.