During Strategies in Light, Venntis Technologies’ Jeff Mastin will present a case study on the economics of equipping small indoor farms and how such operations can leverage the qualities of LED-based horticultural lighting.

As we close out 2017, our most-read news stories on the LEDs Magazine website continue to steer toward IoT and smart lighting applications, along with business deals that continue to move lighting into emerging areas.

Detailing installed lighting in the US of all types of sources, total energy use, and total lumen output, the newest US Department of Energy (DOE) report will help guide the agency’s R&D program.

At Strategies in Light, Tricia Foster of Acuity Brands Lighting and Catherine Hollenshead of Estes, McClure & Associates will outline a case study on a Texas school district’s experience with implementing tunable lighting in several classrooms.

Finnish LED company continues to build up its stable of IoT and human-centric products.

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Starting today, you can apply to participate in a developer preview that allows you to use eight English (U.S.) Amazon Polly voices to narrate your Alexa skills.

You can now access AWS CodeBuild from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) using VPC endpoints. Many AWS customers run their applications within a VPC for security or isolation reasons. Previously, you could connect to CodeBuild from your VPC using an internet gateway or VPN connection. With VPC endpoints, no public IP addresses are required and traffic between the VPC and CodeBuild does not leave the Amazon network.

Starting today, the AWS VPN service supports custom Pre-Shared Keys (PSKs) and inside tunnel IP CIDR blocks for your VPN connection. These new features allow you to better self-manage their VPNs, avoid inside tunnel IP address conflicts, and enable support for additional devices. These features are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. 

AWS CodeCommit now enables you to restrict who can commit changes to the master branch or any branch of your choosing. Previously, you could control who can make changes to a repository but not to specific branches within a repository. Now, you can define which actions are allowed on a branch and who has permission to perform those actions. This makes it easy to set-up a workflow where only approved users can merge pull requests or commit changes to a sensitive branch.

Amazon RDS now offers Multi-AZ support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. This new high availability option leverages SQL Server Mirroring technology with additional improvements to meet the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads running on SQL Server. The Multi-AZ deployment option provides enhanced availability and data durability by automatically replicating database updates between two AWS Availability Zones. Availability Zones are physically separate locations with independent infrastructure engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones.