AWS Step Functions now supports higher throughput workflows, making it easier to coordinate applications with high event rates and variable loads. Starting today, throughput has increased from 400 state transitions per second to 1,000 state transitions per second with burst capacity of 5,000 state transitions. The default start rate for AWS Step Functions state machine executions has also increased from 25 per second to 200 per second, with burst capacity of up to 1,000 starts in select regions.

Today, AWS made it easier to manage your secrets from the console by making the AWS Secrets Manager console available in two additional languages – Italian and Traditional Chinese.  

Elastic Beanstalk environment health events can now be streamed to CloudWatch Logs. It enables you to review and debug the historical health changes of your running applications in Elastic Beanstalk.

Starting today, users can access Amazon Chime from their web browser. The new Amazon Chime web application makes it easy to join meetings from any device with a supported browser, including those running Linux or ChromeOS, without downloading or installing a client application. The web application lets users use Amazon Chime on more devices, and helps them stay connected and productive.

Amazon Inspector expanded security assessments to include Amazon Linux 2018.03 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE), Security Best Practices, and Runtime Behavior Analysis. To run security assessments, simply install the Amazon Inspector Agent on the desired EC2 instance, configure your assessment in the Inspector console, and run your assessment.

In December 2015, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) released service last accessed data, which helps you identify overly permissive policies attached to an IAM entity (a user, group, or role). Now, we have extended service last accessed data to support four additional regions: EU (London), Canada (Central), US East (Ohio), and EU (Paris) AWS Regions.

PostgreSQL read replicas on Amazon RDS now support Outbound Network Access and can execute queries using the postgres_fdw extension to access remote servers. The postgres_fdw extension lets you access and modify data stored in other PostgreSQL servers as if they were tables within the RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance. This is already supported on primary PostgreSQL instances, but offloading read only queries from remote servers to read replicas will reduce resource usage on the primary instance.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) now makes it easier for you to control access to your AWS resources by using the AWS organization of IAM principals (users and roles). You can use a new condition key , aws:PrincipalOrgID, in your permissions policy to require all IAM principals (users and roles) accessing your resources, to be from an account in your organization.  

In 2018, Strategies in Light will open with a new keynote session that addresses high-level concerns and brings insights to industry professionals on market opportunities, emerging applications, and areas of growth in LED and lighting. Bob Steele reports on the strategic speakers who will kickstart each session.

At Las Vegas consumer show, Osram and Swiss auto designer will show how shared, autonomous vehicles will use LEDs for everything including comfort, illumination, data connectivity, security, and more.