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.

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.