Amazon Lex is now integrated with AWS CloudTrail, a service that enables you to log, continuously monitor, and retain events related to API calls across your AWS infrastructure, to provide a history of API calls for your account. Amazon Lex API calls are captured from the Amazon Lex console or from your API operations using the SDKs directly. Your Amazon Lex API calls are delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket with your other AWS service records. Using the information collected by AWS CloudTrail, you can track requests made to Amazon Lex including the origination of the request, such as source IP address, the date and time the request was made, and the parameters requested.

Announcing the new AWS CloudHSM. The new CloudHSM offers you cost effective hardware key management at cloud scale for sensitive and regulated workloads. You can now generate and use encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated hardware security modules (HSMs) on the AWS Cloud. CloudHSM integrates with your applications using industry-standard APIs, such as PKCS#11, Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE), and Microsoft CryptoNG (CNG). It is also standards-compliant and enables you to export all of your keys to most other commercially-available HSMs. CloudHSM is a fully-managed service that automates time-consuming administrative tasks for you, such as hardware provisioning, software patching, high-availability, and backups. With CloudHSM, you can add and remove HSM capacity on-demand, with no up-front costs.

You can now use the AWS Glue Data Catalog with Apache Spark and Apache Hive on Amazon EMR. The AWS Glue Data Catalog is a managed metadata repository that is integrated with Amazon EMR, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and AWS Glue ETL jobs. Additionally, it provides automatic schema discovery and schema version history. You can choose to use the AWS Glue Data Catalog to store external table metadata for Hive and Spark instead of utilizing an on-cluster or self-managed Hive Metastore. This allows you to more easily store metadata for your external tables on Amazon S3 outside of your cluster.

You can now use the AWS Glue Data Catalog as the metadata repository for Amazon Redshift Spectrum. The AWS Glue Data Catalog provides a central metadata repository for all of your data assets regardless of where they are located.  

Amazon Virtual Cloud (VPC) now provides customers an opportunity to recover EIPs that they might have released accidentally. The released EIPs are available for recovery as long as they are not assigned to a different customer. The sooner customers try to recover their EIPs, the better are the chances of recovering them. Customers can recover their EIPs via CLI by using the allocate-address command and specifying the IP address using the –address parameter.  

The AWS Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is an extension for Microsoft VSTS and on-premises Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) that makes it easy to deploy .NET applications to AWS. If you already use Microsoft VSTS or TFS, the AWS Tools for VSTS makes it easy to deploy your code to AWS without changing how you run your project, organize your builds, and track your work.

EPA orders
closure to protect nearby drinking water.

Administrator Scott Pruitt released Monday said he will seek to revise
the 2015 guidelines mandating increased treatment for wastewater from
steam electric power-generating plants.

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced $60.7M in grants, in addition to loans will be used to support infrastructure improvements.

Black, smelly water was discharged into the base of the Falls July 29.