The Amazon CloudWatch Events service now supports AWS Step Functions state machines as event targets. Amazon CloudWatch Events enables you to respond quickly to application availability issues or configuration changes that might impact performance or security by notifying you of AWS resource changes in near-real-time. You simply write rules to indicate which events are of interest to your application and what automated action to take when a rule matches an event. You can, for example, invoke AWS Lambda functions or notify an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. Now, you can also send the matching events to an AWS Step Functions state machine to start a workflow responding to the event of interest, such as managing copies of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots upon snapshot completion .

AWS CodeBuild is now available in the Asia (Tokyo, Singapore), EU (Frankfurt) and Australia (Sydney) Regions.

The Oracle January 2017 Patch Set Updates (PSU) are now available for Amazon RDS for Oracle. To learn more about Oracle PSUs supported on RDS, visit the RDS patch update documentation .

The AWS Cryptography team has released the AWS Encryption SDK for Python. This new SDK joins the Java version launched in 2016 to make encryption easier for developers while minimizing errors that could lower the security of their applications. Developers using encryption often face two problems: a. how to correctly generate and use a key to encrypt data, and b. how to protect the key after it’s been used. The AWS Encryption SDK addresses the first problem by transparently implementing the low-level details using the cryptographic provider available in a developer’s environment. The SDK addresses the second problem by providing intuitive interfaces to let developers choose how they want to protect their encryption keys after use. By using the AWS Encryption SDK, developers can focus on the core of the application they’re building instead of the complexities of encryption. We’ve provided ready-to-use samples in the SDK for AWS customers who use AWS CloudHSM or AWS Key Management Service, however the open source SDK can be extended to support other key providers.

Dept. of Natural Resources names facilities for producing high quality data.

 

Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District’s Regional Water Reclamation Facility is currently rated to treat 8 mgd.

 

Finlay Cuffe from Sutton Grammar School and Shahab Fazal from Loreto Sixth Form College in Manchester have both been named as WCSIM (Worshipful Company Of  Scientific Instrument Makers) Young Engineer of the Year 2017. The nominations entitle them to participate, along with more than 1,700 other students from around the world, in the Intel-sponsored International Science …

Read full article: WCSIM chooses Young Engineer of the the Year 2017

Imec has made an 896Gb/s silicon photonics transceiver of just a few mm2, targeting future Tb/s optical links and highlighting the scalability of Imec’s iSiPP50G silicon photonics platform. Driven by exponential demand for interconnect bandwidth in datacenters, single-mode optical transceivers will need to scale to Tb/s capacity and be tightly integrated with network switches. Imec …

Read full article: Imec makes tiny 896Gb/s Si photonics transceiver

ARM has introduced a new microarchitecture for its Cortex-A series called DynamIQ. DynamIQ allows up to eight cores to be put on a chip with different configurations like 1+7 (i.e. 1xbig and 7xLITTLE CPUs), 2+4, 1+3 to deliver scalable solutions The first phones using DynamIQ will be out early in 2018. DynamIQ aims to allow …

Read full article: ARM launches new microarchitecture – DynamIQ

Rohde & Schwarz’s latest RF spectrum analyser starts with a 1GHz model, and it can be upgraded to 2- or 3GHz with a software keycode. Upgrades can be purchased as needed and are available as soon as the keycode is entered. Recalibration is not required. Noise performance can also be upgraded by software. The R&S …

Read full article: Rohde & Schwarz makes RF spectrum analyser software upgradable