Amazon GameLift is a fully managed service that makes it simple and cost-effective to deploy, operate, and scale session-based multi-player game servers in the cloud. GameLift has added two new features and made several improvements to the service. Game developers can now use the new game session search & sort feature to populate session browsers with active game sessions that better match player preferences. Developers building game servers can now implement custom health checks for game server processes and report health status, which GameLift uses to track and maintain overall health for a fleet. In addition, with the release of the new Server SDK, GameLift now fully supports the ability to run multiple server processes concurrently on each instance in a fleet, giving you greater control over how efficiently you use GameLift resources and potentially reducing overall costs for hosting your game.

You can now easily change the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) used by your Amazon RDS DB instance. You can specify a new VPC for an existing DB instance deployed in Single-AZ configuration by using the Amazon RDS Management Console, the Amazon RDS API, or the AWS Command Line Tools. In addition, if you are running your DB instance on the EC2-Classic environment, you can switch to the EC2-VPC environment by modifying your existing DB instance. If your AWS account was created before 2013-12-04, you are potentially running RDS on the EC2-Classic environment.

AWS Database Migration Service is now available to customers in the AWS Asia Pacific Seoul and Mumbai regions, as well as the South America region in São Paulo. AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS easily and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database.

Egypt’s Ministry of International Co-operation and the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development have signed a deal to build a new desalination plant in East Port Said.

Watch our Desalinate newscast for a round-up of the latest global desalination stories…

OriginClear’s PWT completes boiler feedwater upgrade for power utility.

Under this new 5-year contract extension, Veolia will manage and implement a customer utility information and billing software solution for the city.

Sembcorp Industries has reported a fall in net profit of 47 per cent to S$193.5 million ($144.2 million) for the first half of 2016. The decrease partly reflects a gain of S$54.7 million ($40.8 million) on selling UK water business Bournemouth Water in the first half of 2015, as well as a “difficult” current market environment.

Xylem has reported a fall in net income of five per cent to $71 million in the second quarter of 2016, reflecting debt refinancing costs and higher restructuring and realignment charges. Revenue was up one per cent to $932 million, helped by a robust public utility market globally, and particularly in the US.

Acciona group revenues fell by 16.3 per cent to E2,764 million ($3,086 million) in the first half of 2016, owing to a decrease in energy revenues and to a lesser extent construction revenues.