Chromaticity shift remains one issue in LED-based lamps, and the US Department of Energy has added to its Caliper data on PAR38 lamps with research into SSL lamp design and parametric component failure.

Amazon Kinesis Firehose, the easiest way to load streaming data into AWS, now supports auditing your API calls using AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail records AWS API calls for your account and delivers the log files to you. For more details, see Logging Amazon Kinesis Firehose API calls Using AWS CloudTrail .

 

To get started with Amazon Kinesis Firehose, please visit our website and Developer Guide .

You can use AWS Mobile Hub to develop apps in Swift. Simply login to the AWS Mobile Hub console  to create a project and select features for your app including user authentication, data storage, backend logic, push notifications, content delivery, and analytics, then choose Swift from the build tab of your project. AWS Mobile Hub automatically provisions these features and generates a working quickstart app for iOS that you can use as a foundation for your app, or cut and paste code snippets to your existing app.

Amazon VPC Endpoints for S3 is now available in South America (Sao Paulo) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) Regions. Amazon VPC endpoints are easy to configure and provide reliable connectivity to Amazon S3 without requiring an internet gateway or a Network Address Translation (NAT) instance. With VPC endpoints, the data between the VPC and S3 is transferred within the Amazon network, helping protect your instances from internet traffic.

Support for multiple trails: You can now create up to 5 trails in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. Different stakeholders such as IT auditors, security administrators, and developers can create and manage their own trail. Additionally, you can prescribe granular access control to allow or deny access to specific trails for particular users. For more details, refer to the Multiple Trails section of the CloudTrail User Guide. One trail per region is free. Charges apply for additional trails. For pricing details, go to the CloudTrail pricing page.  

AWS continues to innovate at a rapid pace, and one of the keys to building a successful business on AWS is ensuring you can accurately explain the value and operation of AWS and its latest features. AWS Business and Technical Professional courses consist of e-learning modules and assessments designed to help you stay current. Today we’re making them available in additional languages— Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese, with Spanish to follow soon. These courses are available at no cost to APN Partners via the APN Portal . Once you successfully complete all course assessments, you achieve an accreditation that validates your role-specific knowledge. 

Amazon EC2 Spot instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region. AWS customers in the area can now use Spot instances to save up to 90% compared to On-Demand prices by bidding on unused Amazon EC2 capacity. In addition to reducing the cost of running your applications, you can also use Spot instances to increase your computing scale and throughput for the same budget and enable new types of cloud computing applications. 

Amazon RDS for SQL server now supports authentication using the Windows Authentication method. You can now enable your applications to authenticate against Amazon RDS for SQL Server using credentials stored in the AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition). Keeping all of your credentials in the same directory will save you time and effort because you will no longer have to find and update each copy of the credentials in separate repositories. This may also improve your overall security profile. Windows Authentication support is now available for new instances as well as existing instances.

Today we are announcing the availability of two new CloudWatch metrics for monitoring network packets on EC2 instances. The new metrics are NetworkPacketsIn and NetworkPacketsOut. These new metrics provide insight into the number of network packets flowing to and from an EC2 instance. These metrics are available along with the other CloudWatch metrics for all EC2 instances on the EC2 console, CLI and API.

The AWS Cryptography team has announced the AWS Encryption SDK. This new SDK makes 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 library provided in 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 library 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.