Amazon Managed Services (AMS) Accelerate Operations Plan now supports the AWS Europe (Stockholm) region. AMS Accelerate provides operational services including monitoring, incident management, security, patch, and backup to help you with day-to-day operations management of AWS resources so that your teams can focus on business transformation in the cloud.

Starting today, you can split your shared costs within your AWS Cost Categories   by defining Split Charge rules. AWS Cost Categories enables you to group your cost and usage information into meaningful categories based on dimensions such as accounts, tags, services, charge types, and even other Cost Categories. Every organization has a set of costs that are shared by multiple teams, business units, or financial owners, for instance, data transfer costs, enterprise support, or operational costs of a central infrastructure team. These costs are not directly attributable to a single owner, and so cannot be categorized into a singular Cost Category value. With Split Charge rules, you can now equitably allocate these costs across your Cost Category values.

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker notebook instance supports Amazon Linux 2. You can now choose Amazon Linux 2 for your new Amazon SageMaker notebook instance to take advantage of the latest update and support provided by Amazon Linux 2.

Today, we’re pleased to announce AWS Glue version 3.0, a new version of AWS Glue Spark for your batch and streaming jobs that accelerates your data integration workloads in AWS. AWS Glue 3.0 introduces a performance-optimized Spark runtime that includes optimizations from AWS Glue and Amazon EMR, and is based on open-source Apache Spark 3.1.1 . The AWS Glue 3.0 runtime optimizes both read and write access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), using faster vectorized readers and Amazon S3 optimized output committers. It also optimizes access to the AWS Glue Data Catalog with the use of partition predicates. For highly partitioned datasets, Glue 3.0 improves the execution speed by filtering out unnecessary partitions using partition indexes . AWS Glue 3.0 runtime is also fully integrated with AWS Lake Formation, so you can secure your data access in different granularities like database-, table-, column-, row-, and cell-level access control using resource names and AWS Lake Formation tag based access control . With AWS Glue 3.0, we also bring in new capabilities to improve user experience for monitoring, debugging, and tuning Spark applications. Spark 3.1.1 enables an improved Spark UI experience that includes new Spark executor memory metrics and Spark Structured Streaming metrics that are useful for AWS Glue streaming jobs. Similar to AWS Glue 2.0 , AWS Glue 3.0 reduces startup latency and improve the overall job completion times.

You can now hibernate Amazon EC2 C5d, M5d, and R5d Instances. Hibernation allows you to pause your EC2 Instances and resume them at a later time, rather than fully terminating and restarting them. Resuming your instance lets your applications continue from where they left off so that you don’t have to restart your OS and application from scratch. Hibernation is useful for cases where rebuilding application state is time-consuming (e.g., developer desktops) or an application’s start-up steps can be prepared in advance of a scale-out.

EC2 VM Import/Export now supports migration of virtual machines that use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot. UEFI is a modern firmware that initializes your operating system. You can now use EC2 VM Import/Export APIs to bring your UEFI based virtual machines directly to AWS EC2 without converting to legacy BIOS.

According to McKinsey, a third of the 1000 top tech companies founded in Europe since 2000 were British. 319 of the top one thousand were founded in the UK which is more than twice the number founded in France and Germany. Second was Germany with 149 followed by France with 143 and Sweden with 64. …

This story continues at Britain Leads Europe In Startups, says McKinsey

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Just a quick post to flag this News story, which could have been written for Gadget Master. It’s about breaking a domino-setting record… What’s that to do with Electronics Weekly? Well, YouTuber Mark Rober customised, built and programmed an autonomous robot called Dominator, “Dom”, to place the 102,000 dominoes. (It took just over 24 hours, …

This story continues at Raspberry Pi powers robot domino-setting record

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The rich are more paranoid than the rest of us. Last week we heard that Larry Page had, like many billionaires, bought a New Zealand funkhole and this week we hear Peter Thiel’s Palantir has bought $50 million worth of gold bars. It was ever thus. Back in the Cold War days, the rich were …

This story continues at Funkholes

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