Starting today, payer accounts can access all of their linked accounts’ Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations from a centralized view, making it easy to identify cost savings opportunities on a per-account basis. Previously, payer accounts were only able to access recommendations based on the aggregate usage across all of their accounts. This launch expands the RI purchase recommendation capabilities to allow payer accounts to generate and view recommendations based on the usage incurred by each account. This allows you to easily identify the cost savings opportunities for each of your accounts from a central location, eliminating the need to access recommendations separately for each of your accounts.

You can now launch Amazon EMR clusters with the next generation of graphics powered G3 instances, memory-optimized Z1d instances, and storage-optimized H1 instances from the Amazon EC2 family. G3 and Z1d instances are available with the EMR release 5.18.0 and later while H1 instances are available with the EMR release 5.17.0 and later.

The graphics powered G3 instances feature the latest generation of GPUs and are ideal for graphics-intensive big-data applications that require a powerful combination of CPU, memory, and GPU capacity.

The Z1d instances feature high single thread performance CPUs and high memory and are ideal for memory intensive application that doesn’t require many CPUs.

The storage-optimized H1 instances offer dense local HDD storage with high network bandwidth and are ideal for data-intensive applications that require low-cost storage, high disk throughput, and fast sequential disk I/O access to big datasets.

These instances are available in various sizes, to learn more about these instances, please visit the Amazon EC2 instance page . For Amazon EMR pricing for these instances, visit the Amazon EMR pricing page .

Amazon EMR supports these instances in the following regions:

G3 instances are supported in the US East (N.Virginia and Ohio), US West (San Francisco and Oregon), Europe(Ireland and Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Sydney, Singapore, and Tokyo) regions.

Z1d instances are supported in the US East (N.Virginia), US West(San Francisco and Oregon), Europe(Ireland), and Asia Pacific(Singapore and Tokyo) regions.

H1 instances are supported in the US East (N.Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe(Ireland) regions.

You can now use Apache Flink 1.6.0, Apache Zeppelin 0.8.0, and S3 Select with Apache Hive and Presto on Amazon EMR release 5.18.0. Flink 1.6.0 adds several new features and updates, including native support for state TTL that allows you to control access to Flink states and support for HTTP/REST based job submissions that allows better integration with container environments on the cluster. It also features several SQL and Table API improvements that simplify the executions of streaming and batch queries and adds SQL support for Avro data format. Zeppelin 0.8.0 features support for running Spark interpreter in Apache Hadoop YARN cluster mode, support for Ipython interpreter, and ability to use Apache HDFS as backend storage for saving and reading Zeppelin notebook files.

With EMR release 5.18.0, you can now use S3 Select with Hive and Presto. S3 Select allows applications to retrieve only a subset of data from an object stored in Amazon S3. This improves performance as it reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred to and processed by the EMR cluster when running Hive and Presto queries. Please visit S3 Select with Hive and S3 Select with Presto pages to learn more about these features.

Additionally, with this release, you can also use the upgraded versions of Apache Spark 2.3.2, Apache HBase 1.4.7, and Presto 0.210.

You can create an Amazon EMR cluster with the release 5.18.0 by choosing the release label “emr-5.18.0” from the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or SDK. You can select Flink, HBase, Presto, and Zeppelin to install these applications when you launch your EMR cluster. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about EMR release 5.18.0 , Flink 1.6.0 , HBase 1.4.7 , Spark 2.3.2 , Presto 0.210 , and Zeppelin 0.8.0.

Amazon EMR release 5.18.0 is now available in all supported regions for Amazon EMR.

You can stay up to date on EMR releases by subscribing to the RSS feed for EMR release notes. Use the RSS icon at the top of the EMR Release Guide to link the feed URL directly to your favorite feed reader.

Amazon EMR now supports a public EMR artifacts repository to help developers build applications based on the EMR distribution for Apache Hadoop and Apache Hive using Apache Maven for dependency management. The EMR artifacts repository hosts the same optimized versions of libraries and dependencies that are available with specific Amazon EMR release versions, ensuring that artifacts used in building applications against the EMR stack are compatible with the runtime libraries on the EMR cluster. Artifacts in the repository correspond to EMR release 5.18.0 and later. Please visit the Amazon EMR documentation for more information about the EMR artifacts repository .

Today, Amazon Pinpoint added support for transactional emails. This capability exists alongside the existing campaign-based email sending features of Amazon Pinpoint. Transactional emails are a great tool for sending ad-hoc messages, such as order confirmations and password reset emails.

Signify turns the 1000-ft+ China World Trade Center tower into a top-to-bottom ornamental light show.

Smart lighting will need the property industry’s backing if it is to really take off. It could be happening already, judging by next week’s annual exhibition and conference.

Globally, cities are contemplating smart-city application deployment that can rely on networked LED-based outdoor lighting as a backbone, and the TALQ Consortium has demonstrated interoperability among software from multiple vendors at a Valencia, Spain plugfest.

Amazon Inspector security findings now include the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) ID, instance tags, auto scaling group, hostname, IP addresses, DNS names, and subnet ID of the Amazon EC2 instance that has the vulnerability or insecure configuration. You can view these fields by clicking the ‘Show Details’ button while reviewing a finding in the management console. These fields are also available when you describe findings through the AWS API and CLI.

Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity. These additional fields help you filter, group, and prioritize your security findings based on the image, network location, tags, or other attributes of vulnerable EC2 instances.

Amazon Inspector is available in the following eleven regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and AWS GovCloud (US).

To learn more about Amazon Inspector or to start your free trial, please visit Amazon Inspector .