This Quick Start builds an Autodesk Forge environment on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud for customizable building blocks in the form of web service application programming interfaces (APIs), tools, and services. The deployment takes about 15 minutes.

PostgreSQL 11 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment , allowing customers to test the early production version of PostgreSQL 11 on Amazon RDS including 40+ extensions like PostGIS and support for hash partitioning. PostgreSQL 11 can now be deployed for development and performance testing in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment without the hassle of installing, provisioning, and managing the database.

The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 11 on October 18, 2018 . PostgreSQL 11 provides users with improvements to overall performance of the database system, particularly for very large databases and high computational workloads. Further, PostgreSQL 11 makes significant improvements to the table partitioning system, adds support for stored procedures capable of transaction management, improves query parallelism, adds parallelized data definition capabilities, and introduces just-in-time (JIT) compilation for accelerating the execution of expressions in queries.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region . The RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes (currently T2, M4, and R4), and can be encrypted at rest using KMS keys. Database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. To move data in and out of the preview environment, customers can either use standard PostgreSQL dump and load functionality or use native PostgreSQL logical replication .

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment Forum is available for customers and the Amazon RDS team to share information and concerns about both the early production versions of PostgreSQL 11 and the RDS Database Preview Environment. For details on Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, refer to https://aws.amazon.com/rds/databasepreview .

Amazon ElastiCache now supports the next generation general-purpose and memory-optimized Amazon EC2 M5 and R5 nodes for high-performance applications. Both M5 and R5 nodes are based on the AWS Nitro System and feature Enhanced Networking based on Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), to deliver up to 25 Gbps of aggregate network bandwidth. M5 and R5 nodes are powered by custom Intel® Xeon Scalable processors with a sustained all core frequency of up to 3.1 GHz. These processors also feature Intel’s newest vector processing instruction set, Advanced Vector Extension 512 (AVX-512), for faster processing of high-performance workloads. The general-purpose M5 nodes offer memory size flexibility ranging from 6.38 GiB to 314.32 GiB. The memory optimized R5 nodes offer memory size flexibility of 13.07 GiB to 635.61 GiB. 

Over the course of 20 conferences, the Strategies in Light program has seen its share of changes. With his unique insight into the historic market research, conference co-chair Bob Steele draws patterns between the evolution of LED markets and the ways they have shaped the content of the event.

You can now connect to Amazon EFS file systems from EC2 instances in other AWS regions using an inter-region VPC peering connection, and from on-premises servers using an AWS VPN connection. 

With AWS Elemental MediaLive, live channels that have inputs with matching embedded timecodes now produce synchronized video segments for HLS and Smooth Streaming outputs. Used with the input redundancy feature in AWS Elemental MediaPackage , this allows a live channel to seamlessly failover across the two channel pipelines provided by MediaLive and the redundant inputs used by a MediaPackage channel. The result is a highly available, multi-AZ , live channel from a single endpoint and a better-quality viewing experience.

The new AWS Budgets console provides simplified budget creation workflows, contextual AWS Cost Explorer integration, and an enhanced Budgets dashboard.

Starting today, device makers building with Alexa Voice Service (AVS) can integrate their products with Alexa for Business . Alexa for Business customers can then manage these third party devices as shared devices  and make private skills available through their Alexa for Business console. This will provide Alexa for Business customers with an expanded choice of Alexa built-in devices to use in their organizations – from conference rooms to shared workspaces. 

We have three of the Xilinx boards to offer as prizes, worth £203 each.

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  Thanks to Statista for this one – the twelve best countries for holiday entitlement:

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