Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports launching T2 Unlimited EC2 instances directly from the Amazon ECS console during cluster creation.

Amazon MQ is now available in nine regions with the addition of the Asia Pacific (Seoul) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. Previously launched regions include US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions. 

Amazon EC2 R5 instances offer Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processors with a sustained all core frequency of up to 3.1 GHz, with up to 50% more vCPUs and 60% more memory over R4 instances. R5 instances deliver 5% additional memory per vCPU and a 10% price per GiB improvement over R4 instances. R5 instances are ideally suited for applications such as high-performance databases, distributed in-memory caches, in-memory databases, and big data analytics.

Amazon EC2 z1d instances deliver a sustained all core frequency of up to 4.0 GHz, the fastest of any cloud instance. z1d instances feature a custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor that can run all cores at up to 4.0 GHz sustained. z1d instances include up to 1.8TB of local instance storage and are available in 6 sizes with up to 48 vCPUs and 384 GiB memory. Support for a z1d bare metal instance size will be available soon.

Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service, is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. You can now continuously monitor and detect security threats in the AWS GovCloud (US) region to help protect your AWS accounts and workloads.

You can now configure an Elastic Beanstalk environment to ignore application HTTP 4xx responses in enhanced health monitoring. It helps in avoiding impact to Elastic Beanstalk environment health because of client-side errors.

Smart lighting is struggling to lift off in a big way. It needs a boost in corporate access and partnerships. Ingy wants to provide just that.

Look ma, no lights: Current is supplying sensors and data analytics to help the telecommunication company win smart city jobs in Canada. Not a luminaire in sight in the announcement.

Following prior suits in the US, Nitride Semiconductors is suing RayVio and its distributor Digi-Key in the Tokyo District Court for infringing a Japanese patent covering manufacturing UV LEDs.

Bastiaan de Groot, who has spearheaded many smart lighting initiatives, is now CEO at Amsterdam-based Ingy.