AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) now enables you to grant permissions to an administrative user to access and manage AWS Organizations master account resources. Previously, AWS SSO only allowed users to access Organizations member account resources. Now, users can sign in to the AWS SSO user portal with their corporate credentials and access resources in their assigned accounts, regardless if the account is a master or member account.

Following a launch of the Apple Siri-compatible line under the Sylvania brand in the US, the German smart lighting company offers it under the Osram name elsewhere. Some people must be buying it.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.0.35, 10.1.34, and 10.2.15 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MariaDB database engine.

You can now activate Amazon GuardDuty across multiple accounts and regions as well as link those accounts back to a master account by using AWS CloudFormation StackSets. Your security team can now automate the provisioning of GuardDuty across hundreds of accounts.

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now supports setting lifecycle policy rules for all images, without requiring a tag value. This makes it easier to set rules to automate container image cleanup in your Amazon ECR repositories.

An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses.

You can now tag EC2 Dedicated Hosts using the AWS API or CLI. A tag is a label that you can assign to EC2 Dedicated Hosts and they enable you to categorize your Hosts in different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. This helps you quickly identify specific Dedicated Hosts based on the tags assigned to it.

Click here to learn more about you can start tagging Dedicated Hosts. 

Info techies are more influential decision makers in today’s IoT-oriented, smart lighting, smart building environment, according to a survey by GE’s Current group.

AWS Fargate is now available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region.

AWS Fargate is a technology for Amazon ECS that lets you run containers in production without deploying or managing servers. Fargate lets you focus on designing and building your applications instead of managing the infrastructure that runs them.

Visit the AWS global region table for a full list of AWS Regions where AWS Fargate is available. To learn more about using Fargate, visit the documentation page.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is now certified as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant. You can now use the latest version of ElastiCache for Redis for low latency and high throughput in-memory processing of sensitive payment card data for use cases such as payment processing, mobile wallet, and payment fraud prevention.

Starting today, Tag-On Create for Amazon EC2 & Amazon EBS is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region , an isolated region designed to address specific regulatory and compliance requirements for vetted government customers and organizations in government-regulated industries that run sensitive workloads in the cloud.

Upon creation, you can tag your Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volumes from the EC2 Instance launch wizard or through the RunInstances or CreateVolume APIs. By tagging resources at the time of creation, you can eliminate the need to run custom tagging scripts after resource creation. In addition, you can now set resource-level permissions on the CreateVolume , CreateTags , DeleteTags , and the RunInstances APIs. This allows you to implement stronger security policies by giving you more granular control over who has access to these APIs. You can also enforce the use of tagging and control which tag keys and values are set on your resources.

This capability is available at no additional cost in all AWS commercial regions, and the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. You can get started from EC2 Instance launch wizard, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, and AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell. To learn more about tagging your Amazon resources, visit the EC2 User Guide .