Starting today, you can monitor and automate action on your Amazon EBS snapshots using Amazon CloudWatch Events. CloudWatch Events provide a stream of events describing changes to your AWS resources. EBS CloudWatch Events fire when a snapshot completes or when a snapshot has been shared with you. This allows you to automate and streamline your data backup workflows by eliminating the need to poll the snapshot API to track snapshot status. You can also better adhere to best practices for multi-region disaster recovery by automating the copy of snapshots across regions upon snapshot completion. We will continue to add support for additional snapshot and volume events in future releases.

AWS IoT now supports Simplified Permission Management. This feature allows you to easily manage permission policies for a large number of devices by using variables that reference the Device Registry or X.509 certificate properties. The integration of Device Registry and Certificate properties with device policies offers the following benefits:

1. You can now reference Registry properties in device permission policies.

Referencing device properties defined in the Device Registry allows your policies to reflect any changes made in the Device Registry. For example, referencing the Thing Attribute “building-address” as a variable in the policy, devices will automatically inherit a new set of permissions when they move buildings.

2. You can share a single generic policy for multiple devices.

A generic policy can be shared among the same category of devices instead of creating a unique policy per device. For example, a policy that references the “serial-number” as a variable, can be attached to all the devices of the same model. When devices of the same model connect, policy variables will be automatically substituted by their serial-number.

These two new Quick Starts automatically deploy Consul and Vault, which are two popular DevOps tools from HashiCorp, Inc. , on the AWS Cloud. The Quick Starts were created by AWS solutions architects in partnership with HashiCorp, to integrate solutions and services from both companies. 

AWS CodeCommit is now available in the US West (Oregon) region.

Now, you can run more applications with AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition) directory, also known as Microsoft AD, when the applications require extensions to your Active Directory (AD) schema. Today, we have added the ability for you to extend the schema of your Microsoft AD directory. Extending the schema allows you to add new attributes and object classes to your Microsoft AD that are required by your applications and that are not present in the core Microsoft AD classes and attributes.

A man discovered trespassing in a Chicago water plant has vanished after being charged with trespassing early last week.

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality confirmed contamination in the Doney Park Water Company supply.

The PM’s really fired up by Trump’s victory, Ed confides to his diary, is the vicar’s daughter titillated by the thought of cosying up to a rough-hewn Yankee builder? I don’t know, but in Cabinet she seems to go a shade pinker when he’s mentioned. Anyway, we’ve all been told to come up with ways …

Read full article: Ed Joins The Trump Love-Fest

Imec and it’s subsidiary Holst Centre have developed a health patch which tracks physical and cardiac activity while monitoring bioelectrical impedance. The technology is available for licensing. “Since our entry in this space, we’ve advanced far beyond proof-of-concept to a patch that has attained a high level of technical maturity,” says Imec’s Ruben de Francisco, …

Read full article: Multi-functional health patch from Imec

Smartphone shipments are forecast to grow by 4% in 2016 to 1,490 million units after jumping by 13% to 1,430 million in 2015, says IC Insights, and to grow by 5% in 2017, reaching 1,565 million units. Overall, smartphone unit shipments are now forecast to grow at single-digit annual rates through 2020. Smartphones accounted for …

Read full article: Smartphones growing but total cellphone falling, says IC Insights