During my time at AWS, I have always looked for opportunities to work with students. I have delivered over 50 talks at universities across the region, and watching the potential in the room is always a strong motivator. It reminds me of why I do this work, and that the students I meet today may well become our customers and collaborators tomorrow. That is why I am happy to open this week with Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center.

Rick Suttles published Introducing Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center, a new benefit for verified higher education students. When you verify your enrollment through SheerID and complete your Builder Center profile, you unlock 12 months of premium AWS Skill Builder access (900+ courses, hands-on labs, certification exam prep, and game-based learning). From there, you earn badges through actions on Builder Center: publishing articles, commenting, and maintaining engagement. At 7 badges, you unlock $10 in AWS Credits. At 14 badges, another $20 in credits. At 21 badges, you earn an AWS Foundational Certification exam voucher ($100 value).

This represents a commitment of over $500 million in resources during this back-to-school season, providing students with the training, tools, and certification needed to start building their careers in cloud and AI. Student Rewards is available to students 18 years or older and enrolled at accredited higher education institutions worldwide, subject to verification and applicable terms.

Verify your student status and start learning, earning badges, and unlocking rewards!

Last week’s launches
Here’s what else happened this week.

• A new AWS Local Zone in Las Vegas, Nevada – This new Local Zone supports Amazon EC2 C7i, M7i, R7i, and C8gn instances, Amazon EBS, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Direct Connect. AWS Local Zones are now available in more than 30 metropolitan areas worldwide. In addition, AWS added a fourth Availability Zone to the Europe (London) Region, delivering next-generation AI and ML capacity with Trn3 and P6 accelerated instances alongside general-purpose compute.
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports batch instance termination – You can now pass up to 100 instance IDs to the TerminateInstanceInAutoScalingGroup API to terminate them as a batch, reducing the number of API calls needed to scale down your Auto Scaling groups. Batch termination is designed for workloads that need to rapidly scale down, such as AI/ML training jobs, container orchestrators, or event-driven architectures that spin up large fleets temporarily.
• AWS CloudShell now includes a built-in visual file editor – CloudShell now includes a visual file editor that you can launch directly from your shell session using a single edit command. The editor supports syntax highlighting, find-and-replace, multi-line selection, copy-paste, and undo-redo in a single browser session. Whether you are updating a deployment script, modifying an agent steering file, editing a CloudFormation template, or fixing a Lambda function, the editor provides a seamless edit-and-run experience without leaving CloudShell.
• Amazon Bedrock now supports SpaceXAI Grok 4.6 with cross-Region inference – Grok 4.6, a frontier model built for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, is now available on Amazon Bedrock. The model runs on the bedrock-runtime endpoint with support for the Responses, Chat Completions, and Converse APIs, and works with existing account-level controls including model invocation logging, Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and cost itemization in AWS Cost Explorer.
• Amazon Bedrock expands API support and introduces cross-Region inference for OpenAI models – Amazon Bedrock now supports OpenAI GPT-5.6 models (Sol, Terra, and Luna) with the Responses, Converse, and Chat Completions APIs, and adds cross-Region inference. Geo cross-Region inference routes requests within a predefined geography (including new US Geo support with this launch), while Global cross-Region inference serves requests from any commercial AWS Region at a lower per-token cost.
• AgentCore payments is now generally available in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore – At general availability, AgentCore payments includes Quick Create for Coinbase credential provisioning directly within the AgentCore console, a curated Coinbase Bazar MCP server of pay-per-use x402 endpoints via AgentCore gateway, support for the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), and the “upto” scheme in the x402 protocol for pay-per-inference and dynamic pricing use cases. To learn more, visit the AI Blog post.
• AWS Glue 6.0 delivers 30% price reduction and Iceberg v3 support – AWS Glue 6.0 is built on a fully modernized runtime, Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.13, and Scala 2.13, delivering 30% lower pricing than previous AWS Glue versions. With Iceberg v3, Glue 6.0 adds the VARIANT data type with automatic shredding for faster reads on semi-structured data, deletion vectors for high-performance row-level updates, geometry and geography data types for spatial processing, and flexible schema evolution.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts you may find useful:

• Updates to your AWS Sign-In experience – AWS is gradually introducing updates to the sign-in and sign-up experience. The redesigned sign-in page introduces a unified email entry point for root users and customers using the new email-based sign-in method, while IAM users continue signing in with their account ID, username, and password. The page also includes sign-in options for customers whose AWS account was created using a supported identity provider (Google, GitHub, Apple, or Amazon.com). A redesigned session selection page simplifies viewing and managing multiple active account and role sessions. If your organization relies on browser automation or scripted workflows that interact with the sign-in page, review the post to understand how these changes might affect your configuration.
• In the works: AWS Builder Lofts in Berlin, Hyderabad, and São Paulo – My colleague Channy announced plans to open new Builder Lofts in three cities. Since the first Builder Loft opened in San Francisco in July 2025, it has welcomed more than 22,500 developers through its doors. Each new location will be a permanent community space offering free workshops, networking events, pitch nights, content creation spaces, and co-working areas. Berlin will focus on digital sovereignty and security-readiness, Hyderabad on AI and cloud-native architecture, and São Paulo on supporting Latin America’s developer ecosystem.
• AWS and Amazon WorkSpaces recognized as a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service – AWS has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for the third consecutive year, evaluated on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. Gartner noted strengths in operations, geographic strategy, and overall viability. This is also the first year the evaluation includes Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents, a capability that runs AI agents within the same desktop environment, security perimeter, and audit trail as human users.

For a full list of AWS blog posts, be sure to keep an eye on the AWS Blogs page.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• AWS Summits – Free in-person events for builders and innovators to learn, connect, and explore the latest in cloud. Coming up: Zurich (September 2), São Paulo (September 3), Tel Aviv (September 10), and Dubai (September 30). You can also watch keynotes and sessions on the AWS Summits Global Livestream + On-Demand Hub. To access live and on-demand content for a particular Summit, you need to be registered for that event.
• AWS Community Days – Community-led conferences planned and delivered by community leaders. Upcoming events include Bolivia, Santa Cruz (August 29), Toronto, Canada (August 29), JAWS SONIC, Tokyo (September 5), Warsaw, Poland (September 8).

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building.

Summer is slowly coming to an end, and I am already planning a few days off in the coming months to keep me motivated through the rainy autumn ahead. I hope you are doing the same. Come back next week for more!

— Esra

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center, Local Zone in Las Vegas, and more (August 24, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.

In my last Week in Review post, I mentioned how much time I’ve been spending on AI-Driven Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC) workshops with customers this year. A common theme in those sessions is the need for better cost visibility. Teams are moving fast with AI, but as they go from experimenting to full production, finance and leadership really need to know who is using which resources and at what cost. That’s why I was so excited to see the launch of Amazon Bedrock new support for cost allocation by IAM user and role this week. This lets you tag IAM principals with attributes like team or cost center and then activate those tags in your Billing and Cost Management console. The resulting cost data flows into AWS Cost Explorer and the detailed Cost and Usage Report, giving you a clear line of sight into model inference spending. Whether you’re scaling agents across teams, tracking foundation model use by department, or running tools like Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock, this new feature is a game changer for tracking and managing your AI investments. You can get all the details on setting this up in the IAM principal cost allocation documentation.

Now, let’s get into this week’s AWS news…

Headlines

Amazon Bedrock now offers Claude Mythos Preview Anthropic’s most sophisticated AI model to date is now available on Amazon Bedrock as a gated research preview through Project Glasswing. Claude Mythos introduces a new model class focused on cybersecurity, capable of identifying sophisticated security vulnerabilities in software, analyzing large codebases, and delivering state of the art performance across cybersecurity, coding, and complex reasoning tasks. Security teams can use it to discover and address vulnerabilities in critical software before threats emerge. Access is currently limited to allowlisted organizations, with Anthropic and AWS prioritizing internet critical companies and open source maintainers.

AWS Agent Registry for centralized agent discovery and governance now in preview AWS launched Agent Registry through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, providing organizations with a private catalog for discovering and managing AI agents, tools, skills, MCP servers, and custom resources. The registry helps teams locate existing capabilities rather than duplicating them, with semantic and keyword search, approval workflows, and CloudTrail audit trails. It is accessible via the AgentCore Console, AWS CLI, SDK, and as an MCP server queryable from IDEs.

Last week’s launches

Here are some launches and updates from this past week that caught my attention:

• Announcing Amazon S3 Files, making S3 buckets accessible as file systems — Amazon S3 Files transforms S3 buckets into shared file systems that connect any AWS compute resource directly with your S3 data. Built on Amazon EFS technology, it delivers full file system semantics with low latency performance, caching actively used data and providing multiple terabytes per second of aggregate read throughput. Applications can access S3 data through both file system and S3 APIs simultaneously without code modifications or data migration.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service supports Managed Prometheus and agent tracing —Amazon OpenSearch Service now provides a unified observability platform that consolidates metrics, logs, traces, and AI agent tracing into a single interface. The update includes native Prometheus integration with direct PromQL query support, RED metrics monitoring, and OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic convention support for LLM execution visibility. Operations teams can correlate slow traces to logs and overlay Prometheus metrics on dashboards without switching between tools.
• Amazon WorkSpaces Advisor now available for AI powered troubleshooting— AWS launched Amazon WorkSpaces Advisor, an AI powered administrative tool that uses generative AI to help IT administrators troubleshoot Amazon WorkSpaces Personal deployments. It analyzes WorkSpace configurations, detects problems automatically, and provides actionable recommendations to restore service and optimize performance.
• Amazon Braket adds support for Rigetti’s 108 qubit Cepheus QPU — Amazon Braket now offers access to Rigetti’s Cepheus-1-108Q device, the first 100+ qubit superconducting quantum processor on the platform. The modular design features twelve 9 qubit chiplets with CZ gates that offer enhanced resilience to phase errors. It supports multiple frameworks including Braket SDK, Qiskit, CUDA-Q, and Pennylane, with pulse level control for researchers.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page.

Other AWS news

Here are some additional posts and resources that you might find interesting:

Upcoming AWS events

Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

• What’s Next with AWS (April 28, Virtual) Join this livestream at 9am PT for a candid discussion about how agentic AI is transforming how businesses operate. Featuring AWS CEO Matt Garman, SVP Colleen Aubrey, and OpenAI leaders discussing emerging agent capabilities, Amazon’s internal experiences, and new agentic solutions and platform capabilities.

Browse here for upcoming AWS led in person and virtual events, startup events, and developer focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

~ micah

The post AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Mythos Preview in Amazon Bedrock, AWS Agent Registry, and more (April 13, 2026) appeared first on The NOKIA Blog.