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AWS Weekly Roundup: Student Rewards Program, Las Vegas Local Zone, and Key Service Updates

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This weekly roundup details several AWS updates, led by the new Student Rewards program on AWS Builder Center, offering premium Skill Builder access and AWS credits to verified higher education students. Other announcements include a new AWS Local Zone in Las Vegas and a fourth Availability Zone for the Europe (London) Region. Further service enhancements cover batch instance termination for EC2 Auto Scaling, a visual file editor in CloudShell, and expanded AI model support in Amazon Bedrock, including Grok 4.6 and OpenAI GPT-5.6. Additionally, AWS Glue 6.0 is now available, delivering a 30% price reduction and Iceberg v3 support.

  • →Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center now available
  • →Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling supports batch instance termination
  • →AWS CloudShell now includes a built-in visual file editor
  • →Amazon Bedrock expands AI model support and AgentCore payments
  • →New AWS Local Zone in Las Vegas and Europe (London) AZ
Features (4) ›
  • Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center now available

    A new program offers verified higher education students 12 months of premium AWS Skill Builder access. Students can earn badges for engagement, unlocking AWS Credits ($10, $20) and an AWS Foundational Certification exam voucher ($100 value) after achieving 7, 14, and 21 badges respectively. This initiative represents a commitment of over $500 million in resources.

  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling supports batch instance termination

    Users can now terminate up to 100 instance IDs in a single API call to TerminateInstanceInAutoScalingGroup. This feature reduces API calls and facilitates rapid scaling down for workloads like AI/ML training jobs, container orchestrators, and event-driven architectures.

  • AWS CloudShell now includes a built-in visual file editor

    CloudShell integrates a new visual file editor, launchable via a single `edit` command, offering syntax highlighting, find-and-replace, multi-line selection, and undo-redo. This provides a seamless edit-and-run experience directly within the browser-based shell session.

  • Amazon Bedrock expands AI model support and AgentCore payments

    Amazon Bedrock now supports SpaceXAI Grok 4.6 and OpenAI GPT-5.6 models (Sol, Terra, Luna) with cross-Region inference and expanded API support. AgentCore payments are also generally available in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, including Quick Create for Coinbase credential provisioning and support for the Machine Payment Protocol.

Enhancements (2) ›
  • New AWS Local Zone in Las Vegas and Europe (London) AZ

    AWS has launched a new Local Zone in Las Vegas, Nevada, supporting various EC2 instances and services. Additionally, a fourth Availability Zone has been added to the Europe (London) Region, providing next-generation AI/ML capacity with Trn3 and P6 instances alongside general-purpose compute.

  • AWS Glue 6.0 delivers 30% price reduction and Iceberg v3 support

    AWS Glue 6.0, built on Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.13, and Scala 2.13, offers a 30% price reduction compared to previous versions. It also introduces Iceberg v3 support, adding the VARIANT data type with automatic shredding, deletion vectors, spatial data types, and flexible schema evolution.

Read the original announcement →

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-student-rewards-on-aws-builder-center-local-zone-in-las-vegas-and-more-august-24-2026/

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