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.
Originally published at aws.amazon.com
