AWS Builder Center Turns 1, Security Hub Gets Network Scanning, and Loom for AWS Arrives!

Hi everyone, it's Shiichan! AWS had so much exciting news again this week, so let me dive right in!

AWS Blog aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

This time I'm bringing you the July 13 edition of the AWS Blog weekly roundup post, "AWS Weekly Roundup"! The headline story is a look back at AWS Builder Center, which just turned one year old. On top of that, there's a new network scanning capability in Security Hub, the Loom for AWS agent-building platform, and a lot more packed into this edition!

Why it matters

The AWS Weekly Roundup is a post where AWS itself gathers up the week's announcements. This week you can clearly see three threads running through it: community growth, stronger security, and infrastructure for building agents. It's a great edition for getting a feel for where AWS is focusing its energy right now!

What changes

First, AWS Builder Center. It launched on July 9, 2025, and in just one year it has grown into a full ecosystem with sandbox environments, workshops, Spaces, and a Builders' Library. Rick Suttles published a feature timeline covering the whole year's journey.

The numbers behind that growth are pretty striking:

• 5,548 authors have published 6,448 articles
• Combined page views have passed 10.4 million
• 99,226 badges have been earned (counted since March 2026)
• 565 community wishes have been submitted, with 10 shipped and 20 on the roadmap

Security Hub gained a new "network scanning" capability that actually finds resources reachable from the public internet. It's a way to catch cases where a resource you thought wasn't exposed turns out to be visible from the outside after all.

Loom for AWS is a new open-source platform for building agents. It bundles up the management features you need when building agents with AWS Strands Agents.

Dive Deep

Here's a rundown of the concrete details from the source, organized by topic.

AWS Builder Center: new sandbox environments

To mark the anniversary, a new feature called "sandbox environments" was added for workshops.

• Free, pre-provisioned AWS accounts you can use without a personal account or credit card
• Each environment automatically de-provisions after 8 hours
• You can request one per week

The post also highlighted popular community articles, including "Building an AWS Study Buddy with MCP + Strands Agents SDK" by Dineshraj Dhanapathy (50,000+ views), "Migrating an EOL Linux Server to AWS in 8 Hours with Kiro" by Chris Miller (45,000+ views), and "AIdeas: NeuroVoice – Multimodal AI for Early Screening of Neurological Diseases" by Yash Aggarwal (38,000+ views).

Security Hub: network scanning and Azure support

Here's how Security Hub's network scanning works:

• It probes your environment from the internet to verify actual reachability
• It discovers public IPs, virtual machines, and load balancers across both AWS and Azure
• It identifies which ports are reachable and what services are running
• It generates findings that include the discovered evidence
• It's included with Security Hub Essentials at no additional cost

Security Hub also now monitors Microsoft Azure resources, giving you unified posture management across both clouds. It automatically discovers Azure VMs, container images, Function Apps, and identities.

SageMaker Studio x Hugging Face, plus compute price cuts

SageMaker Studio now supports one-click deployment of Hugging Face models. New customers get:

• A Studio environment that spins up in seconds
• Permissions pre-configured for serverless customization and fine-tuning
• Default GPU access on G5 / G6 / G4dn instances, without needing to request a quota increase

On the compute pricing side, starting July 1, 2026, GPU management fees for EKS Auto Mode and ECS Managed Instances came down.

• G-series management fees cut by 35%
• P-series and AWS Trainium management fees cut by 60%
• The cuts apply automatically to existing clusters

Separately, change data capture (CDC) for Amazon Aurora DSQL is now generally available. It streams insert, update, and delete operations to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, useful for syncing microservices, triggering Lambda functions, and delivering data to S3, Redshift, and OpenSearch Service.

New faces in agent development

• Loom for AWS — an open-source platform for building agents with AWS Strands Agents. It comes with a unified management UI and backend API, identity provider integration with scope-based authorization, multi-tenant security through RBAC and ABAC, agent lifecycle management, integration with the AWS Agent Registry, and human-in-the-loop review capabilities. It's available in AWS Labs on GitHub
• Claude Apps Gateway for AWS — a self-hosted control plane for centralized control over access, cost, and policy for Claude Code and Claude Desktop. It supports OIDC-compliant identity providers, per-user and per-group spend caps, routing to either Amazon Bedrock or Claude Platform on AWS, and can be deployed as a stateless container
• OAuth support for the AWS MCP Server — agents can now connect using browser-based OAuth with AWS Console or CLI credentials. It supports IAM federation and AWS IAM Identity Center, and uses short-lived access and refresh tokens

Upcoming events

Free in-person AWS Summits are coming up in Taipei (July 15), Bogotá (July 30), Jakarta (August 6), Mexico City (August 12), Johannesburg (August 19), and Zurich (September 2). AWS Community Days are also planned in Yaoundé and Ahmedabad (July 25), Belo Horizonte, Ottawa, and Tulsa (August 22), and Toronto (August 29).

Wrap-up

Here are the key points from this week's AWS Weekly Roundup:

• AWS Builder Center turned 1! New features like sandbox environments were added, and the platform has grown to 5,548 authors publishing 6,448 articles
• Security Hub gained "network scanning," which automatically surfaces exposed resources you might not know are reachable, plus support for monitoring Azure resources
• SageMaker Studio can now one-click deploy Hugging Face models, and GPU management fees dropped by up to 60%
• CDC for Amazon Aurora DSQL went GA, and agent-development infrastructure grew with Loom for AWS and Claude Apps Gateway for AWS

This was a week packed with useful details for anyone looking to tighten up security, cut compute costs, or find infrastructure for building agents!