From Student Rewards to a New Local Zone, Here's What Happened at AWS This Week

Hey everyone, it's Shii! I checked out this week's AWS Blog roundup, "AWS Weekly Roundup," and it was a packed one, from a new perk for students to a new Local Zone and new Bedrock models. Let me round it all up for you!

AWS Blog aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

This week's post comes from Esra Kayabali, a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS who says she's given over 50 talks at universities. The thing she leads with this week is "Student Rewards on AWS Builder Center"!

It's a new benefit for students enrolled at accredited higher education institutions: verify your enrollment through SheerID and complete your Builder Center profile, and you unlock 12 months of premium AWS Skill Builder access (900+ courses, hands-on labs, certification exam prep, and game-based learning).

You also earn badges through actions on Builder Center, like publishing articles, commenting, and staying active, and those badges unlock rewards:

• 7 badges: $10 in AWS Credits
• 14 badges: another $20 in AWS Credits
• 21 badges: an AWS Foundational Certification exam voucher ($100 value)

This program represents a commitment of over $500 million in resources for this back-to-school season. It's open to students 18 or older, enrolled at accredited higher education institutions worldwide, subject to verification and applicable terms.

Last week's major launches

Beyond Student Rewards, here's what else launched last week:

• A new AWS Local Zone in Las Vegas: supports Amazon EC2 C7i, M7i, R7i, and C8gn instances, plus Amazon EBS, ECS, EKS, Application Load Balancer, and AWS Direct Connect. AWS Local Zones are now available in more than 30 metro areas worldwide. On top of that, the Europe (London) Region got a fourth Availability Zone, adding next-generation AI/ML capacity with Trn3 and P6 accelerated instances
• Amazon Bedrock now supports SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6: a frontier model for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, now available with cross-Region inference through the Responses, Chat Completions, and Converse APIs
• Amazon Bedrock expands OpenAI GPT-5.6 support (Sol, Terra, and Luna): available via the Responses, Converse, and Chat Completions APIs, plus new cross-Region inference. Geo cross-Region inference routes requests within a predefined geography (with new US Geo support), while Global cross-Region inference serves requests from any commercial AWS Region at a lower per-token cost

What changes

With Student Rewards, students can dive into Skill Builder content and build cloud and AI skills without worrying about cost, and collecting badges gives them extra motivation along the way.

On the infrastructure side, the new Las Vegas Local Zone and the new London Availability Zone give you more options for running low-latency applications and AI/ML workloads close to users. And the cross-Region inference support for Grok 4.6 and GPT-5.6 on Bedrock widens your options for picking models and optimizing cost.

Dive Deep

The original post also covered a bunch of other updates:

• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports batch termination: you can pass up to 100 instance IDs at once to the TerminateInstanceInAutoScalingGroup API, cutting down the number of API calls needed to scale down an Auto Scaling group. Built for workloads that need to scale down fast, like AI/ML training jobs or container orchestrators
• AWS CloudShell now includes a built-in visual file editor: launch it straight from your shell session with a single edit command, with syntax highlighting, find-and-replace, multi-line selection, copy-paste, and undo-redo. You can edit and run deployment scripts, CloudFormation templates, or Lambda functions without leaving the browser session
• AgentCore payments is now GA in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: includes Quick Create for one-click Coinbase credential provisioning in the AgentCore console, a curated Coinbase Bazar MCP server of pay-per-use x402 endpoints, support for the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), and the x402 "upto" scheme for pay-per-inference and dynamic pricing
• AWS Glue 6.0 arrives with a 30% price cut and full Iceberg v3 support: built on a modernized runtime (Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.13, Scala 2.13), it's 30% cheaper than previous Glue versions. Iceberg v3 support adds the VARIANT data type with automatic shredding for faster reads on semi-structured data, deletion vectors for faster row-level updates, geometry and geography types for spatial data, and flexible schema evolution

Other posts covered a refreshed AWS sign-in experience (a unified email entry point and a simplified session-selection page for managing multiple active sessions), plans for new AWS Builder Lofts in Berlin, Hyderabad, and São Paulo (the San Francisco location has welcomed more than 22,500 developers so far), and Amazon WorkSpaces being named a Leader for the third year running in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service, the first year the evaluation included WorkSpaces for AI agents.

Wrap-up

• AWS Builder Center now offers Student Rewards for students: verify with SheerID for 12 months of premium Skill Builder access, plus AWS Credits and a certification voucher as you collect badges
• A new AWS Local Zone launched in Las Vegas, and the London Region gained a fourth Availability Zone
• Amazon Bedrock added cross-Region inference support for Grok 4.6 and OpenAI GPT-5.6
• Plenty of practical updates too: EC2 Auto Scaling batch termination, a CloudShell visual editor, AgentCore payments GA, and Glue 6.0's price cut with Iceberg v3 support

From students to infrastructure teams to AI builders, there was something in this week's roundup for just about everyone!