AWS Builder Centre expands with free sandbox workshops
Tue, 14th Jul 2026 (Today)
AWS's Builder Centre has reached its first anniversary, marking its expansion into a broader community and learning service.
To mark the milestone, AWS has launched sandbox environments that give users a free, pre-provisioned AWS account for workshop exercises. Each sandbox stays active for eight hours before the account and its resources are automatically de-provisioned. Users can run one active sandbox at a time and request one each week.
The service does not require a personal AWS account, a credit card, or manual clean-up. AWS is positioning the feature as a way to lower practical barriers for developers who want to try workshops without setting up their own cloud resources.
Over its first year, Builder Centre has moved beyond its original functions of wishlist voting, community profiles, and a toolbox. It now includes workshops, spaces for user-created groups, a Builders' Library, saved items, article series, view counts, badges and streaks, student status, availability notifications, and sign-in with GitHub and Amazon.
The platform now spans more than 1,500 services across 37 regions through its AWS Capabilities by Region feature. It has also added filters for workshop categories and complexity, giving users more ways to sort content.
Usage figures suggest the community has gained scale. Since launch, 5,548 authors have published 6,448 articles, drawing a combined 10.4 million page views.
According to AWS, the badge system introduced earlier this year has generated 99,226 badges. Community members have also submitted 565 product wishes, of which 10 have shipped and another 20 are on the near-term roadmap.
Several community articles have attracted large audiences. The most-viewed post, Building an AWS Study Buddy with MCP + Strands Agents SDK by Dineshraj Dhanapathy, has passed 50,000 views. Chris Miller's Migrating an EOL Linux Server to AWS in 8 Hours with Kiro has topped 45,000, and Yash Aggarwal's AIdeas: NeuroVoice - Multimodal AI for Early Screening of Neurological Diseases has reached 38,000.
Security updates
Alongside the Builder Centre update, AWS outlined product changes across security, machine learning, containers, and databases. One of the more notable additions is Network Scanning in AWS Security Hub.
The new function identifies resources that are reachable from the public internet by probing them externally rather than relying only on internal configuration analysis. This complements existing network reachability findings in Security Hub, which flag configurations that could make a resource reachable.
AWS said the feature discovers public IP addresses, virtual machines, and load balancers across AWS and Microsoft Azure environments, identifies reachable ports, and determines which services are running behind them. Each reachable port generates a Security Hub finding, which is then correlated with other information in Security Hub Exposures to assess broader risk.
Existing customers can enable Network Scanning in individual accounts and regions or across an organisation through a configuration policy. For new Security Hub users, the function is switched on by default and is included with Security Hub Essentials at no extra cost.
AWS has also extended Security Hub to monitor Microsoft Azure resources. The service now offers unified posture management, vulnerability management, and security response across both cloud providers, with AWS and Azure findings shown in the same view and using the same formats and automation workflows.
AI and infrastructure
In machine learning, Amazon SageMaker Studio now integrates with Hugging Face for one-click model deployment and customisation. Users can move from finding a supported model on Hugging Face to opening the corresponding workflow page in SageMaker Studio with the model pre-loaded.
New users receive a Studio environment set up in seconds with pre-configured permissions for serverless model customisation, model evaluation, and deployment to SageMaker or Bedrock endpoints. Verified users also receive default GPU access to G5, G6, and G4dn instances without requesting quota increases, with quota use shown inside the Studio environment.
AWS has also reduced management fees for GPU-related infrastructure on Amazon EKS Auto Mode and Amazon ECS Managed Instances. G-series fees are down 35%, while P-series and AWS Trainium fees are down 60%. The lower pricing is applied automatically to existing clusters.
EKS Auto Mode now includes automatic parallel image pulling on GPU instances with local NVMe storage and accelerator-aware node repair. ECS Managed Instances now provides GPU metrics through Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and automatic health monitoring for GPU hardware failures.
Database changes
Amazon Aurora DSQL change data capture is now generally available. The service streams the results of insert, update, and delete operations as change events to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.
The feature can be used to synchronise data across microservices, trigger Lambda functions, or send changes to S3, Redshift, and OpenSearch Service through Amazon Data Firehose. AWS said the streaming has no impact on database workload performance and does not require users to manage infrastructure.
Outside its core service announcements, AWS also disclosed several software projects tied to artificial intelligence and developer access. These include Loom for AWS, an open-source platform for building agents with AWS Strands Agents and deploying them on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, a self-hosted Claude apps gateway for AWS, and OAuth support for AWS MCP Server.
The updates show AWS continuing to tie community tools, cloud security, developer workflows, and AI software more closely to its broader cloud platform, while Builder Centre's usage figures suggest it is building a sizeable audience around technical content and peer-led learning.