• AWS News Blog Happy New Year! • AWS Weekly Roundup: 10,000 AIdeas Competition, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS Managed Instances and more (January 5, 2026) | Happy New Year! • I hope the holidays gave you time to recharge and spend time with your loved ones. • Like every year, I took a few weeks off after AWS re:Invent to rest and plan ahead. • I used some of that downtime to plan the next cohort for Become a Solutions Architect (BeSA). • BeSA is a free mentoring program that I, along with a few other Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees, volunteer to host as a way to help people excel in their cloud and AI careers.
Article Summaries:
- AWS announced several key updates in its January 5, 2026 roundup. The Global 10,000 AIdeas Competition remains open until January 21, offering $250,000 in prizes and potential AWS re:Invent exposure. Amazon is launching a free “Become a Solutions Architect” cohort on “Agentic AI on AWS” starting February 21. New EC2 M8gn and M8gb instances, powered by Graviton4, deliver up to 30 % better compute and high network bandwidth. AWS Direct Connect now supports resilience testing via Fault Injection Service. Control Tower gains 176 new Security Hub controls, and AWS Transform for VMware adds automated network conversion for hybrid migrations.
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