# The AWS Builder Center Goes Mobile and More: A Roundup of the Latest from the AWS Builder Community
Imagine being stuck on a delayed train somewhere in the Netherlands, with nothing but a phone and a few spare minutes to spare. For many in the AWS builder community, those moments of idle time are now far more productive thanks to a new mobile app that brings the entire Builder Center experience right to your fingertips.
## The AWS Builder Center Mobile App Is Here
The AWS Builder Center is now available as a dedicated mobile application on both iOS and Android. This expansion moves the platform well beyond its previous desktop and web-only roots, giving builders a way to stay connected to the community no matter where they are.
Once signed in with your AWS Builder ID, your sessions persist across devices seamlessly. From the mobile app, you can browse trending articles, explore over 600 AWS Skill Builder courses, and manage hands-on workshops — complete with free sandbox environments — all from your phone or tablet. The app also lets you follow AWS Heroes, Community Builders, and User Group Leaders, check Builder Loft event calendars in real time, and receive push notifications tailored to the topics and communities you care about. A Wishlist feature is also built in, allowing users to submit product feedback directly to AWS teams.
The app is available worldwide through both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, making it accessible to builders everywhere.
## New Community Features: Polls and Zero to Shipped
Two standout features were introduced this week that aim to strengthen community engagement and hands-on innovation.
**Polls** give community members a way to pose questions directly from the Home feed. Creating a poll is simple — write your question, add two to five answer options, set a deadline, and the community votes. Results update live, and discussions continue in the comments section beneath each poll. All votes are anonymous, and creators only see aggregate counts and percentages, ensuring honest and unbiased participation.
The **Zero to Shipped hackathon** runs from September 18 through October 2. Participants connect their coding agents to AWS, build a complete application, and deploy it live on AWS infrastructure. The competition is fierce but the rewards are substantial: five winning projects each receive $5,000 in AWS credits alongside an AWS Builder swag bundle, all drawn from a prize pool totaling $28,000.
## Major AWS Product Launches This Week
Beyond the Builder Center updates, the week brought a wave of significant product announcements and general availability releases.
### Amazon Connect Talent
Amazon Connect Talent is now generally available as an AI-powered hiring solution designed for talent acquisition teams managing large-scale recruitment. Leveraging decades of Amazon’s own hiring methodology, Connect Talent deploys AI agents to conduct structured voice interviews, administer evidence-based assessments, and score candidates in a consistent, unbiased manner.
Candidates can interview from any device at any time — 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Recruiters then review scores, transcripts, and detailed evaluations the following morning. All candidate data is anonymized during the AI evaluation process, and every competency score is tied to specific evidence extracted from the interview. Ultimately, recruiters retain full decision authority over every hire. The general availability release includes competency-based assessments, AI-led voice interviews with adaptive questioning, a brand-customizable mobile-first candidate portal, and streamlined admin onboarding tools.
### Amazon Corretto 27
Amazon Corretto 27, a Feature Release version of the no-cost, multi-platform OpenJDK distribution, is now available for download on Linux, Windows, and macOS. Support is guaranteed through April 2027. Key highlights of this release include G1 being set as the default garbage collector across all environments, post-quantum hybrid key exchange for TLS 1.3, compact object headers enabled by default for a reduced memory footprint, and JFR in-process data redaction to strip sensitive data from Java Flight Recorder recordings before they leave the JVM. Additionally, Corretto 27 continues previewing enhanced pattern matching, structured concurrency, lazy constants, and the Vector API incubator.
### Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI on Amazon Bedrock
Kimi K3 has joined Amazon Bedrock as a general availability model for coding and knowledge work. Developed by Moonshot AI, Kimi K3 is described as the company’s most capable model and the first open model to reach 2.8 trillion parameters. It combines native vision capabilities with a 1-million-token context window, making it particularly well suited for long-running coding sessions across large repositories, multi-document analysis, and extended agent workflows.
Moonshot AI reports an approximate 2.5x improvement in scaling efficiency compared to its predecessor, Kimi K2. Notably, Kimi K3 is the first open-weight model on Amazon Bedrock to support explicit prompt caching, which can significantly reduce latency and input costs when reusing context across multiple model calls.
### A Simplified Getting Started Experience
AWS has reimagined the onboarding process for builders starting new projects. Rather than working through a series of configuration tasks first, the new experience lets builders begin with sensible defaults. Sign-up is now possible using existing identities from providers including Google, GitHub, and Apple, and for most new customers, no credit card is required thanks to $100 in free AWS Free Tier credits.
AWS organizes each builder’s work into a project that contains an AWS account and sharing settings, applying security controls automatically. Collaborators can be invited by email without needing to set up IAM users, monthly spend limits can be set starting at $20, and advanced AWS features can be activated later at no additional cost with no migration required. The experience is currently rolling out gradually to new customers.
### Amazon EC2 T8i Instances
New low-cost burstable Amazon EC2 T8i instances are now generally available. Powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors codenamed Granite Rapids, T8i instances are among the most affordable EC2 options and deliver up to 30% better price performance compared to previous-generation T3 instances.
These instances are ideal for workloads with low-to-moderate CPU utilization, including microservices, low-traffic websites, development and testing environments, and small databases. T8i instances offer up to 70% higher compute performance, up to 1.25x higher network bandwidth, and up to 2.4x higher Amazon EBS bandwidth compared to T3, all while using the same CPU credit system for an easy upgrade path.
### AWS Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode
AWS Elastic Beanstalk has introduced Cluster Mode, a new fully managed option for teams running a portfolio of applications on shared infrastructure powered by Amazon EKS. Instead of managing each application in isolation, Cluster Mode lets teams run multiple applications through a single experience with a shared operational baseline, which drives down per-application costs as the portfolio scales.
Source code can be uploaded in Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, or Go, and Elastic Beanstalk handles containerization automatically through Cloud Native Buildpacks when needed. Cluster Mode includes production-grade deployment strategies with automatic rollback, event-driven autoscaling, AWS Secrets Manager integration, native OpenTelemetry observability, and AI-powered troubleshooting. Standard and Cluster Mode environments can run side by side within the same application, enabling teams to migrate one environment at a time without disruption.
## Other Notable AWS Developments
Several additional posts and announcements caught the attention of the builder community this week.
Two new posts explore building on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, an independent cloud environment for Europe that operates as a distinct partition with its own control plane, IAM, billing, console, and service endpoints. The first post provides a walkthrough of architecting a secure landing zone, covering account structure and governance, identity as infrastructure as code, centralized logging, data protection, and partition-aware ARN construction. The second post announces the general availability of Gemma 4 open-weight models on the Amazon Bedrock next-generation inference engine within the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, with inference confined entirely to the eusc-de-east-1 region under a zero data retention and zero operator access model.
A new version of the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime has been announced, representing the managed compute layer for running agents. The updated runtime reclaims memory as a session releases it rather than holding it at peak capacity, ensuring billing reflects real usage throughout the session. It also delivers consistent cold start times regardless of container image size or concurrency by preparing the environment once, snapshotting it, and restoring that snapshot for each new instance. In testing, the new runtime achieved a P75 cold start of approximately 2 seconds from a 200 MB image up to 2 GB — a dramatic improvement over the original runtime’s 5.4 to nearly 30 seconds.
A revised AWS Well-Architected Streaming Media Lens has been published, offering updated architectural best practices for video streaming workloads. The revision expands coverage from the original 2021 version to include five streaming scenarios such as interactive live streaming with Amazon IVS Real-Time Streaming for up to 25,000 concurrent viewers, low-latency live streaming, and ad-supported content monetization. It also introduces new sustainability best practices focused on reducing carbon footprint, expanded observability and incident-response frameworks, and advanced content protection with multi-layered DRM and forensic watermarking.
## Upcoming AWS Events
The AWS calendar remains packed with events for builders and cloud enthusiasts. AWS re:Invent returns to Las Vegas from November 30 to December 4, featuring over 2,000 session times, locations, and speakers. Reserved seating for re:Invent opens on October 6. AWS Summits, which are free in-person events covering cloud and AI, are winding down for the year, with the final Summit taking place in Dubai on September 30 at the Dubai World Trade Center. AWS Community Days are also on the schedule, with upcoming events in Lebanon, Kuala Lumpur, Cebu, Davao, Manchester, and Rome.
—
## Frequently Asked Questions
**Q: Is the AWS Builder Center mobile app free to download?**
A: Yes, the app is available for free download on both the Apple App Store and Google Play Store worldwide.
**Q: Can I access all AWS Skill Builder courses through the mobile app?**
A: Yes, the mobile app provides access to the full catalog of over 600 AWS Skill Builder courses, along with trending articles and hands-on workshops.
**Q: How do polls work on the AWS Builder Center Home feed?**
A: Any user can create a poll by writing a question, adding two to five answer options, and setting a deadline. Community members vote anonymously, and creators can see only aggregate counts and percentages, not individual votes.
**Q: What do I need to enter the Zero to Shipped hackathon?**
A: You need a coding agent connected to AWS. From there, you build a real application and ship it live on AWS. The hackathon runs from September 18 to October 2.
**Q: Is Amazon Connect Talent available for small businesses?**
A: Amazon Connect Talent is designed for talent acquisition teams managing hiring at scale. Small businesses with simpler hiring needs may find standard hiring tools more appropriate, though Connect Talent’s AI-driven approach could benefit any team conducting large volumes of interviews.
**Q: Which programming languages are supported by AWS Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode?**
A: Cluster Mode supports Java, .NET, Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and Go. Elastic Beanstalk handles containerization automatically through Cloud Native Buildpacks when needed.
**Q: What makes the new AWS getting started experience different from the previous process?**
A: The new experience starts with sensible defaults rather than requiring builders to complete configuration tasks upfront. It supports sign-in through Google, GitHub, and Apple, offers $100 in free credits with no credit card for most new customers, and allows collaboration by email without IAM user setup.
**Q: How does the updated AgentCore runtime improve cold start times?**
A: The new runtime prepares the environment once, snapshots it, and restores that snapshot for each new instance. This eliminates the need to rebuild the environment for every cold start, reducing P75 cold start times from roughly 5.4 to nearly 30 seconds down to about 2 seconds.
—
## Conclusion
This week has been a landmark period for the AWS builder community, with the launch of the Builder Center mobile app making it easier than ever to stay engaged on the go. The introduction of polls and the Zero to Shipped hackathon adds new dimensions to community interaction, while the flurry of product announcements — from Amazon Connect Talent and Corretto 27 to T8i instances and Elastic Beanstalk Cluster Mode — underscores AWS’s commitment to expanding its ecosystem with tools that are more accessible, more intelligent, and more cost-effective.
For builders, developers, and IT professionals, these developments offer tangible ways to streamline workflows, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation. Whether you are just getting started with AWS using the simplified onboarding experience or diving into advanced hackathons, there has never been a better time to be part of the AWS builder community.
Keep an eye on the What’s New with AWS page for the latest announcements and stay tuned for next week’s roundup.
Thank you for reading
