The AWS Student Community in Kenya had an exciting week filled with meetups, workshops, and career discussions that concluded with the AWS Student Community Day at Meru University of Science and Technology. The event featured keynotes from Veliswa and Tiffany, covering topics such as GitOps, cloud-native engineering, and AI agent building.
JAWS Days 2026, the largest AWS Community Day in the world, took place on March 7th with over 1,500 attendees. The event included a keynote on building an AI-driven development team by Jeff Barr, along with technical sessions, lightning talks, workshops, and networking parties.
Now, let’s delve into the latest AWS news from last week:
Introducing Amazon Connect Health, Agentic AI Built for Healthcare – Amazon Connect Health is now available with five AI agents for healthcare, including patient verification, appointment management, patient insights, ambient documentation, and medical coding. These features are HIPAA-eligible and can be integrated into existing clinical workflows quickly.
Policy in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is now generally available – This update allows for centralized, fine-grained controls for agent-tool interactions outside the agent code. Security and compliance teams can define tool access and input validation rules using natural language that automatically converts to Cedar, the AWS open-source policy language.
Introducing OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail to run your autonomous private AI agents – Users can now deploy a private AI assistant on their cloud infrastructure with built-in security controls, sandboxed agent sessions, HTTPS support, and device pairing authentication. Amazon Bedrock serves as the default model provider, and integration with messaging platforms like Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, and Discord is possible.
AWS announces pricing for VPC Encryption Controls – VPC Encryption Controls, a feature for encrypting traffic flows within and across VPCs, has transitioned from a free preview to a paid feature. Users can audit and enforce encryption-in-transit of all traffic flows within a region, with monitor mode to detect unencrypted traffic and enforce mode to prevent it.
Database Savings Plans now support Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Neptune Analytics – Users can save up to 35% on eligible serverless and provisioned instance usage with a one-year commitment. Savings Plans automatically apply across different engines, instance families, sizes, and AWS Regions.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now offers AI-powered environment analysis – Elastic Beanstalk can now collect data on environment health and send it to Amazon Bedrock for analysis when degraded. The service provides troubleshooting recommendations tailored to the environment’s current state.
AWS simplifies IAM role creation and setup in service workflows – Users can now create and configure IAM roles directly within service workflows through a new in-console panel. This feature supports various services like Amazon EC2, Lambda, EKS, ECS, Glue, and CloudFormation.
Accelerate Lambda durable functions development with new Kiro power – Kiro assists in building resilient, long-running applications and AI workflows with guidance on replay models, concurrent execution patterns, error handling, and deployment best practices.
Amazon GameLift Servers launches DDoS Protection – Session-based multiplayer games can now be protected against DDoS attacks using a co-located relay network that authenticates client traffic and enforces per-player traffic limits at no additional cost.
For more AWS announcements, visit the What’s New with AWS page.
In the AWS community, some posts that caught our attention include:
– Building a portable AI memory layer with MCP, AWS Bedrock, and a Chrome Extension
– Exploring the concept of an AI agent generating a complete web application at runtime
Upcoming AWS events to mark on your calendar include AWS Community GameDay Europe, AWS at NVIDIA GTC 2026, AWS Summits in various locations, and AWS Community Days in Slovakia, Pune, and Mexico City.
Stay updated on upcoming AWS events, startup events, and developer-focused events on the AWS website.
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
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