AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS AI/ML Scholars program, Agent Plugin for AWS Serverless, and more (March 30, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

The March 30, 2026 AWS Weekly Roundup highlights the new AWS AI & ML Scholars program, which will offer free generative AI education to up to 100,000 people and fully funded Udacity Nanodegrees to 4,500 top participants. It also emphasizes new tools for serverless development, SageMaker IDE integration, expanded Lambda Managed Instance capacity, and streaming speech synthesis. AWS Summit and Community Day events are also scheduled worldwide.

AWS AI & ML Scholars Program

• Open to anyone aged 18 or older, with no prior AI or machine learning experience required.
• Includes:
  • A foundational generative AI Challenge phase.
  • A fully funded three-month Udacity Nanodegree for the top 4,500 performers.
• Applications close June 24, 2026.

Serverless and Database Improvements

• Aurora PostgreSQL express configuration enables serverless databases to be created and connected in seconds using preconfigured defaults.
• Aurora PostgreSQL is now part of the AWS Free Tier, with eligible new customers receiving AWS credits.
• The Agent Plugin for AWS Serverless adds skills, sub-agents, and Model Context Protocol servers to AI coding assistants such as Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor.
  • It supports building, deploying, troubleshooting, and managing production-ready serverless applications.
• The Aurora DSQL Connector for Ruby automatically generates authentication tokens for each connection while remaining compatible with the pg gem.

SageMaker and AWS Console Updates

• SageMaker Studio now supports remote connections from Kiro and Cursor, combining those IDEs’ coding workflows with SageMaker’s scalable compute.
• The AWS Management Console now supports visual customization, including account colors and hiding unused regions or services to reduce interface clutter.

Expanded Lambda Managed Instance Capacity

• The file descriptor limit has increased from 1,024 to 4,096, supporting higher-concurrency and file-intensive workloads.
• Functions can now use up to:
  • 32 GB of memory
  • 16 vCPUs
• Users can select memory-to-vCPU ratios of 2:1, 4:1, or 8:1 for workloads such as data processing, media transcoding, and scientific simulations.

Conversational Speech with Amazon Polly

• Polly’s new Bidirectional Streaming API supports incremental text-to-speech generation.
• Audio synthesis can begin before an LLM or other application has produced the complete response, making it better suited to conversational AI.

Upcoming AWS Events

• AWS Summits are free, in-person events covering cloud, AI, best practices, and networking.
• Upcoming locations include Paris, London, Bengaluru, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and Stockholm.
• AWS Community Days in San Francisco and Romania will feature community-led talks, workshops, and hands-on labs.

AWS developers can follow the AWS News Blog and “What’s New with AWS” for additional announcements, while the AWS Builder Center and Events and Webinars pages provide opportunities for learning and community participation.