AWS re:Invent 2025: The Complete Platform Engineering Guide
🎙️ Listen to our 4-part podcast series on AWS re:Invent 2025:
TL;DR​
AWS re:Invent 2025 delivered the most significant platform engineering announcements in years. Agentic AI became the defining theme: AWS DevOps Agent achieves 86% root cause identification, Kiro has 250,000+ developers, and Gartner predicts 40% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2027 due to data foundation gaps. Infrastructure hit new scale: EKS Ultra Scale supports 100K nodes (vs 15K GKE, 5K AKS), Graviton5 delivers 192 cores with 25% better performance, Trainium3 cuts AI training costs by 50%. Developer experience evolved: Lambda Durable Functions enable year-long workflows, EKS Capabilities bring managed Argo CD/ACK, and the EKS MCP Server enables natural language cluster management. Werner Vogels coined "verification debt" in his final keynote, warning that AI generates code faster than humans can understand it. For platform teams, this isn't about AI replacing engineers—it's about evolving skills from writing runbooks to evaluating AI-generated mitigation plans.
Key Statistics​
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Agentic AI & Automation | ||
| Kiro autonomous agent users globally | 250,000+ | AWS |
| AWS DevOps Agent root cause identification | 86% | AWS |
| Nova Act browser automation reliability | 90%+ | AWS |
| Bedrock AgentCore evaluation frameworks | 13 | AWS |
| Agentic AI projects predicted to fail by 2027 | 40%+ | Gartner |
| Day-to-day decisions by agentic AI by 2028 | 15% | Gartner |
| Kindle team time savings with DevOps Agent | 80% | AWS |
| Infrastructure & Compute | ||
| EKS Ultra Scale max nodes per cluster | 100,000 | AWS |
| GKE max nodes (standard cluster) | 15,000 | AWS |
| AKS max nodes | 5,000 | AWS |
| Max Trainium accelerators per EKS cluster | 1.6 million | AWS |
| Anthropic Claude latency KPI improvement with EKS Ultra Scale | 35% → 90%+ | AWS |
| EKS scheduler throughput at 100K scale | 500 pods/sec | AWS |
| Graviton5 cores per chip | 192 | AWS |
| Graviton5 performance improvement vs Graviton4 | 25% | AWS |
| Top 1000 AWS customers using Graviton | 98% | AWS |
| Trainium3 performance vs Trainium2 | 4.4x | AWS |
| Trainium3 cost reduction for AI training | 50% | AWS |
| Trainium3 energy efficiency improvement | 4x | AWS |
| Trainium3 PFLOPs per UltraServer (FP8) | 362 | AWS |
| Developer Experience | ||
| Lambda Durable Functions max workflow duration | 1 year | AWS |
| Database Savings Plans max savings (serverless) | 35% | AWS |
| Database Savings Plans savings (provisioned) | 20% | AWS |
| AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) CRDs | 200+ | AWS |
| ACK supported AWS services | 50+ | AWS |
| EKS Provisioned Control Plane (4XL) max nodes | 40,000 | AWS |
| EKS Provisioned Control Plane (4XL) max pods | 640,000 | AWS |
| Data Services | ||
| S3 Tables query performance improvement | Up to 3x | AWS |
| S3 Tables TPS improvement | Up to 10x | AWS |
| S3 Tables Intelligent-Tiering cost savings | Up to 80% | AWS |
| S3 Tables created since launch | 400,000+ | AWS |
| Aurora DSQL performance vs competitors | 4x faster | AWS |
| Aurora DSQL availability (multi-region) | 99.999% | AWS |
Executive Summary: What Matters Most​
AWS re:Invent 2025 was dominated by three strategic themes:
-
Agentic AI everywhere: From frontier agents (DevOps Agent, Security Agent, Kiro) to platform capabilities (Bedrock AgentCore) to browser automation (Nova Act), AWS is betting that autonomous AI will fundamentally change how software is built and operated.
-
Scale as a competitive moat: EKS Ultra Scale's 100K-node support creates a 6-20x advantage over GKE and AKS. Combined with custom silicon (Graviton5, Trainium3), AWS is positioning itself as the only cloud that can handle next-generation AI training workloads.
-
Developer experience simplification: Lambda Durable Functions eliminate Step Functions complexity, EKS Capabilities remove operational toil, natural language interfaces (EKS MCP Server) lower the barrier to Kubernetes operations.
For platform engineering teams, the message is clear: AI will handle operational toil (triage, analysis, routine fixes), humans will handle judgment calls (architecture, approval, verification). The teams that master this hybrid model will deliver 5-10x productivity gains. The teams that resist will struggle with mounting operational debt.
Part 1: The Agentic AI Revolution​
The Shift from Assistants to Agents​
AWS CEO Matt Garman set the tone in his keynote: "AI assistants are starting to give way to AI agents that can perform tasks and automate on your behalf."
The distinction matters:
AI Assistants are reactive. They wait for you to ask a question, then provide an answer. You drive the interaction.
AI Agents are autonomous. They observe systems, identify problems, analyze root causes, and either fix issues or propose fixes. They work for hours or days without constant human intervention. They navigate complex, multi-step workflows across multiple systems.
AWS announced three "frontier agents"—so named because they represent the cutting edge of what autonomous AI can do today.
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: The agent paradigm fundamentally changes how platform teams interact with AI. Instead of asking questions, you delegate tasks. Instead of getting answers, you review proposed actions. The skill shifts from prompt engineering to evaluation and approval.
AWS DevOps Agent: 86% Root Cause Identification​
The AWS DevOps Agent acts as an autonomous on-call engineer, working 24/7 without sleep or context-switching.
How it works:
- Integrates with CloudWatch (metrics/logs), GitHub (deployment history), ServiceNow (incident management)
- Correlates signals across sources that would take humans 30 minutes to gather
- Identifies root causes in 86% of incidents based on AWS internal testing
- Generates detailed mitigation plans with expected outcomes and risks
- Humans approve before execution—the agent stops at the approval stage
Real-world impact: The Kindle team reported 80% time savings using CloudWatch Investigations, the underlying technology powering DevOps Agent.
Availability: Public preview in US East (N. Virginia), free during preview.
The critical insight: DevOps Agent handles triage and analysis—the tasks that consume the first 20-40 minutes of any incident. You make the decision with full context instead of spending that time gathering information. The role evolves from first responder to decision-maker.
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: Start mapping how DevOps Agent fits with your existing incident management tools (PagerDuty, OpsGenie). Define approval processes now while it's in preview. Who can approve AI-generated fixes? What's the review bar? How do you handle disagreement with an agent's recommendation?
AWS Security Agent: Context-Aware Application Security​
The AWS Security Agent goes beyond pattern matching to understand your application architecture.
Key capabilities:
- AI-powered design reviews: Catches security issues in architecture decisions before code is written
- Contextual code analysis: Understands data flow across your entire application, not just individual files
- Intelligent penetration testing: Creates customized attack plans informed by security requirements, design documents, and source code
What makes it different: Traditional static analysis tools flag patterns ("this code uses eval"). Security Agent understands intent and context ("this admin endpoint uses eval for configuration, but it's protected by IAM and only accessible from VPC endpoints").
Availability: Public preview in US East (N. Virginia), free during preview. All data remains private—never used to train models.
💡 Key Takeaway: Security Agent shifts security left in a practical way. Instead of handing developers a list of CVEs to fix after code review, the agent participates earlier in the process—understanding context rather than just matching patterns.
Kiro: 250,000+ Developers Building with Autonomous Agents​
Kiro is the autonomous developer agent that navigates across multiple repositories to fix bugs and submit pull requests. Over 250,000 developers are already using it globally.
Key differentiators:
- Persistent context: Unlike chat-based assistants, Kiro maintains context across sessions for hours or days
- Team learning: Understands your coding standards, test patterns, deployment workflows
- Multi-repository navigation: Works across your entire codebase, not just single files
- Pull request workflow: Submits proposed changes for human review before merge
Amazon made Kiro the official development tool across the company, using it internally at scale.
Startup incentive: Free Kiro Pro+ credits available through AWS startup program.
💡 Key Takeaway: Kiro represents the "developer agent" category—autonomous systems that can take development tasks and execute them across your codebase. The human review step remains critical, treating AI-generated code the same way you'd treat code from any new team member.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Building Production-Ready Agents​
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is the platform for building custom AI agents. At re:Invent 2025, AWS announced major enhancements:
Policy in AgentCore (Preview): Set explicit boundaries using natural language. "This agent can read from this database but not write." "This agent can access production logs but not customer PII." Deterministic controls that operate outside agent code.
AgentCore Evaluations: 13 pre-built evaluation systems for monitoring agent quality—correctness, safety, tool selection accuracy. Continuous assessment for AI agent quality in production.
AgentCore Memory: Agents develop a log of information on users over time and use that information to inform future decisions. Episodic functionality allows agents to learn from past experiences.
Framework agnostic: Supports CrewAI, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Strands Agents.
Adoption: In just five months since preview, AgentCore has seen 2 million+ downloads. Organizations include PGA TOUR (1,000% content writing speed improvement, 95% cost reduction), Cohere Health, Cox Automotive, Heroku, MongoDB, Thomson Reuters, Workday, and Swisscom.
💡 Key Takeaway: If you're building custom agents, AgentCore provides the production infrastructure—policy controls, memory, evaluations—that enterprises require. The framework-agnostic approach means you're not locked into AWS-specific patterns.
Amazon Nova Act: 90% Browser Automation Reliability​
Amazon Nova Act is a service for building browser automation agents, powered by a custom Nova 2 Lite model optimized for UI interactions.
The 90% reliability claim: Nova Act achieves over 90% task reliability on early customer workflows, trained through reinforcement learning on hundreds of simulated web environments.
Use cases:
- Form filling and data extraction
- Shopping and booking flows
- QA testing of web applications
- CRM and ERP automation
Real-world results:
- Hertz: Accelerated software delivery by 5x, eliminated QA bottleneck using Nova Act for end-to-end testing
- Sola Systems: Automated hundreds of thousands of workflows per month
- 1Password: Reduced manual steps for users accessing logins
What makes it work: Nova Act diverges from standard training methods by utilizing reinforcement learning within synthetic "web gyms"—simulated environments that allow agents to train against real-world UI scenarios.
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: Browser automation has traditionally been fragile (Selenium tests breaking on minor UI changes). Nova Act's 90% reliability suggests a step-change in what's possible. Consider it for QA automation, internal tool workflows, and data extraction tasks.
The 40% Failure Warning: Why Agentic AI Projects Fail​
Gartner predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls.
Primary causes:
-
Inadequate data foundations: Agents need high-quality, timely, contextualized data. When agents act on outdated or incomplete data, results range from inefficiencies to outright failures.
-
Data silos: Agents need to access information across systems, but most enterprises have data locked in disconnected silos without API access.
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Trust in data quality: If the data an agent uses is stale, incomplete, or inaccurate, the agent's outputs will be too.
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Cross-organizational governance: Who's responsible when an agent accesses data from multiple teams? What are the audit requirements?
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Data consumption patterns: Agents consume data differently than humans—they need APIs, not dashboards.
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"Agent washing": Many vendors rebrand existing RPA tools, chatbots, and AI assistants without substantial agentic capabilities. Gartner estimates only about 130 of thousands of agentic AI vendors are real.
The opportunity: Despite the high failure rate, Gartner predicts 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through agentic AI by 2028 (up from virtually none in 2024), and 33% of enterprise software applications will embed agentic AI by 2028 (vs less than 1% today).
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: Platform teams thinking about agentic AI should start with a data readiness assessment. Are the systems these agents need to access actually accessible via API? Is the data fresh and accurate? Do you have governance frameworks in place? Without solid data foundations, even the most sophisticated agents will fail.
Werner Vogels' Verification Debt Concept​
In his final re:Invent keynote after 14 years, Werner Vogels introduced a concept every platform engineer should internalize: verification debt.
The problem: AI generates code faster than humans can comprehend it. This creates a dangerous gap between what gets written and what gets understood. Every time you accept AI-generated code without fully understanding it, you're taking on verification debt. That debt accumulates until something breaks in production.
The solution: Code reviews become "the control point to restore balance."
Vogels was emphatic: "We all hate code reviews. It's like being a twelve-year-old and standing in front of the class. But the review is where we bring human judgment back into the loop."
His answer to "Will AI take my job?": "Will AI take my job? Maybe. Will AI make me obsolete? Absolutely not—if you evolve."
The Renaissance Developer framework (5 qualities):
- Be curious: AI lowers the barrier to learning—explore any technology in hours, not months
- Think in systems: Architecture matters more than ever—AI writes code, you design systems
- Communicate precisely: AI amplifies unclear thinking—vague prompts produce vague code
- Own your work: "Vibe coding is fine, but only if you pay close attention to what is being built"
- Become a polymath: Cross-disciplinary skills differentiate—breadth plus depth equals competitive advantage
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: Organizations like Oxide Computer Company are already building verification debt into policy. Their internal LLM policy states: "Wherever LLM-generated code is used, it becomes the responsibility of the engineer." Engineers must self-review all LLM code before peer review. The closer code is to production, the greater care required.
Part 2: Infrastructure at Unprecedented Scale​
EKS Ultra Scale: 100,000 Nodes per Cluster​
Amazon EKS Ultra Scale now supports up to 100,000 worker nodes per cluster—a 6-20x advantage over competitors:
- EKS: 100,000 nodes
- GKE (standard): 15,000 nodes
- AKS: 5,000 nodes
What this enables: Up to 1.6 million AWS Trainium accelerators or 800,000 NVIDIA GPUs in a single cluster. This is the scale required for training trillion-parameter models, where training jobs fundamentally can't be distributed across multiple clusters easily.
The technical breakthrough: The bottleneck at scale has always been etcd, Kubernetes' core data store. Etcd uses Raft consensus for replication, which works great at normal scale but becomes limiting at 100K nodes.
AWS's solution:
- Replaced etcd's Raft backend with "journal": An internal AWS component built over a decade that provides ultra-fast, ordered data replication with multi-AZ durability
- Moved etcd to in-memory storage (tmpfs): Order-of-magnitude performance wins—higher read/write throughput, predictable latencies, faster maintenance
- Doubled max database size to 20GB: More headroom for cluster state
- Partitioned key-space: Split hot resource types into separate etcd clusters, achieving 5x write throughput
Performance results:
- 500 pods/second scheduling throughput at 100K scale
- Cluster contains 10+ million Kubernetes objects (100K nodes, 900K pods)
- Aggregate etcd database size: 32GB across partitions
- API latencies remain within Kubernetes SLO targets
Real-world adoption: Anthropic uses EKS Ultra Scale to train Claude. Their end-user latency KPIs improved from an average of 35% to consistently above 90%. The percentage of write API calls completing within 15ms increased from 35% to 90%.
💡 Key Takeaway: EKS Ultra Scale isn't just about bragging rights—it's about enabling AI workloads that simply can't run on other clouds. If your organization is training large models or running massive batch inference workloads, EKS is now the only Kubernetes platform that can handle it at scale.
Graviton5: 192 Cores, 25% Better Performance​
AWS Graviton5 is AWS's most powerful and efficient CPU:
Specifications:
- 192 cores per chip (up from 96 in Graviton4)
- 25% better compute performance vs Graviton4
- 33% lower inter-core latency
- 5x larger L3 cache
- Built on Arm Neoverse V3 architecture using TSMC's 3nm process
Adoption: 98% of AWS's top 1,000 customers are already using Graviton. For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton.
Real-world results:
- SAP: 35-60% performance improvement for S/4HANA workloads
- Atlassian: 30% higher performance with significant cost reduction
- Honeycomb: 36% better throughput for observability workloads
New instance types: M9g (general purpose), C9g (compute-optimized), R9g (memory-optimized) launching in 2026.
Price-performance advantage: Graviton5 delivers 40% better price-performance vs x86 equivalents, according to AWS benchmarks.
💡 Key Takeaway: Most container workloads compile seamlessly for ARM64. If you're not running Graviton, you're leaving 25-40% price-performance on the table. The migration patterns are well-established now—this is no longer experimental.
Trainium3: 4.4x Performance, 50% Cost Reduction​
AWS Trainium3 UltraServers are AWS's answer to GPU supply constraints and high AI training costs:
Performance metrics:
- 4.4x more compute performance vs Trainium2
- 50% cost reduction for AI training
- 362 FP8 petaflops per UltraServer
- 144 Trainium3 chips per UltraServer
- 4x better energy efficiency
Technical innovation: Built on TSMC's 3nm process, Trainium3 is AWS's first 3nm AI chip. EC2 UltraClusters 3.0 can connect thousands of UltraServers, scaling up to 1 million chips total.
Real-world adoption:
- Anthropic: Using Trainium for Claude training, scaling to over 1 million Trainium2 chips by end of 2025, achieving 60% tensor engine utilization on Trainium2 and over 90% on Trainium3
- Decart: Achieved 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs
- Metagenomi: Using for genomics research AI models
- Ricoh: Using for document processing AI
Future roadmap: AWS announced Trainium4 on the roadmap, which will be NVIDIA NVLink compatible, signaling long-term commitment to custom AI silicon.
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: Trainium3 changes AI economics for organizations willing to optimize for AWS's custom silicon. If you're evaluating AI infrastructure and can adapt your training pipelines, Trainium is now a serious alternative to NVIDIA at half the cost.
Lambda Durable Functions: Year-Long Workflows​
AWS Lambda Durable Functions fundamentally changed what serverless can do.
The old constraint: Lambda timeout is 15 minutes. Complex workflows required Step Functions.
The new capability: Build stateful workflows directly in Lambda that run from seconds to 1 full year.
Two new primitives:
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context.step(): Creates durable checkpoints. Your function executes some code, checkpoints the result, and if anything fails, it resumes from that checkpoint. -
context.wait(): Suspends execution and resumes when an event arrives. You can wait for human approval, external API callbacks, timer expirations—all natively in Lambda.
How it works: Lambda keeps a running log of all durable operations (steps, waits) as your function executes. When your function needs to pause or encounters an interruption, Lambda saves this checkpoint log and stops execution. When it's time to resume, Lambda invokes your function again from the beginning and replays the checkpoint log, substituting stored values for completed operations.
Example use case: A data pipeline that fetches data, waits up to 7 days for human approval, then processes the data after approval. In the old world: Step Functions state machine, callback patterns, state store management. Now: 3 lines of code with context.step() and context.wait().
Additional operations: create_callback() (await external events or human approvals), wait_for_condition() (pause until specific condition met), parallel() and map() for advanced concurrency.
Timeout settings:
- Lambda function timeout (max 15 minutes): Limits each individual invocation
- Durable execution timeout (max 1 year): Limits total time from start to completion
Availability: Generally available in US East (Ohio) with support for Python 3.13/3.14 and Node.js 22/24 runtimes.
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: If you're using Step Functions for straightforward state management, Lambda Durable might be simpler. It's not replacing Step Functions for complex orchestration, but it eliminates a lot of boilerplate for common patterns like human approval workflows, long-running data pipelines, and event-driven orchestration.
Database Savings Plans: Up to 35% Savings​
AWS Database Savings Plans offer a flexible pricing model:
Savings breakdown:
- Serverless deployments: Up to 35% savings
- Provisioned instances: Up to 20% savings
- DynamoDB/Keyspaces on-demand: Up to 18% savings
- DynamoDB/Keyspaces provisioned: Up to 12% savings
Coverage: Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, DocumentDB, Neptune, Keyspaces, Timestream, and AWS Database Migration Service across all regions (except China).
Flexibility: Commitment automatically applies regardless of engine, instance family, size, deployment option, or Region. You can change between Aurora db.r7g and db.r8g instances, shift workloads from EU (Ireland) to US (Ohio), modernize from RDS for Oracle to Aurora PostgreSQL, or from RDS to DynamoDB—and still benefit from discounted pricing.
Commitment: One-year term with no upfront payment required (at launch).
Limitations: Excludes SimpleDB, Timestream LiveAnalytics, Neptune Analytics, Redis, MemoryDB, Memcached, China regions, and AWS Outposts. Only covers instance and serverless usage—storage, backup, IO not included.
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: This is an easy cost optimization lever. If your database spend is stable and predictable, commit today. Stack it with Reserved Instances where applicable. The ROI calculation is straightforward: stable spend equals immediate savings.
Part 3: Kubernetes Evolution and Cloud Operations​
EKS Capabilities: Managed Argo CD, ACK, and KRO​
Amazon EKS Capabilities eliminates operational toil for platform teams:
The problem: Platform teams have been running Argo CD for GitOps and ACK for managing AWS resources from Kubernetes. But maintaining these systems is real work—patching, upgrading, ensuring compatibility, handling scaling.
AWS's solution: EKS Capabilities makes all of that AWS's problem. These capabilities run in AWS service-owned accounts that are fully abstracted from you. AWS handles infrastructure scaling, patching, updates, and compatibility analysis.
Three capabilities:
-
Managed Argo CD: Fully managed Argo CD instance that can deploy applications across multiple clusters. Git becomes your source of truth, Argo automatically remediates drift. The CNCF 2024 survey showed 45% of Kubernetes users are running Argo CD in production or planning to.
-
AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK): Manage AWS resources using Kubernetes CRDs. Provides over 200 CRDs for more than 50 AWS services. Create S3 buckets, RDS databases, IAM roles—all from YAML. No need to install or maintain controllers yourself.
-
Kube Resource Orchestrator (KRO): Platform teams create reusable resource bundles that hide complexity. Developers consume these abstractions without needing to understand the underlying details. This is how you build your internal developer platform on Kubernetes.
Multi-cluster architecture: Run all three capabilities in a centrally managed cluster. Argo CD on that management cluster deploys applications to workload clusters across different regions or accounts. ACK provisions AWS resources for all clusters. KRO creates portable platform abstractions that work everywhere.
Pricing: Per-capability, per-hour billing with no upfront commitments. Additional charges for specific Kubernetes resources managed by the capabilities.
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: GitOps becomes turnkey with EKS Capabilities. The maintenance burden of running Argo CD and ACK disappears. That's real operational toil that goes away, freeing platform teams to focus on higher-value work like building abstractions and improving developer experience.
EKS MCP Server: Natural Language Kubernetes Management​
The EKS MCP Server lets you manage Kubernetes clusters using natural language instead of kubectl.
What is MCP?: Model Context Protocol is an open-source standard that gives AI models secure access to external tools and data sources. Think of it as a standardized interface that enriches AI applications with real-time, contextual knowledge.
What the EKS MCP Server does:
- Say "show me all pods not in running state" → it just works
- Say "create a new EKS cluster named demo-cluster with VPC and Auto Mode" → it does it
- Get logs, check deployments, create clusters—all through conversation
- No kubectl, no kubeconfig required
Enterprise features:
- Hosted in AWS cloud: No local installation or maintenance
- Automatic updates and patching
- AWS IAM integration for security
- CloudTrail integration for audit logging
- Knowledge base built from AWS operational experience managing millions of Kubernetes clusters
AI tool integrations: Works with Kiro (AWS's IDE and CLI), Cursor, Cline, Amazon Q Developer, or custom agents you build.
Availability: Preview release.
💡 Key Takeaway: The MCP Server changes who can operate Kubernetes clusters. AWS is betting that conversational AI turns multi-step manual tasks into simple requests. The barrier to Kubernetes operations just dropped significantly—which has implications for team structure, skill requirements, and developer self-service.
EKS Provisioned Control Plane: Guaranteed Performance​
Amazon EKS Provisioned Control Plane provides guaranteed SLAs for production workloads:
The problem: Standard EKS control planes have variable performance. Under burst loads, you can get unpredictable behavior.
The solution: Pre-allocate control plane capacity with well-defined performance characteristics.
T-shirt sizing:
| Tier | API Request Concurrency | Pod Scheduling Rate | Cluster Database Size | Stress Test Results | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| XL | 1,700 concurrent requests | 100 pods/sec | 5GB | 10,000 nodes, 160K pods | $1.65/hr |
| 2XL | 3,400 concurrent requests | 200 pods/sec | 10GB | 20,000 nodes, 320K pods | $3.30/hr |
| 4XL | 6,800 concurrent requests | 400 pods/sec | 20GB | 40,000 nodes, 640K pods | $6.90/hr |
When to use: Enterprises needing guaranteed SLAs for production workloads, especially those with burst traffic patterns or large-scale deployments.
Flexibility: You can switch tiers as workloads change, or revert to standard control plane during quieter periods.
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: For mission-critical workloads where control plane performance SLAs matter, Provisioned Control Plane provides predictable capacity. The 4XL tier's ability to handle 40,000 nodes and 640,000 pods (8x improvement over standard) makes it suitable for large enterprises consolidating multiple clusters.
CloudWatch Generative AI Observability​
CloudWatch Gen AI Observability provides comprehensive monitoring for AI applications and agents:
What it does: Built-in insights into latency, token usage, and errors across your AI stack—no custom instrumentation required.
Framework support:
- Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (native integration)
- LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI (open-source agentic frameworks)
Why it matters: Agent observability has been a gap. You deploy an agent, and when something goes wrong, you're debugging in the dark. Now you have proper tracing and metrics out of the box.
Additional CloudWatch updates:
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MCP Servers for CloudWatch: Bridge AI assistants to observability data—standardized access to metrics, logs, alarms, traces, and service health data
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Unified Data Store: Automates collection from AWS and third-party sources (CrowdStrike, Microsoft 365, SentinelOne). Everything stored in S3 Tables with OCSF and Apache Iceberg support. First copy of centralized logs incurs no additional ingestion charges.
-
Application Signals GitHub Action: Provides observability insights during pull requests and CI/CD pipelines. Developers can identify performance regressions without leaving their development environment.
-
Database Insights: Cross-account and cross-region monitoring for RDS, Aurora, and DynamoDB from a single monitoring account.
💡 Key Takeaway: As more teams deploy AI agents, observability becomes critical. CloudWatch's native support for agentic frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI) and end-to-end tracing means you can monitor agent performance, identify bottlenecks, and debug failures—just like you do for traditional applications.
Part 4: Data Services for AI Workloads​
S3 Tables with Apache Iceberg: 3x Faster Queries​
Amazon S3 Tables is AWS's first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support:
Performance improvements:
- Up to 3x faster query performance
- Up to 10x higher transactions per second (TPS)
- Automated table maintenance for analytics workloads
Adoption: Over 400,000 tables created since launch.
Key updates at re:Invent 2025:
-
Intelligent-Tiering support: Automatically optimizes table data across three access tiers (Frequent Access, Infrequent Access, Archive Instant Access) based on access patterns—delivering up to 80% storage cost savings without performance impact or operational overhead. S3 Intelligent-Tiering has saved customers over $6 billion to date.
-
Automatic replication across AWS Regions and accounts: Simplifies disaster recovery and multi-region analytics.
Use cases:
- Data lakes requiring ACID transactions
- Analytics workloads with high query concurrency
- Change data capture (CDC) from Aurora Postgres/MySQL for near real-time analytics
- Multi-engine access (Athena, Redshift, EMR, Spark)
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: S3 Tables simplifies data lake management with native Apache Iceberg support and ACID transactions. If you're building data lakes or analytics platforms, the combination of 10x TPS improvement and 80% cost savings via Intelligent-Tiering is compelling.
Aurora DSQL: Distributed SQL with 99.999% Availability​
Amazon Aurora DSQL is a new serverless, distributed SQL database:
Key features:
- Effectively unlimited horizontal scaling: Independent scaling of reads, writes, compute, and storage
- PostgreSQL-compatible: Supports common PostgreSQL drivers, tools, and core relational features (ACID transactions, SQL queries, secondary indexes, joins)
- 99.999% multi-region availability: Strong consistency across regions
- 4x faster than competitors: According to AWS benchmarks
Technical innovation: DSQL decouples transaction processing from storage, so every statement doesn't need to check at commit time. This architectural separation enables the performance and scalability improvements.
Deployment: Create new clusters with a single API call, begin using a PostgreSQL-compatible database within minutes.
Coming soon: Native integrations on Vercel Marketplace and v0—developers can connect to Aurora PostgreSQL, Aurora DSQL, or DynamoDB in seconds.
💡 Key Takeaway: Aurora DSQL addresses the distributed SQL challenge for SaaS applications that need strong consistency across regions. The ability to maintain ACID guarantees while scaling horizontally has traditionally required complex coordination—DSQL makes it turnkey.
What This Means for Your Team: Decision Frameworks​
Framework 1: Should You Adopt AWS DevOps Agent?​
Evaluate if you answer YES to 3+:
- Your team handles 10+ incidents per week
- Mean time to identify (MTTI) is >20 minutes
- You have multiple observability tools (CloudWatch, GitHub, ServiceNow)
- On-call engineers spend >30% time on triage
- You're willing to invest in defining approval processes
If YES: Start with preview in non-production environment. Map integration points with existing incident management tools. Define approval workflows. Train team on evaluating AI-generated mitigation plans.
If NO: Wait for GA and customer case studies showing production results.
Framework 2: Should You Migrate to EKS Ultra Scale?​
Evaluate if you answer YES to 2+:
- You're training AI models requiring 10,000+ GPUs
- You need >15,000 nodes in a single cluster (GKE limit)
- Your workloads can't be easily distributed across multiple clusters
- You're hitting etcd performance limits in existing clusters
- You're willing to run on Trainium or large-scale GPU instances
If YES: EKS Ultra Scale is the only Kubernetes platform that can handle your scale. Start planning migration.
If NO: Standard EKS is sufficient. Monitor your node count growth—plan migration when you cross 10K nodes.
Framework 3: Should You Adopt EKS Capabilities?​
Evaluate if you answer YES to 3+:
- You're running Argo CD or planning GitOps adoption
- You manage AWS resources from Kubernetes (or want to)
- Your team spends >8 hours/month on Argo CD/ACK maintenance
- You operate multi-cluster environments
- You want to build internal developer platform abstractions
If YES: EKS Capabilities eliminates operational toil. The per-capability hourly pricing is likely cheaper than the engineering time spent on maintenance.
If NO: Continue self-hosting if you need deep customization or have existing automation that works well.
Framework 4: Should You Use Lambda Durable Functions?​
Evaluate if you answer YES to 2+:
- You have workflows requiring human approval steps
- You need workflows that run longer than 15 minutes but less than 1 year
- Your Step Functions state machines are mostly linear (not complex branching)
- You want to reduce state management boilerplate
- You're willing to use Python 3.13+/Node.js 22+
If YES: Lambda Durable simplifies common state management patterns. Start migrating straightforward Step Functions workflows.
If NO: Keep using Step Functions for complex orchestration with parallel branches, error handling, and integration with 200+ AWS services.
Framework 5: Should You Invest in Trainium3?​
Evaluate if you answer YES to 3+:
- You're training or fine-tuning large language models
- AI training costs are >$100K/month
- You can adapt training pipelines to AWS custom silicon
- You're willing to invest in optimization for 50% cost reduction
- You're planning multi-year AI infrastructure commitments
If YES: Trainium3's 4.4x performance and 50% cost reduction justify the optimization investment. Follow Anthropic's playbook—they achieved 60% utilization on Trainium2 and 90%+ on Trainium3.
If NO: Stick with NVIDIA GPUs if you need maximum ecosystem compatibility and existing training pipelines work well.
Comparison: AWS vs GCP vs Azure for Platform Engineering​
| Capability | AWS (re:Invent 2025) | GCP | Azure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kubernetes Scale | EKS: 100,000 nodes | GKE: 15,000 nodes (standard) | AKS: 5,000 nodes |
| Custom AI Chips | Trainium3 (4.4x, 50% cost reduction) | TPU v5p/v6e | Azure Maia 100 (preview) |
| Custom CPUs | Graviton5 (192 cores, 25% faster) | Axion (Arm, preview) | Cobalt 100 (Arm, preview) |
| Serverless Workflows | Lambda Durable (1 year max) | Cloud Run/Workflows (no native durable) | Durable Functions (unlimited) |
| Managed GitOps | EKS Capabilities (Argo CD managed) | Config Sync, Anthos | Flux (self-managed) |
| AI Agents | DevOps Agent (86% accuracy), Security Agent, Kiro (250K users) | Gemini Code Assist, Duet AI | GitHub Copilot integration |
| Database Savings | 35% (serverless), 20% (provisioned) | Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) | Reserved Capacity (35%) |
| Data Lakes | S3 Tables (Iceberg, 3x faster, 10x TPS) | BigLake (Iceberg support) | OneLake (Fabric, Delta Lake) |
Where AWS leads:
- Kubernetes scale (6-20x advantage)
- Custom silicon maturity (98% of top 1000 customers on Graviton)
- Agentic AI breadth (3 frontier agents + AgentCore platform)
- Managed GitOps (EKS Capabilities vs self-managed alternatives)
Where competitors lead:
- Azure: Durable Functions unlimited duration (vs Lambda's 1 year)
- GCP: BigQuery performance for analytics, Cloud Run simplicity
- Azure: GitHub integration (Microsoft ownership), native AD/Entra ID
đź’ˇ Key Takeaway: AWS is positioning itself as the platform for AI-scale workloads. If your organization is training large models, running massive batch inference, or building agentic AI applications, AWS has the most comprehensive stack. For traditional web/mobile workloads, the differences are less pronounced.
Action Plan for Platform Engineering Teams​
Immediate Actions (Next 30 Days)​
-
Data readiness assessment: Before investing in agentic AI, audit your data foundations. Are systems accessible via API? Is data fresh and accurate? Do you have governance frameworks?
-
Test DevOps Agent in preview: Integrate with one non-production environment. Map how it fits with PagerDuty/OpsGenie. Define approval processes.
-
Evaluate Database Savings Plans: If database spend is stable, commit today for immediate 20-35% savings.
-
Audit Graviton readiness: Identify which workloads can migrate to ARM64. Most containers work seamlessly—you're leaving 25-40% price-performance on the table.
-
Review Lambda workflows: Identify Step Functions state machines that are mostly linear. Migrate to Lambda Durable for reduced boilerplate.
Medium-term (Next 90 Days)​
-
Define verification debt protocols: Establish code review processes for AI-generated code. Who can approve? What's the review bar? Document expectations.
-
Experiment with EKS Capabilities: If you're running Argo CD or ACK, test managed versions. Calculate time savings from eliminating maintenance toil.
-
Build agent evaluation framework: If you're developing custom agents, implement AgentCore Evaluations. Define quality metrics (correctness, safety, tool selection accuracy).
-
Map EKS scale requirements: Project node count growth over next 24 months. If you'll exceed 15K nodes, plan EKS Ultra Scale migration.
-
Pilot natural language ops: Test EKS MCP Server with subset of team. Evaluate impact on developer self-service and support ticket volume.
Long-term (Next 12 Months)​
-
Skill evolution plan: Shift team skills from writing runbooks to evaluating AI mitigation plans. This is a different skillset—invest in training.
-
Platform abstraction strategy: Use KRO (Kube Resource Orchestrator) to build internal developer platform abstractions. Hide infrastructure complexity.
-
AI infrastructure evaluation: If you're training large models, run cost comparison between Trainium3 and NVIDIA GPUs. Anthropic's 50% cost reduction at 90% utilization is the benchmark.
-
Renaissance Developer framework: Adopt Werner Vogels' 5 qualities. Invest in system thinking, precise communication, polymath skills.
-
Agent-first architecture: Design new systems assuming AI agents will interact with them. Provide APIs, not dashboards. Implement policy controls, audit logging, explicit boundaries.
The 2026 Outlook: Three Predictions​
Prediction 1: Human-in-the-Loop Becomes Industry Standard​
AWS's frontier agents all stop at the approval stage. This pattern will become the industry standard for mission-critical systems. Organizations that automate too aggressively (removing human approval) will suffer high-profile failures that set the industry back.
Why it matters: Platform teams should invest in approval workflows, not full automation. The skill evolution is from first responder to decision-maker with AI-generated context.
Prediction 2: Data Foundations Separate Winners from Losers​
Gartner's 40% failure prediction will prove accurate. The primary differentiator won't be which AI models you use—it'll be whether your data is accessible, accurate, and governed. Organizations with strong data foundations will see 5-10x productivity gains. Organizations with data silos will struggle.
Why it matters: Data readiness assessment should be your first step before any agentic AI investment. Without solid foundations, even the most sophisticated agents will fail.
Prediction 3: Kubernetes Scale Becomes a Competitive Moat​
EKS's 100K-node support creates a 6-20x advantage over GKE and AKS. As AI training workloads require increasingly large single-cluster deployments, organizations will consolidate on AWS. Google and Microsoft will respond, but AWS has a 12-24 month head start.
Why it matters: If your organization is building AI-first products requiring large-scale training, AWS is the only cloud that can handle it today. Make architectural decisions accordingly.
Conclusion: The AI-Native Platform Era​
AWS re:Invent 2025 marked the transition from cloud-native to AI-native platform engineering.
The key shifts:
- From reactive to autonomous: AI agents (DevOps Agent, Security Agent, Kiro) handle operational toil, humans handle judgment calls
- From limited scale to unlimited scale: EKS Ultra Scale's 100K nodes enables workloads that simply can't run elsewhere
- From generic hardware to purpose-built silicon: Graviton5 and Trainium3 deliver 25-50% cost advantages through vertical integration
- From complex orchestration to simple primitives: Lambda Durable Functions eliminate Step Functions boilerplate for common patterns
- From manual operations to natural language: EKS MCP Server enables conversational cluster management
Werner Vogels' verification debt warning should be internalized by every platform engineer. AI speed creates new risks. Code reviews are more important than ever. Organizations that embrace the Renaissance Developer framework—curious, systems-thinking, precise communication, ownership, polymath—will thrive. Organizations that resist will accumulate technical debt faster than they can pay it down.
The teams that master the hybrid model—AI handles triage and analysis, humans handle architecture and approval—will deliver 5-10x productivity gains. The teams that resist will struggle with mounting operational burden as systems grow more complex.
The autonomous DevOps future isn't coming. It's already here. The question isn't whether to engage with it. It's how to shape it for your team.
Sources​
AWS Official Announcements​
- AWS re:Invent 2025: Amazon announces Nova 2, Trainium3, frontier agents
- Top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2025
- AWS DevOps Agent helps accelerate incident response
- Amazon EKS enables ultra scale AI/ML workloads with support for 100K nodes
- Under the hood: Amazon EKS ultra scale clusters
- Announcing Amazon EKS Capabilities
- Build multi-step applications with AWS Lambda durable functions
- Introducing Database Savings Plans for AWS Databases
- Build reliable AI agents with Amazon Nova Act
- Make agents a reality with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Industry Analysis​
- Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by end of 2027
- Werner Vogels foresees rise of the 'renaissance developer'
- Amazon CTO Werner Vogels's 2026 tech predictions
- AWS Debuts a Distributed SQL Database, S3 Tables for Iceberg
- InfoQ: AWS Introduces Durable Functions