Another re:Invent, another firehose of announcements delivered at a pace that suggests AWS gets paid by the feature. I've sifted through the mountain of announcements to pick out a few highlights. Sydney (ap-southeast-2) availability remains a recurring punchline - half of the interesting announcements are US based/limited region only. The theme this year is clearly agentic AI and making serverless pricing more palatable. Our team will be busy testing how these agents work in production. Ask me again in three months!
Also, a bonus at the end highlighting some of the more interesting things on the expo floor.
Tier 1: Actually Exciting (Will Change How We Work)
Native vector storage in S3 for the average Joe - no need to spin up dedicated infrastructure for RAG workloads
Competitive pricing - could be up to 90% cheaper than dedicated vector databases (!)
Integrates with Bedrock Knowledge Bases and OpenSearch for tiered strategies (hot in OpenSearch, warm/cold in S3)
Available in Sydney
Commit to $/hour for 1 year, no upfront. Up to 35% off serverless (a discount for the first time!), 20% off provisioned, 18% off DynamoDB on-demand
Covers Aurora, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, DocumentDB, Neptune, Keyspaces, Timestream, DMS
No 3-year option, doesn't cover storage/backups or older instance generations
Available in Sydney
Evals are critical and if you are not doing them, you definitely should be
Continuous sampling of live agent runs - not just single-shot eval theatre
13 pre-built evaluators: correctness, helpfulness, tool selection accuracy, safety, goal success rate, context relevance. Custom evaluators supported
No need to build your own eval infrastructure when using Bedrock - no more excuses!
Available in Sydney (preview). Pricing TBD but expect evaluator model inferencing + CloudWatch costs
Tier 2: Solid Upgrades (Quietly Useful)
When developers insist on Lambda but want to pay EC2 pricing
Keep the Lambda programming model but run on EC2 instances you choose. AWS handles lifecycle, patching, scaling
Multi-concurrency: one execution environment handles multiple requests/instantiations. No duration charge, decent cost lever for functions running seconds, not milliseconds (!)
15% management fee on top of EC2 price. Code may need refactoring. Scaling is slower (~5 min to double capacity vs near-instant)
Not available in Sydney (US, Tokyo, Ireland only)
Step Functions but in actual code instead of JSON hieroglyphics
Checkpoint/replay model: suspend for up to 1 year, no compute charges during waits (!!!)
Built for multi-step workflows with external callbacks, approval gates, agentic AI loops (with/without human-in-the-loop)
Code must be deterministic (which will be a fun surprise for some teams) and support replay. State management required. Invocation still capped at 15 minutes as before
Not available in Sydney, limited language support
CloudWatch Unified Data Management
AWS consolidating security & ops observability into CloudWatch is either genuinely helpful or a very slow vendor lock-in play. Probably both
Combines CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, Security Hub findings, and third-party logs into a single location
S3 Tables integration lets you query via Athena/Redshift without storage charges
Handles OCSF conversion, supports pipelines for enrichment
Available in Sydney. Standard CloudWatch pricing, no new charges for unified features
Transform composability and Transform custom (agent)
Two related announcements: composability lets us plug our own tools/agents/knowledge bases into AWS Transform; custom agents handle repetitive modernisation (runtime upgrades, SDK updates, Java 8→17). Similar to cline workflows or claude skills. Effectively instructions + workflow
CLI-based workflow: run local, inspect, commit. Agent supposedly learns from feedback
Not a magic button - engineers still need good examples and reviews. But it's Transform as a platform, not just a service
Composability available in Sydney (custom agent pricing is $/agent minute). Custom agents not in Sydney yet
Tier 3: Interesting But Wait-and-See
192 cores on a single socket is a feat of engineering. 25% performance uplift for most workloads (EC2, ECS, EKS)
Pretty cool - Nitro Isolation Engine. A thin Rust layer with formal verification for workload isolation. Aimed at regulated industries needing provable security guarantees (not a use case I have ever worked on)
Not available in Sydney (limited region preview, no pricing)
Frontier agents - devops, security & kiro
DevOps Agent correlates across CloudWatch, Datadog, GitHub for incident triage. Security Agent does automated pen testing. Kiro handles long-running coding tasks
Most interesting for me & the Managed Services team: DevOps Agent shows the art of the possible for autonomous incident response
If I was a betting man, I would say the pricing for this would be inordinately high compared to what you could build yourself. Preview while it’s free!
Not available in Sydney. Free during preview with quotas
Four models: Lite (cheap), Pro (complex tasks), Sonic (speech-to-speech), Omni (multimodal)
AWS claims Pro beats Sonnet 4.5 on 10/16 benchmarks. Artificial Analysis says it "sits near the top group, though still trails leading models." Healthy skepticism warranted until we test
Nova 2 Pro is a ghost launch — announced but not actually available anywhere yet
Pricing: Nova 2 Pro matches GPT-5.1, while compared to Sonnet 4.5 its ~50% cheaper
Nova Forge (very pricy!) lets you inject your own data into training - evidently Reddit is using it for content moderation. Data will end up embedded in the model itself
Cross-region inference available, not in Sydney natively
Tier 4: Noted (Partner/Niche Plays)
Agentic AI Factory for Partners
Framework for going from use case to production deployment of agentic systems
Four phases: Assess, Plan, Implement, Iterate. Includes security/governance pillars
Early Adoption Program with a "Platform Starter Kit" available in preview
Useful for us directly as a partner
Bonus section: An indulgence
The expo floor is where you find the good stuff - tech actually helping people, and builders solving problems nobody asked them to solve. A few highlights:
AWS support for the underprivileged. There is some excellent work being done here and I really hope they get a more prominent area next year
Supporting and building hygiene packs for girls
Blast from the past with ibm at the hashicorp stand
AWS car dashboards. It really is a data driven world!
Nvidia gb300 rack. 72 interconnected Blackwell gpus using nvlink, with up to 132KW consumed per rack (!)
Nvidia developed an experimental robot. Used in medical settings to deliver blood samples, medicine etc within the hospital
And a lot of really nifty things created by the SA team in their spare time at aws, showcased in the builders fair
Concierge-bot that wouldn't let me jailbreak it
AI based Pictionary game, something I’ll definitely be building for the kids!
Another one for the kids. A Pac-Man game that focuses on testing knowledge
Incredibly cool AI based video analysis and scene explainer for the sight impaired. The most complex problem was readjusting the scene detail based on the limited amount of spoken audio gap
Taking whiteboarding architecture to the next level. This time with magnets! It provides best practice and architecture suggestions
And that’s it! See you at the next re:Invent bingo.