Matt and Georgia recap AWS re:Invent 2025 with special guest Michael Walmsley, AWS Serverless Hero and Global Technology Architect at Accenture. Fresh from the Vegas event with 70,000 attendees, they discuss the major announcements, the shift toward AI agents, and Michael's wild experience coding on a bus for a $100K hackathon prize.
Highlights
Road to re:Invent Hackathon
- 50 developers coded on buses traveling LA to Vegas over 5 hours
- Michael's team built "Lucky Loo.me" - an AI bathroom finder using facial recognition
- Winning team created "Oric" - an IDE that turns 3 lines into 3,000 lines of AI slop
- Prize: $100K split among the winning team
The Big Theme: AI Agents Everywhere
- "Agents" was the dominant word at every booth
- AWS pushing agent capabilities into every service team
- Evolution from general AI (2024) to production agent platforms (2025)
Announcements we covered:
Agent Core Updates
- New policy controls for blocking unauthorized actions
- Evaluation tools for inspecting agent behavior
- Progressive adoption - use pieces without adopting the whole platform
AWS Agent Marketplace
- Vendors can now sell pre-built agents
- Example: Cloud Zero cost management agent
Lambda Updates
- Lambda managed instances
- Durable functions for long-running workflows in code
- Alternative for developers who don't want Step Functions
S3 Vectors (GA)
- Store 20 trillion vectors in one bucket
- 90% cost savings vs traditional vector databases
- Sub-100ms query times for frequent queries
- "S3 is the cheapest database on the planet"
CloudWatch Unified Data Store
- All logs and metrics exposed in S3 Tables
- Cheap, structured SQL querying of observability data
AWS Interconnect ⭐ Biggest Surprise
- High-speed encrypted links between AWS and Google Cloud
- Azure support coming 2026
- Free during preview (pricing TBA)
- Major shift from AWS's anti-multi-cloud stance
- Acknowledges multi-cloud reality in enterprises
Kiro
- Rebranding away from confusing "Amazon Q" umbrella
- Kiro Powers: AI-activated tool modules
- Reduces context bloat in coding agents
- Active hackathon scene with significant prize pools
Guest
Michael Walmsley - AWS Serverless Hero, Global Technology Architect at Accenture, specializing in serverless and SaaS architecture. Fourth year attending re:Invent.
Key Takeaway
AWS is maturing from general AI capabilities to production-ready agent platforms while finally embracing multi-cloud architectures. The focus has shifted to making agents secure, manageable, and practical for enterprise use.
