AWS re:Invent 2025 Wrapped

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.