AWS Podcast Episode #731: AWS News - Kiro, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and Lots More
Release Date: July 28, 2025
Hosts: Liz Shimothy and Simon Elisha
Introduction
In Episode #731 of the AWS Podcast, hosts Liz Shimothy and Simon Elisha delve into a plethora of exciting updates and developments within the Amazon Web Services ecosystem. From groundbreaking AI advancements to enhanced storage solutions, this episode serves as a comprehensive guide for developers and IT professionals eager to stay abreast of the latest AWS offerings.
AI and Development Tools
Kiro: An IDE-Enhanced Development Experience
Liz introduces Kiro (KIRO), a new Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that integrates generative AI to revolutionize software development. Unlike traditional autocomplete features, Kiro assists developers by creating comprehensive requirements based on prompts, iterating on them, and facilitating technical design.
“Kiro takes a different approach to software development being augmented by AI... if the spec is not great, you're going to get not great.”
— Liz Shimothy [00:25]
Simon praises Kiro for its holistic integration of generative AI into the development workflow, differentiating it from other IDEs that use AI merely as a coding assistant.
“The Kiro team has thought about how can we really integrate generative AI as part of the entire development experience.”
— Simon Elisha [02:04]
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Simon highlights the introduction of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a game-changer for building AI agent applications at scale. This tool streamlines the transition from proof of concept to production by handling observability, security, and reliability.
“This is going to really change how people think about building AI agentic applications overall at scale.”
— Simon Elisha [04:10]
Liz emphasizes the Agent Core Gateway, which simplifies tool integration and discovery, ensuring control and visibility over AI agents' activities.
“Agent Core Gateway... simplifies tool integration, that discovery approach and understanding what's going on.”
— Liz Shimothy [05:12]
AWS Marketplace AI Agents and Tools
Liz announces the availability of AI agents and tools from AWS partners in the AWS Marketplace, enhancing procurement and deployment processes.
“This is a new way to purchase and consume these capabilities... it becomes easier to pick and choose what makes sense for your business.”
— Liz Shimothy [06:06]
Analytics and Data Management
AWS Glue Zero ETL Integrations
Simon introduces the latest updates to AWS Glue, which now supports zero ETL integrations from Amazon DynamoDB and eight other applications to S3 tables. This enhancement allows seamless data movement without the traditional Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes.
“Zero ETL means you're not actually doing the ETL... data that starts in point A can easily be viewed or read in point B.”
— Simon Elisha [05:12]
Amazon S3 Enhancements
Several updates to Amazon S3 are discussed, including:
-
Metadata Support for Existing Objects: Now manages metadata for all existing S3 data, enabling SQL queries across extensive storage.
-
Reduced Pricing: Discounts of up to 33% on metadata-related operations and significant reductions in compaction processing fees for Apache Iceberg tables.
-
S3 Vectors (Preview): Introduces native support for storing and querying vectors, optimized for cost and performance, crucial for large-scale AI applications.
“Amazon S3 vectors is the first cloud object storage with native support for storing and querying vectors... cost-effective to create and use really large vector data sets.”
— Simon Elisha [25:37]
Amazon Redshift Updates
Amazon Redshift now supports automatic refresh of materialized views on Apache Iceberg tables and cascading refreshes of nested materialized views, enhancing data warehousing capabilities.
“Amazon Redshift now supports cascading refresh of nested materialized views with a single option to specify cascade or restrict.”
— Simon Elisha [06:57]
Compute and Free Tier Enhancements
AWS Deadline Cloud for Unreal Engine
Simon announces expanded support for Unreal Engine in AWS Deadline Cloud, allowing developers to render projects without managing compute infrastructure.
“You can submit Unreal Engine projects to Deadline Cloud for rendering without needing to configure or manage compute infrastructure.”
— Simon Elisha [17:33]
AWS Free Tier Update
The AWS Free Tier now offers $200 in credits and a 6-month free plan, providing greater flexibility for users to explore AWS services, including Amazon Bedrock.
“You get $100 in credits straight up when you sign up and then an additional $100 if you use services like Amazon EC2.”
— Liz Shimothy [18:28]
Database Innovations
Amazon DocumentDB Enhancements
Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility now supports up to 10 secondary region clusters, doubling the previous limit and enhancing global scalability and disaster recovery.
“This gives you disaster recovery from region-wide outages and fast local reads for globally distributed applications.”
— Liz Shimothy [19:37]
Amazon RDS for SQL Server
Updates include support for change data capture and cumulative updates for SQL Server 2022, improving data tracking and system reliability.
“Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports the cumulative update 19 for SQL Server 2022.”
— Liz Shimothy [20:47]
Internet of Things (IoT) and Networking
AWS IoT Greengrass Version 2.15
Liz mentions the release of AWS IoT Greengrass version 2.15, which brings significant updates to core components, enhancing support for resource-constrained devices.
“These are all about resource-constrained devices... like five meg RAM type devices.”
— Liz Shimothy [20:56]
Amazon VPC CNI Plugin
Amazon VPC Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin now supports higher bandwidth and improved network performance per pod, catering to high-performance computing and AI workloads.
“If you need to scale the network performance for your Kubernetes-based workflows, this is definitely something that you should check out.”
— Simon Elisha [25:37]
Management, Governance, and Observability
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
Enhancements to AWS Cost Anomaly Detection improve model accuracy by handling historical cost variations, providing more reliable cost monitoring.
“It understands the patterns that your organization typically goes through.”
— Liz Shimothy [21:30]
AWS Knowledge Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server
The preview of the AWS Knowledge Model Context Protocol MCP Server offers authoritative AWS knowledge in an LLM-compatible format, ensuring up-to-date information access for AI applications.
“You don't have to worry about keeping it up to date because you know it's always up to date.”
— Liz Shimothy [22:47]
Amazon CloudWatch Generative AI Observability (Preview)
Amazon CloudWatch now includes generative AI observability, enabling end-to-end prompt tracing and enhanced telemetry for complex systems.
“This gives you end-to-end prompt tracing components... you get to understand telemetry across these increasingly complicated systems.”
— Liz Shimothy [23:49]
Migration and Transfer
AWS DataSync IPv6 Support
Simon announces that AWS DataSync now supports IPv6, enhancing connectivity and future-proofing data transfer mechanisms.
“AWS DataSync now supports IPv6.`
— Simon Elisha [23:57]
AWS Transform for Mainframe
Enhanced AWS Transform for Mainframe offers improved code refactoring and business logic extraction, aiding in the modernization of legacy mainframe applications.
“This is going to result in more readable and maintainable code for developers.”
— Simon Elisha [24:01]
Storage Solutions
Amazon EBS Volume Initialization Status
Liz shares a significant update to Amazon EBS, which now provides visibility into volume initialization status, crucial for latency-sensitive applications.
“Having visibility is really cool... EBS volumes that are created from a snapshot, it's like lazy loading in the background.”
— Liz Shimothy [25:37]
Amazon S3 Tables and Compaction Enhancements
Amazon S3 tables now support MCP Server integration and offer more cost-effective compaction operations for Apache Iceberg tables, reducing processing fees by up to 90%.
“With these compaction price reductions, the per object price is now 50% lower, while the per byte processing prices are 90% lower for bin pack compaction.”
— Simon Elisha [25:37]
Amazon S3 Vectors (Preview)
Introducing Amazon S3 Vectors, the first cloud object storage with native support for storing and querying vectors, optimized for cost and performance.
“You can reduce the cost of uploading, storing, and querying your vectors by up to 90%.”
— Simon Elisha [25:37]
S3 Console External Access Summary
The Amazon S3 console now displays an external access summary for all buckets, enhancing security by allowing users to identify publicly accessible or cross-account accessible buckets effortlessly.
“Your S3 buckets should not be public... access should be via a CloudFront distribution or specific permissions.”
— Liz Shimothy [25:37]
Closing Remarks
Liz and Simon wrap up the episode by highlighting the extensive range of updates covered, emphasizing the transformative impact of these enhancements on AWS users' productivity and capabilities.
“This might have been like the biggest update show that we've had so far in 2025.”
— Simon Elisha [30:41]
“Keep on building.”
— Liz Shimothy [31:34]
For additional feedback or to connect with the hosts, listeners are encouraged to visit awspodcastmo.com or reach out to Jillian Ford on LinkedIn.
This episode underscores AWS's commitment to innovation, particularly in the realms of AI, data management, and scalable infrastructure solutions. Whether you're developing cutting-edge AI applications or managing extensive cloud resources, AWS continues to provide robust tools and services to support your endeavors.