AWS Podcast Episode #744: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager, and So Much More!

Date: November 3, 2025
Hosts: Simon Elisha & Gillian Ford
Theme: In this packed episode, Simon and Gillian provide a comprehensive tour through the latest AWS launches and updates spanning AI/ML, compute, analytics, application integration, databases, storage, management, and more. The conversation especially spotlights the highly anticipated release of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and major enhancements to EC2 capacity management, AI observability, and cloud reporting tools.

Main Theme and Purpose

This episode centers around AWS’s latest product upgrades and new releases, streamlining cloud development, enhancing AI capabilities, and providing deeper observability and cost management. Simon and Gillian break down the most notable launches, share hands-on user perspectives, and offer practical advice to help customers maximize these new features.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

[00:18] Amazon Bedrock AgentCore — General Availability

• Comprehensive Secure Agent Management:
  AgentCore is now generally available, letting teams build, deploy, and operate sophisticated agents securely and at scale on any model, framework, or protocol.
• New Capabilities:
  • VPC & PrivateLink Support
  • CloudFormation Tagging
  • Expanded Runtime: 8-hour execution window and session isolation
  • Agent-to-Agent Protocol, broader support coming
  • Self-managed Memory Pipelines
  • Gateway connecting to MCP servers and transforming APIs/Lambda into agent tools
  • IAM and OAuth Authentication
  • Identity-aware Authorization with secure refresh token storage
  • Enhanced Observability: End-to-end operational metrics, OTEL compatibility (integrates with Dynatrace, Datadog, etc.)
• Open Source Compatibility: Works with CrewAI, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Google ADK, OpenAI SDK, and any Bedrock/non-Bedrock model.

"It's taking away our old friend the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing all these agents... Now we don't have to do it the hard way anymore."
— Simon [01:14]

"All Agent Core services now have support for VPC, PrivateLink, AWS CloudFormation resource tagging—so you get all that good stuff now out of the box."
— Simon [00:40]

[02:53] Regional Coverage for AgentCore

• Available in all major AWS commercial regions (US East, Ohio, Sydney, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Ireland, Singapore, Mumbai).
• Launch includes many features requested during the preview phase.

"All the regions that it's now generally available in... that's a lot!"
— Gillian [02:53]

[03:16] Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager

• Centralized Capacity Monitoring:
  New interface for monitoring, analyzing, and managing EC2 capacity across all accounts and regions, including On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved Instances.
• Features:
  • Historical Trend Analysis
  • Optimization Recommendations
  • Data Export APIs
  • AWS Organizations Integration: Unified dashboard for all member accounts.
  • Default Availability & Free: No extra cost, enabled across all commercial AWS regions.

"This is all about simplification. One interface and you get a comprehensive view of your on demand spot and capacity reservation usage across your accounts and regions."
— Simon [03:16]

"Once you've enabled AWS organizations, you can view and analyze your capacity across all of your member accounts in a single dashboard. How convenient."
— Gillian [04:29]

[04:58] Analytics & Application Integration Updates

Key Analytics/Integration Launches

• Kinesis Data Streams: Fault injection actions for API resilience testing.
• Amazon MSK: Kafka 4.1 support introducing queues, new rebalance protocol.
• OpenSearch Service: Graviton4-powered instances (up to 30% better performance).
• QuickSight: New GA data preparation experience: easier data cleaning, multi-step workflows, bigger/faster cross-source joins.
• Amazon Corretto: October 2025 updates for JDK distributions.
• AWS Step Functions: Diagnose failures directly with Amazon Q—a built-in AI assistant providing error analysis and remediation suggestions.

"You just click Diagnose with Amazon Q and it will go and give you some troubleshooting assistance... Q told me what was wrong, Q fixed it, and I moved on with my life."
— Simon [07:33]

[07:41] AI & Amazon Bedrock Upgrades

Claude Haiku 4.5 Model in Bedrock

• Performance: Matches Claude Sonnet 4 with lower cost & faster speeds; supports vision tasks and multi-agent systems.
• Access: Global, available in all commercial AWS regions for serverless inference.

"Claude Haiku 4.5 delivers new frontier performance... at a substantially lower cost and faster speeds."
— Gillian [07:41]

• Bedrock Data Automation:
  Expands video/image codec support (AVI, MKV, WebM, AV1, MPEG4) and speeds up image processing by up to 50%.
• Nova Models:
  Customizable content moderation for sensitive content.
• SageMaker AI Projects & Unified Studio:
  More flexible S3 provisioning, Athena workgroup integration.
• Marketplace:
  Purchase order line numbers for improved cost allocation.

[10:46] Business Applications & Amazon Connect

Amazon Connect Enhancements

• Granular Permissions: Separate access for call recordings and transcripts.
• Threaded Views: Conversation history in agent replies.
• Automated Evaluations: Follow-up triggered by initial results.
• Flexible Scheduling: Configurable thresholds and adherence notifications.
• Preview Dialing: Agent sees customer context before calling.

"You can allow users to listen to calls while preventing any unauthorized copying of transcripts."
— Simon [10:52]

Amazon QuickSight

• Font customizations now available for data labels and axes.

[11:58] New Service: Amazon RTB Fabric

• Fully Managed Ad Exchange:
  • Connects ad tech partners (Amazon Ads, Gumgum, TripleLift, etc.) in 3 steps.
  • Ultra-low latency, up to 80% networking cost reduction.
• Purpose: Real-time bidding for advertising workloads, solving the critical latency challenge.

"Latency was always a maximum consideration. So this is a really interesting offering..."
— Simon [12:24]

[13:23] Compute Updates

• EC2 CPU Options for Windows License Optimization:
  Customize vCPUs and disable hyperthreading to halve license costs.

"You can now customize the number of VCPUs and/or disable hyperthreading on Windows Server and SQL Server license included instances to save on VCPU based licensing costs."
— Gillian [13:23]

"If you spend much time of your life working on licensing, it's not fun... But cutting back on CPUs that you're not using can have a huge effect in terms of cost."
— Simon [13:50]

• ECS CloudTrail Events:
  Audit/troubleshoot container API activity.
• ECS FireLens:
  Run containers as non-root.
• Lambda:
  Async payload size increased from 256KB to 1MB.
• ParallelCluster:
  Secret key rotation and Slurm 25.05 support.
• SAM CLI:
  FINCH support for local dev/testing.
• Fluent Bit:
  v3.0.0 now available.

[16:23] Databases

• CloudWatch Database Insights:
  On-demand ML-based bottleneck diagnosis for RDS/SQL Server.
• DocumentDB:
  Graviton 4 support; IPv6 enabled.
• Elasticache Vector Search:
  Now GA for semantic LLM caching and ultra-fast retrieval.
• Aurora DSQL & SageMaker Integration:
  Near real-time, no-code ETL to lakehouse with support for Apache Iceberg.
• Timestream for InfluxDB:
  InfluxDB 3 support for high-performance analytics.

[19:51] End User Computing

• AppStream 2.0:
  Now offers Microsoft applications with built-in licensing.
• DCV:
  v20.25.0 for enhanced keyboard and WebAuthn.

[20:11] Frontend, Management & Governance

• Amazon Location Service:
  Enhanced map styling (terrain, contours, real-time data).
• CloudWatch AI Observability:
  Monitor all generative AI app components—metrics for code, gateway, memory, identity.
• CloudWatch Agent:
  Windows log filtering.
• CloudWatch Synthetics:
  Multi-check canaries for workflow test automation.
• AWS Config:
  Supports three new resource types.
• Customer Carbon Footprint Tool:
  Now includes Scope 3 lifecycle emissions data, with historical reporting back to Jan 2022.
• Systems Manager Patch Manager:
  Security update notifications for Windows.
• Resource Explorer:
  Immediate cross-account resource discovery.

"This is really useful because as we're building out these systems they get complex pretty quickly... lets you do things like identify gaps in vector DB to authentication failures to end to end prompt tracing."
— Simon [21:21]

[23:55] Migration, Networking, and Security

• Transfer Family:
  Identity provider changes without disruption; SFTP VPC connectors.
• ALB:
  URL and Host Header rewrite with regex before request routing.
• Client VPN:
  MacOS Tahoe support.
• Route 53:
  PrivateLink profiles.
• Security:
  Bedrock Guardrails now support customer-managed KMS keys, automated checks.
• Security Hub:
  Updated CIS benchmarks.

[25:46] Storage

• AWS Backup:
  Expanded job/API info, enhanced backup planning UI, CloudWatch metrics.
• EBS:
  Volume Clones for millisecond-latency copies.
• S3:
  CloudTrail events for table maintenance.

[27:00] Easter Egg: Amazon QuickSuite Launch

• New AI-Powered Workspace:
  An "agentic" reporting and business data workspace with teammates that automate insight generation, document/report summarization/editing, and task automation.
• Collaboration:
  Secure spaces for team-based data use, report plans, iterative feedback, and commenting to improve outputs.

"It's like a whole bunch of teammates that can get you the answers you need around your business data... Whether you need a single data point or a PhD-level research project."
— Simon [27:13]

[29:00] Service Sunsets and End-of-Support Notices

• Notable services (including CodeCatalyst, Cloud Directory, S3 Object Lambda, Workspaces Web, and more) are being sunset or end-of-supported. Details and migration plans available on the AWS Lifecycle page.

"In most cases, you would have already received an email anyway for your AWS account."
— Simon [30:42]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AgentCore:
  "I think I've been doing things the hard way till this came along and now we don't have to do it the hard way anymore."
  — Simon [01:14]

• On Cost and Licensing:
  "If you spend much time of your life working on licensing, it’s not fun... But cutting back on CPUs that you’re not using can have a huge effect in terms of cost."
  — Simon [13:50]

• On QuickSuite:
  "I'll use all the help I can get."
  — Simon [31:00]

• Favorite Picks:
  "Agent Core is still hands down my pick of this episode."
  — Gillian [30:54]
  "QuickSuite is becoming a fast favorite for me."
  — Simon [31:00]

Important Timestamps

| Time | Segment | |----------|----------------------------------------------------------| | 00:18 | Amazon Bedrock AgentCore deep dive | | 03:16 | EC2 Capacity Manager | | 04:58 | Analytics, Application Integration, & QuickSight | | 07:41 | AI/ML: Bedrock, Claude Haiku 4.5, Data Automation | | 10:46 | Business Apps: Amazon Connect, QuickSight updates | | 11:58 | New: Amazon RTB Fabric, SES improvements | | 13:23 | Compute: EC2 licensing, ECS, Lambda, Dev tools | | 16:23 | Databases: CloudWatch Insights, DocumentDB, Elasticache | | 19:51 | End User Computing updates | | 20:11 | Management: CloudWatch, Config, Carbon Footprint Tool | | 23:55 | Migration, Networking, Security | | 25:46 | Storage: Backup, EBS Clones, S3 maintenance events | | 27:00 | Amazon QuickSuite launch (easter egg) | | 29:00 | Service sunsets and end-of-support announcements | | 30:54 | Hosts’ favorite features and closing thoughts |

Closing Thoughts

Simon and Gillian wrap up reflecting on their favorite launches: AgentCore revolutionizes agent operations, while QuickSuite transforms reporting and business insights for teams. The episode offers a dense roundup—essential listening or reading for AWS users wanting to leverage the latest evolution in cloud technology.

For more details or migration guidance, check the AWS Product Lifecycle documentation.