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The week after AWS re:Invent builds on the excitement and energy of the event, it’s a good time to learn more and understand how recent announcements can help you solve your challenges and open up new opportunities. As usual, we’ve kept you updated on our major AWS re:Invent 2025 announcements, which you can learn all about here.
For me, one moment stood out above all the tech announcements: watching Rafi (Raphael Francis Quisumbing) from the Philippines receive the Now Go Build Award from Werner Vogels. Rafi has been an AWS Hero since 2015 and has been the co-leader of the Philippines AWS User Group since 2013. His commitment to building communities and empowering developers across the region epitomizes what this award stands for. You can read more about Rafi at The Kernel. Congratulations, Rafi!
Main recap: Agents, the renaissance, and the role of the developer
This year’s AWS re:Invent keynotes painted a clear picture of where we’re headed.
Matt Garman he emphasized that developers are “the heart of AWS” and that “freedom to invent” remains AWS’s core mission after 20 years. He pointed to AI agents as the next inflection point: “AI assistants are starting to give way to AI agents that can perform tasks and automate for you. This is where we start to see significant business returns on your AI investments.”
Swami Sivasubramanian highlighted the transformational moment we are in: “For the first time in history, we can describe what we want to achieve in natural language and the agents will generate the plan. They will write the code, call the necessary tools and execute the complete solution.” AWS builds production-ready infrastructure that is secure, reliable, and scalable—purpose-built for the nondeterministic nature of agents.
Peter DeSantis and Dave Brown reinforced that the core attributes that AWS has been about for 20 years—security, availability, performance, elasticity, cost, and agility—are more important than ever in the AI era. Dave Brown demonstrated Graviton and AWS’ own silicon innovations that deliver these attributes at scale.
Werner Vogels delivered his final keynote after 14 years, introducing the concept of a “renaissance developer”—someone who is curious, thinks in systems, and communicates effectively. His message about AI and developer development resonated: “Will AI take my job? Maybe. Will AI make me obsolete? Definitely not… if you evolve.” He emphasized that developers must be owners: “The work is yours, not the tools. You build it, you own it.”
You can also watch everything from keynotes, innovation talks, breakout sessions and more on the video on demand page.
Conversations about innovation
Last week’s launch
Here are the launches that caught my eye that weren’t already covered in our main AWS re:Invent 2025 post announcements:
- Kiro Autonomous Agent – Following the general availability of Kiro with team features in November, AWS introduced an autonomous agent that maintains awareness across sessions, learns from pull requests and feedback, and handles bug triage and code coverage improvements across multiple repositories. “Orders of magnitude more efficient” than first-generation AI coding tools, Matt Garman said. Kiro is now Amazon’s standard company-wide AI development environment.
- Multimodal Retrieval for Bedrock Knowledge Bases (GA) – Build AI-based search and question-answering applications that work with text, images, audio, and video files. Developers can now process multimodal content with full control over parsing, splitting, embedding, and vector saving capabilities, then send text or image queries to retrieve relevant segments across all media types.
- AWS Interconnect – Multicloud (Preview) – Quickly create private, secure, high-speed network connections with dedicated bandwidth and built-in resiliency between Amazon VPC and other cloud environments. Starting in Preview with Google Cloud as the first launch partner, with support for Microsoft Azure in 2026.
Check out AWS What’s New for other launch news that I haven’t covered here. That’s it for this week. Check back next Monday for another weekly recap!
Happy building!
— Donnie
This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of exciting news and announcements from AWS!