Revolutionizing Outage Management: AWS AI Agent Unveiled
Amazon Web Services unveiled its AWS DevOps Agent on December 2 at the re: Invent conference in Las Vegas, introducing an autonomous AI system designed to diagnose and resolve system outages with minimal human intervention. The tool can identify root causes in as little as 15 minutes, a process that typically requires hours of manual work by senior engineers, according to AWS.
The DevOps Agent represents what AWS calls a "frontier agent," a new class of AI systems that can work autonomously for hours or days without constant human oversight. When production incidents occur, the agent automatically correlates data across observability tools, including Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, and Splunk, while integrating with code repositories and CI/CD pipelines to track recent deployments.
Real-World Testing Shows Dramatic Results
Commonwealth Bank of Australia, which manages over 1,700 AWS accounts for thousands of engineers, put the agent through rigorous testing while developing its next-generation internal cloud platform. The bank's Cloud Foundations team recreated a complex network and identity management issue that would typically take a seasoned DevOps engineer hours to resolve. The AWS DevOps Agent pinpointed the root cause in under 15 minutes.
"AWS DevOps Agent thinks and acts like a seasoned DevOps engineer, helping our engineers build a banking infrastructure that's faster, more resilient, and designed to deliver better experiences for our customers," said Jason Sandery, head of cloud services at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. "This isn't just about faster resolution times—it's about maintaining the trust our customers put in us."
Growing Competition in AI-Driven Operations
The launch positions AWS against the intensifying competition in autonomous operations tools. Microsoft Azure introduced its own SRE Agent in May, while startups including Resolve and Traversal are developing similar AI-powered incident response systems. Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS's vice president of agentic AI, told CNBC that the DevOps Agent assigns tasks to multiple agents who investigate different theories simultaneously, providing on-call teams with preliminary assessments and remediation suggestions before they even join incident calls.
The agent is currently available in preview at no charge in US East (N. Virginia), though AWS has not disclosed pricing for general availability. During the preview period, accounts are limited to 10 Agent Spaces and 20 DevOps Agent incident response hours per month.
