Best of AWS re:Invent

Attend the opening session with AWS VP and Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr to discover the biggest announcements, AI breakthroughs, and top highlights from AWS re:Invent.

9:00 am | Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist

Going from a pilot to a secure, scalable, and reliable agent system requires more than great prompts. In session, we'll show how Amazon Bedrock AgentCore helps teams move from proof-of-concept to production using enterprise-grade services, including Runtime, Gateway, Identity, Memory, Observability, Code Interpreter, and Browser. Learn how these services simplify development, reduce operational burden, and improve time-to-value. You'll get best practices from the technical team at Ericsson, and we'll cover foundational capabilities like enterprise readiness, tool integration, and performance at scale, providing a blueprint for success no matter where you are in your journey.

AIM2204 | L200
9:40 am | Mark Roy, Vivek Singh, Sarbashis Das

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Evaluations provides developers with a unified way to test and validate AI agent performance. In this session, you’ll learn how to apply pre-built metrics for key dimensions such as task success, response quality, and tool accuracy, or define custom success criteria tailored to your needs. See how Evaluations integrates into CI/CD pipelines to catch regressions early and supports online evaluation in production by sampling and scoring live traces to surface real-world issues. Finally, learn how Evaluations helps teams deploy reliable agents faster, reduce operational risk, and continuously assess an agent’s performance at scale through practical implementation patterns.

AIM3348 | L300
10:40 am | Amanda Lester, Vivek Singh, Ishan Singh

Building sustainable, cost-effective generative AI on AWS requires integrating agentic AI, efficient architecture, and cloud-native optimization. Agentic systems using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore employ contextual memory, asynchronous execution, and on-demand tool invocation to minimize compute waste. MCP enables secure connections between AI agents, AWS services, and custom tools. Efficiency increases through AWS's Trainium and Inferentia2 silicon (50% better performance per watt), Amazon SageMaker for scalable development, and optimization techniques like quantization and speculative decoding. Auto-scaling, batch processing, and spot instances prevent over-provisioning. Combined with CloudWatch and Cost Explorer monitoring, this approach delivers high-performance, low-carbon generative AI solutions.

AI AIM333 | L300
11:40 am | Isha Dua, Parth Patel

In this session, we will walk through the architecture for the Amazon DynamoDB DNS management system that triggered the service disruption on October 20, 2025. We will share the lessons that the DynamoDB team learned from this event and explain how we are using these insights to improve both DynamoDB and AWS. You will walk away with actionable knowledge that you can apply to the systems you build.

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9:40 am | Craig Howard

In this session, deep dive into the newly launched AWS Database Savings Plans, a flexible pricing model that works across multiple AWS database services. With Database Savings Plans, reduce your database costs by up to 35% when using serverless deployments and eligible instances over a 1-year term with no upfront payment. Learn how to analyze usage patterns, implement cost optimization strategies, and maximize savings while maintaining workload flexibility. Discover how to combine Database Savings Plans with existing pricing models and modernization initiatives. Walk away with best practices for optimizing database costs across your organization.

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10:40 am | Adam Driver, Rick Ochs

While generative AI captures headlines, the untapped potential lies in combining it with decades-proven symbolic AI techniques. This session explores how organizations can leverage symbolic AI, such as ontologies and logic-based reasoning to build knowledge graphs and to enhance their AI capabilities. Dive deep into these topics to understand what ontologies look like, where semantics comes from, and what it means to build working knowledge graphs. Learn concrete strategies for defining and adopting ontologies and how to use reasoning for your benefit.

DAT443 | L400
11:40 am | Ora Lassila

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol that standardizes how AI models can, in a secure and structured way, access external tools, data sources, and APIs. Join this session to learn best practices on how to securely implement MCP server-based tools to enhance development workflows with richer context in order to help developers complete coding tasks efficiently. We'll also cover relevant use cases and discuss the tradeoffs between using RAG verus MCP.

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9:40 am | Nathan Jones, Arundeep Nagaraj

The AI-Driven Development Life Cycle (AI-DLC) represents a transformative approach to software engineering that positions AI as a central collaborator throughout the development process. Unlike traditional AI-assisted development methods, AI-DLC reimagines the entire software lifecycle through two key dimensions: AI-powered execution with human oversight and dynamic team collaboration. The methodology operates in three phases - Inception, Construction, and Operations - where AI initiates workflows while maintaining persistent context across all stages. This innovative approach delivers significant benefits including increased velocity, enhanced quality, improved market responsiveness, and better developer experience, all while ensuring critical human oversight and collaboration.

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10:40 am | Raja SP, Anupam Mishra

Transform your team's development experience with Kiro's powerful steering capabilities. Learn how to create and maintain steering files that act as your project's source of truth, ensuring every team member follows the same conventions for components, API endpoints, and tests. We'll demonstrate how this living documentation evolves alongside your codebase, capturing crucial decisions and patterns while reducing cognitive overhead. Say goodbye to repetitive explanations of coding standards and hello to consistent, automated code generation that perfectly aligns with your team's established workflows and best practices.

DVT340 | L300
11:40 am | Allie Fortman, Matt Laver, Chandra Sreeraman

AWS Lambda durable functions enhances Lambda's programming model to simplify building fault-tolerant applications using familiar programming language patterns in JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python. We'll explore new capabilities that simplify failure handling through built-in retry mechanisms, efficient handling of human-in-the-loop interactions, and state management to track progress. Through an interactive demo, you'll see how to get started with Lambda durable functions in your IDE, and use primitives like “steps” and “waits” for state management, failure handling, and seamless execution of long-running business logic. Leave equipped to leverage durable functions for your next project, simplifying architectures and deliver fault-tolerant applications faster.

CNS380 | L300
9:40 am | Eric Johnson, Michael Gasch

Amazon ECS offers multiple compute options that enable architects to optimize for performance, cost, and operational requirements. This session provides a comprehensive guide to using AWS Fargate, Amazon ECS Managed Instances, and self-managed EC2 with Amazon ECS. We’ll dive into the technical architecture, operational models, and cost implications of each compute type through real world scenarios. You’ll learn the inflection points when matching compute options to specific application patterns including batch processing, web services, and data intensive workloads.

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10:40 am | Alexandr Moroz, Mats Lannér, Ruben Di Battista

Organizations face the challenge of migrating legacy applications and modernizing them for cloud-native architectures. This session will cover how to leverage Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes to transform legacy workloads into cloud-native architectures. Learn to evaluate your current stack, identify transformation opportunities, and implement effective modernization strategies. We'll explore tools and best practices to containerize applications, embrace microservices, and harness Kubernetes power. Discover how Amazon EKS enables seamless migration paths and running containerized workloads across on-premises and cloud environments. This approach reduces operational burden, cuts costs, and accelerates innovation—no matter where you are in your migration and modernization journey.

CNS210 | L200
11:40 am | Nirmal Mehta, Isaac Mosquera

Attend the opening session with AWS VP and Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr to discover the biggest announcements, AI breakthroughs, and top highlights from AWS re:Invent.

9:00 am | Jeff Barr, AWS Chief Evangelist

As AI agents transform the workplace, organizations must adapt their structures and methodologies to harness new opportunities. The probabilistic nature of AI requires continuous iteration and intelligent oversight, creating new ways of working across business functions. To thrive, organizations must combine clear capability assessment with agile planning while leveraging their unique domain expertise and data assets. This keynote explores how leadership is evolving to meet these needs, covering new organizational models and roles that coordinate human-AI hybrid teams. Leaders will learn strategies for balancing rapid decision-making with strategic oversight, finding the optimal mix of centralized guidance and decentralized innovation.

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10:40 am | Stephen Brozovich, Jonathan Allen, Richard Davis

To build a lasting, performant corporate culture, you need not only strong mental models to guide your employees and help them make decisions but also the right mechanisms to operationalize company values and mental models—and to help them persist. This session examines why organizational culture erodes over time, dives into the organizational artifacts that reinforce existing cultural patterns, and shares some of the best practices that help create strong mechanisms, using examples from Amazon’s own journey.

SNR303 | L300
11:40 am | Stephen Brozovich

This is a free virtual event that gives you access to the key announcements, top sessions and most exciting moments from AWS re:Invent. Gain direct access to AWS experts and choose from curated content in your preferred language.

Best of AWS re:Invent is a global virtual event taking place on January 28 or 29, 2026 (depending on your time zone).

Best of AWS re:Invent delivers curated content for both technical and business professionals seeking to explore AWS's latest innovations and announcements. From introductory concepts to  technical sessions, attendees can customize their learning experience while gaining practical insights for implementing cutting-edge technologies.

Registration is now open, please register here.  

No. Registration is free.