AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS FinOps Agent in preview, Gemma 4 on Bedrock, Kiro Pro Max, and more (June 15, 2026)

Post Syndicated from Esra Kayabali original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-aws-finops-agent-in-preview-gemma-4-on-bedrock-kiro-pro-max-and-more-june-15-2026/

This week, New York City is hosting AWS Summit, bringing together builders, customers, and AWS teams for a full day of announcements, demos, and technical sessions at the Javits Center. I wrote blog posts for some of the Summit launches, so I am excited to see them go live this week. I just won’t be watching from the Javits Center. I’ll be at a four-day music festival, following the launches on my phone while trying to figure out how to put up a tent. If you weren’t able to attend in person like me, the keynote livestream is available on June 17, with Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Agentic AI, and Chet Kapoor, VP of Security Services and Observability, covering new capabilities across developer tools, AI infrastructure, and security.

Here’s what happened this week.

Headlines
How frontier teams are reinventing AI-native development — Swami published a detailed post this week drawing on data from experiments across hundreds of Amazon engineering teams. The findings are worth reading carefully if you are thinking about how to structure AI adoption on your own team.

A six-engineer team rebuilt the Amazon Bedrock inference engine in 76 days, a project originally scoped for 30 developers over 12 to 18 months. The median productivity gain across structured pilots with Amazon Stores teams was 4.5x in normalized deployment velocity, with some teams exceeding 10x. Perfect Order Experience went from a two-week feature cycle to shipping in an afternoon. WW Grocery cut design document creation from five days to a few hours.

The post distills these results into five practices for becoming a frontier team. First, invest in agent context: build steering files, coding standards, and structured repositories before writing production code. Second, expect an initial slowdown while workflows are restructured, and push through it. Third, maintain a steady backlog of well-scoped tasks so agents can run in parallel without constant supervision. Fourth, make intent explicit through structured specifications before code generation begins. Fifth, shift testing left so agents can self-correct before code reaches the pipeline.

The post closes with a note that commit velocity is only part of the picture, and that a follow-up will cover release management, operations, security operations, and EOL upgrades.

AWS FinOps Agent is now available in preview — AWS FinOps Agent is a new agent for FinOps practitioners and engineering teams that answers cost questions, surfaces optimization opportunities, investigates cost anomalies, and runs recurring FinOps workflows on a defined schedule. You can use it to query your AWS costs, generate cost reports for finance and engineering teams, and surface rightsizing, idle resource, and Savings Plans recommendations from AWS Cost Optimization Hub and AWS Compute Optimizer. The agent can open Jira tickets on your behalf based on those recommendations. When a cost anomaly is detected, FinOps Agent can automatically investigate the root cause and post findings to a Slack channel.

Last week’s launches
I’ll start with one I wrote this week, then cover the other launches that caught my attention:

  • Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances are now generally available — Powered by AWS Graviton5 processors and built on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System, M9g instances deliver up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based instances, with up to 35% faster performance for web applications, up to 35% for machine learning inference, and up to 30% for databases. Graviton5 is the first processor in the AWS fleet to support PCIe Gen6 and DDR5-8800 memory, and includes a 5x larger L3 cache compared to the previous generation. M9g and M9gd instances offer up to 15% higher network bandwidth and 20% higher Amazon EBS bandwidth on average across sizes compared to M8g. This release also introduces the Nitro Isolation Engine, an enhancement to the Nitro System that uses formal verification to provide mathematically proven isolation between virtual machines — establishing Nitro as the first formally verified cloud hypervisor. M9gd instances add up to 11.4 TB of NVMe SSD local storage with 30% higher IOPS compared to M8gd. Both instance types support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC) for adjusting bandwidth allocation between EBS and VPC networking by up to 25%.
  • Anthropic Claude Fable 5 on Amazon Bedrock — Claude Fable 5 launched on Amazon Bedrock on June 9, bringing extended asynchronous task execution, advanced vision capabilities across diagrams, charts, and PDFs, and proactive self-verification. Access requires opting into data sharing via the Data Retention API before invoking the model; Anthropic requires 30-day retention of inputs and outputs for Mythos-class models. Important note on availability: On June 12, Anthropic asked AWS to revoke access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 for all users to support compliance with a US Government export control directive. All other models, including Opus 4.8, are unaffected. Read the Anthropic statement for details. AWS will share further updates as they become available.
  • Gemma 4 models are now available on Amazon Bedrock — The Gemma 4 family from Google DeepMind is now available on Amazon Bedrock across three variants: Gemma 4 31B (dense, 256K-token context window, suited for reasoning and coding workloads), Gemma 4 26B-A4B (mixture-of-experts architecture, targeting cost- and latency-sensitive workloads), and Gemma 4 E2B (smallest variant, designed for low-latency interactive use cases). All three support native function calling, structured output, reasoning, response streaming, multimodal input across text, image, video, and audio, and more than 35 languages.
  • Amazon OpenSearch Service launches MCP Apps for agentic observability — Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports MCP Apps, enabling observability workflows inside compatible agentic IDEs including Claude Desktop and VS Code. An AI agent in your local environment can investigate incidents using logs, traces, metrics, and alerts stored in OpenSearch domains, collections, and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus. Each MCP App tool call returns a dual response: a text summary for the agent to reason over and an interactive visualization rendered in the same conversation thread. Available MCP App tools cover log, metrics, and trace investigation; service performance; topology; dynamic visualizations; agent health; cluster health; and instrumentation scoring.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional posts and updates you may find useful:

  • AWS CLI v1 enters maintenance mode — When CLI v1 enters maintenance mode, the botocore and s3transfer dependencies will be vendored directly into the CLI v1 codebase rather than installed as separate packages. This means upgrading CLI v1 will no longer update the standalone botocore or s3transfer packages, and installing those packages independently will have no effect on the versions used by CLI v1. Environments with both CLI v1 and boto3 installed will contain separate copies of these libraries. New CLI v1 releases will be limited to critical bug fixes and security issues. The recommended path is to migrate to AWS CLI v2.
  • AWS Workload Credentials Provider is now available — AWS has launched a new Workload Credentials Provider that enables workloads to obtain short-term AWS credentials without requiring long-term access keys. This supports credential management for applications running outside of AWS, giving teams a way to follow least-privilege access patterns for workloads in third-party or on-premises environments.
  • Kiro Pro Max is now available — Kiro has introduced a new Pro Max tier, adding higher usage limits, access to the latest frontier models, and additional agentic capabilities for development teams. Kiro Pro Max is designed for professional developers who need sustained, high-volume use across coding, specification generation, and agent-driven tasks.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendar and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

Visit the AWS Builder Center to meet other builders, contribute solutions, and find resources that help you keep building. You can also browse upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, plus developer-focused sessions.

— Esra

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!