AWS News: Bedrock AgentCore Adds Autonomous Payments, Agent Toolkit for AI Coders, and More
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments: Enabling Autonomous Transactions
The most exciting announcement from last week is the preview of managed payment capabilities in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. This feature allows AI agents to autonomously access and pay for APIs, MCP servers, web content, and other agents. Developed in partnership with Coinbase and Stripe, it eliminates the heavy lifting required to build custom billing, credential management, and compliance systems. Developers can connect a Coinbase CDP wallet or Stripe Privy wallet as a payment connection, set session-level spending limits, and let the agent transact independently during execution. For example, a research agent can pay for real-time market data on the fly, or a coding agent can call paid APIs mid-task. To learn more, read the blog post, dive deeper in the documentation, and get started with the AgentCore CLI.
Agent Toolkit for AWS and AWS MCP Server
The Agent Toolkit for AWS is a production-ready suite of tools and guidance available at no additional charge. It helps AI coding agents build on AWS with fewer errors, lower token costs, and enterprise-grade security controls. This toolkit succeeds the MCP servers, plugins, and skills previously available on AWS Labs. To get started, visit the quick start guide or browse the available skills and plugins on GitHub.
Part of this toolkit is the AWS MCP Server, now generally available. It provides a managed remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI agents and coding assistants secure, authenticated access to all AWS services through a small, fixed set of tools. For more details, read Seb Stormacq's blog post.
Amazon WorkSpaces for AI Agents (Preview)
Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents (preview) allows AI agents to securely access and operate desktop applications through managed WorkSpaces environments. This capability enables organizations to automate everyday workflows at scale while maintaining full enterprise-grade governance and compliance. To learn more, check out Micah Walter's blog post.
New EC2 Instances: M8idn/M8idb and R8idn/R8idb
AWS introduced new Amazon EC2 M8idn/M8idb and R8idn/R8idb instances, powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors available only on AWS, paired with the latest sixth-generation AWS Nitro cards. These instances deliver up to 43% better compute performance per vCPU compared to previous-generation instances. The M8idn/R8idn instances offer up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth, while the M8idb/R8idb instances deliver up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth. These are ideal for compute-intensive and memory-intensive workloads.
Valkey Turns Two: Community-Driven Growth
Valkey, the open-source, community-driven in-memory data store, marks its second anniversary. It is a testament to how open, community-driven technology can innovate faster, scale further, and deliver more value than any single-vendor model. Valkey has surpassed 100 million Docker pulls (up 17x year over year) and attracted over 225 contributors who have submitted countless improvements. This milestone underscores the growing adoption and trust in Valkey as a key component of modern architectures.
For a full list of AWS announcements, keep an eye on the What's New with AWS page.
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