Amazon Web Services has debuted an agent that it says will evaluate your cloudy environment “as an experienced cloud architect would” and recommend useful changes. The cloud colossus named its bot the “AWS Well-Architected Agent,” a nod to the Well-Architected Framework that outlines best practices for using the Amazonian cloud. Amazon’s announcement says the agentic incarnation of the Framework analyzes AWS environments “against Well-Architected best practices across 65+ AWS services” and then delivers “targeted, contextual recommendations for improving your applications’ cost, security, performance, and resilience.” “It generates recommendations aligned to your declared business goals, delivers implementation packages with every finding, and surfaces cross-pillar trade-offs making it simpler to remediate the findings,” we’re told. The agent also delivers “ready-to-implement fixes” and “provides individual resource findings with specific dollar impact (where applicable) and step-by-step remediation, consolidated findings across multiple resources scoped to your application, and broad architectural patterns and designs with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) code changes needed to align with Well-Architected best practices.” AWS offers myriad services — some of them with overlapping features and functions. Customers often find themselves using more services than they intended, or using services that aren’t quite right for their intended use. AWS is generally happy if customers change to more appropriate services, even when that sees them spend less, and offers assistance from its own staff or channel partners to make it happen. This agent may make some of that human assistance less necessary. AWS is far from alone in suggesting agents should take on some of the chores that human IT professionals perform today - an approach that’s come to be known as AIOps. When your correspondent chats to IT pros about AIOps, they express distrust on grounds that they cannot be sure agents make valid suggestions and feel following bad advice offered by a machine would indefensible if things go pear-shaped. Vendors I’ve spoken to believe IT pros will first cautiously verify recommendations from AIOps systems, and if they see good results allow agents to take more actions without human oversight - but always with the ability to quickly roll back changes. AWS seems to recognize that users won’t go all-in immediately and therefore offers several manual means to apply recommendations the agent suggests, including the command line interface. For now, the agent is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) regions, but can handle workloads from any AWS commercial Region. It’s only available for users with an AWS support plan. ®
