AWS DevOps Agent - Promises vs Reality

AWS launched DevOps Agent at re:Invent 2025 as an "autonomous on-call engineer." But before you cancel your PagerDuty subscription, we separate marketing from mechanics.

NEWS THIS EPISODE:
• KubeCon Europe 2026: March 23-26 in Amsterdam, 224 sessions across 5 tracks
• Platform Engineering 2026 Predictions: Agentic infrastructure becomes standard

In this deep-dive episode, we cover:

WHAT IT PROMISES:
• Always-on AI that investigates incidents 24/7
• Automatic root cause analysis across logs, metrics, traces, and deployments
• Mitigation plan generation with step-by-step remediation
• Integration with CloudWatch, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk

WHAT IT ACTUALLY DELIVERS:
• Agent Spaces architecture for scoped permissions and isolated environments
• Automatic topology building that discovered 42 resources in demo
• Accurate diagnosis of EKS imagePullBackError in real testing
• MTTR improvement from 45 to 18 minutes when properly configured

THE CRITICAL LIMITATIONS:
• Cannot execute fixes - humans must approve and apply every action
• >40 minute gaps between events break correlation
• Preview limits: 20 incident hours/month, US-East-1 only
• No SOC 2/ISO 27001 compliance yet
• GA pricing unknown - the "$600K question"

EVALUATION FRAMEWORK:
We provide a 5-question framework to decide if this fits your team, plus ideal vs wait-and-see scenarios based on your cloud footprint and incident volume.

Resources and full transcript: https://platformengineering.playbook.org/podcasts/00080-aws-devops-agent-autonomous-operations