AWS unveils new 'frontier agents' focused on improving software development lifecycle

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is introducing three new 'frontier agents' - described by the company as AI agents that are autonomous, scalable and can operate for hours or days without requiring intervention.

The three new frontier agents - Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent - are focused on "transforming the software development lifecycle", moving from assisting with individual tasks to completing complex projects autonomously like a member of a team.

The Kiro autonomous agent maintains persistent context across sessions and continuously learns from pull requests and feedback, able to handle a range of tasks, from triaging bugs to improving code coverage, with a single change spanning multiple repositories.

Users can ask it questions, describe a task, and assign tasks in a backlog directly from GitHub. The agent will then independently figure out how to get the work done, sharing changes as proposed edits and pull requests, so users stay in control of what gets incorporated.

For teams, the Kiro autonomous agent is a shared resource that works alongside the entire team, building a collective understanding of a company's codebase, products, and standards. It connects to  team’s repos, pipelines, and tools, like Jira, GitHub, and Slack, to maintain context as work progresses, adapting to changes or updates. Every code review, ticket, and architectural decision also informs the agent’s understanding.

The AWS Security Agent embeds security expertise throughout the development lifecycle, proactively reviewing design documents and scanning pull requests against organisational security requirements and common vulnerabilities.

Users define an organisation's security standards once, and AWS Security Agent automatically validates them across the company's applications during its review.

The agent also transforms penetration testing into an on-demand capability, expanding it across an entire application portfolio by returning validated findings with remediation code to fix the issues it finds.

AWS DevOps Agent is on call when incidents happen, responding to issues and using its knowledge of an application and the relationship between components to find the root cause of the problem.

It learns your resources and their relationships spanning everything from observability tools, like Amazon CloudWatch, Dynatrace, Datadog, New Relic, and Splunk, to runbooks, code repositories, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

It maps a company's application resources and correlates telemetry, code, and deployment data to  pinpoint root causes and intend to reduce mean time to resolution. Within Amazon, AWS DevOps Agent has handled thousands of escalations, with an estimated root cause identification rate of over 86%.

AWS DevOps Agent analyses patterns across historical incidents, using those learnings to provide targeted recommendations that aim to strengthen four key areas: observability, infrastructure optimization, deployment pipeline enhancement, and application resilience.

"Together these three frontier agents are going to completely transform the way your teams build secure and operate your software," said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS in his keynote speech at AWS re:Invent 2025 event in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia is among the customers already using one or more of these new agents to accelerate the software development lifecycle.

The bank's Cloud Foundations group manages over 1,700 AWS accounts and provides centralised cloud operation services for thousands of engineers. While prototyping their next-generation internal cloud platform, the bank's team replicated a complex network and identity management issue to test AWS DevOps Agent.

These types of issues can take a seasoned DevOps engineer hours to identify, and the agent found the root cause in under 15 minutes, according to AWS.

"AWS DevOps Agent thinks and acts like a seasoned DevOps engineer, helping our engineers build a banking infrastructure that’s faster, more resilient, and designed to deliver better experiences for our customers," said Jason Sandery, head of cloud services at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

"This isn't just about faster resolution times - it's about maintaining the trust our customers put in us.”

Jason Pollock travelled to AWS re:Invent 2025 as a guest of AWS.