It is the last full day of reInvent, and it ended with the kind of keynote only one person can pull off. Style. Philosophy. Code. And a message that doesn’t expire when the tech does. This wasn’t a roadmap or a list of launches. It was a challenge to every person who builds.

Dr. Werner Vogels took the stage one final time.

There is a rhythm to a Peter DeSantis keynote.
You sit down expecting a product announcement, and you end up holding a degree-level lecture on why the future of AI rests on the parts nobody sees. This morning at reInvent was exactly that. A full room, a quiet intro, then straight across the boundary between computer science, silicon strategy, and the economics of AI.

It is Day 3 at re:Invent and today belonged to a single idea. Agents.
Not chatbots. Not prompt wrappers. Real agentic systems with identity, memory, reasoning and policy that you can trust in production.
Swami Sivasubramanian walked onto the stage and delivered a keynote focused entirely on the future of building with AI.

There’s something special about the first keynote of the week. The event feels like it clicks into its next gear — thousands of people settling into seats, the stage lights firing up, and AWS laying down its vision for the year ahead.

Today was Matt Garman’s keynote, and it didn’t take long before it became very clear: 2025 is the year AWS doubles down on AI agents, developer velocity, and the foundations required to make all of that scale.

Day 1 at re:Invent is when the the event finally shifts from anticipation to full throttle. The Community Lounge wakes up early, the first wave of announcements rolls in, hallway conversations get louder and more speculative, and the Expo floor turns into a kind of organised chaos that only AWS could orchestrate. Today felt like the moment everyone collectively remembered why we fly across the world for this: the people, the pace, the surprises, and the unmistakable sense that the week is about to go somewhere big.

Because AWS has impeccable timing

Just as I pressed commit AWS decided now was the perfect moment to drop a handful of announcements that sit somewhere between deeply practical and mildly confusing. Not keynote-level hype. But definitely builder-grade useful.

It’s Day 0 of re:Invent — technically not the official start, but anyone who’s been here before knows it’s when the week unofficially begins. This is the day when the city shifts gears, people converge, badges get claimed, airport reunions happen, and AWS quietly warms up the engines.

No announcements yet — not one.
And honestly, I don’t mind.
Today wasn’t about features or service updates. It was about people, energy, and that unmistakable build-up that says: It’s about to begin.

There’s no official banner that says Welcome to pre:Invent, but you know it when it starts. For me, it was around September 30th — the day announcements started coming in hot and heavy.
As of 23rd November, AWS has quietly dropped 560 updates. That’s not marketing fluff. That’s real features, real services, and a lot of “Wait—when did that get announced?”

UPDATE: At the time of publishing the number of updates had risen to over 600

One of the earliest surprises?
CodeCommit emerged from the dead.
Not just patched — revived. And suddenly, AWS’s developer story started feeling different. Especially with Kiro going GA and Q Developer updates waiting in the wings.

In 2025, AWS Marketplace is quietly rolling out some significant improvements that impact how both sellers and buyers interact with the platform. If you haven’t revisited Marketplace recently, it may be time to take a closer look. These updates reflect AWS’s continued investment in making Marketplace a true software delivery hub — not just a digital catalogue.

Let’s talk about one of the most common (and costly) mistakes I see in serverless applications using Amazon DynamoDB: overusing Scan when a Query would do the job better — faster, cheaper, and more predictably.

“The ‘scan is easier and we don’t need indexes’ anti pattern