AWS Unveils DevOps Agent: New AI First-Responder Aims to Cut Outage Downtime for Businesses
AWS launches DevOps Agent, an AI-powered first responder that rapidly diagnoses outages and suggests fixes, easing pressure on engineers and reducing downtime.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced a powerful new AI-driven system designed to transform how companies handle outages and technical disruptions. Announced at the annual reinvent conference in Las Vegas, the AWS DevOps Agent acts as a digital first responder—automatically analysing failures, diagnosing problems, and offering recommended solutions long before human engineers join the incident call.
AWS says the AI tool can uncover the source of complex disruptions in just 15 minutes, a process that can take senior engineers several hours. For businesses heavily dependent on cloud infrastructure, even a short outage can lead to significant financial losses and eroded customer trust. With DevOps Agent, AWS hopes to dramatically shrink incident resolution times and reduce pressure on site reliability teams.
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’s vice president of agentic AI, explained the tool’s role in streamlining early-stage incident management. “By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” he told a popular publication.
Unlike conventional monitoring platforms that simply detect anomalies and raise alerts, DevOps Agent actively investigates those alerts. It gathers signals from observability solutions such as Datadog and Dynatrace, launches several parallel diagnostic threads, and inspects potential root causes — whether related to database failures, network delays, API breakdowns, or other system issues. All of this happens while engineers are still assembling on the call.
Its real-world performance has already grabbed attention. At the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the tool reportedly resolved issues within minutes—scenarios that usually require hours of manual intervention. This speed and autonomy give DevOps Agent a notable advantage: it not only identifies what went wrong but also proposes actionable fixes and continuously learns from past incidents.
The launch highlights Amazon’s broader push into what the company calls “agentic AI”—systems capable of taking meaningful actions rather than just analysing data or generating text. Earlier this year, AWS rolled out Kiro, its AI assistant aimed at boosting software development productivity. DevOps Agent, however, focuses on critical post-deployment reliability, stepping in during high-pressure moments when uptime is on the line.
The competition in this space is intensifying. Microsoft Azure has already introduced its own SRE Agent, while startups such as Resolve and Traversal are experimenting with similar autonomous operations tools. With cloud environments becoming more layered and demanding, the need for automation in reliability engineering is rising sharply, especially as burnout among SRE teams becomes common.
AWS has not revealed the internal architecture behind DevOps Agent but confirmed that it uses a blend of Amazon’s proprietary models and selected external AI technologies. The company emphasises that the priority is seamless integration with existing enterprise systems, ensuring customers can adopt the tool without major workflow changes.
Positioning the launch within a larger industry shift, Sivasubramanian described the effort as moving from “passive monitoring to active problem-solving.” The preview version of DevOps Agent is now available, with paid tiers set to follow. If it performs as promised, the tool could soon become a core part of enterprise cloud management—reducing overnight emergencies and helping teams spend more time on innovation instead of firefighting.
