AWS Frontier Agents: A 30‑Day Pilot Plan

The headline from AWS re:Invent the week of December 2, 2025 wasn’t just “more models.” It was AWS frontier agents—autonomous teammates that work across code, security, and operations without constant babysitting. The first three are Kiro autonomous agent for development, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent, all available in preview. (aboutamazon.com)

Here’s the thing: pilots that treat agents like chatbots will underwhelm. Pilots that treat them like junior teammates—with scoped permissions, observable workflows, and real success criteria—will show material outcomes. This 30‑day plan is the latter.

What are AWS frontier agents, really?

AWS defines frontier agents by three traits: autonomy (goal‑driven execution), scale (multiple concurrent tasks/sub‑agents), and independence (work for hours or days). The initial set tackles software delivery end‑to‑end: Kiro writes and updates code, Security Agent does design and code reviews plus on‑demand pen testing, and DevOps Agent triages incidents and drives reliability improvements. All three launched in preview at re:Invent. (aboutamazon.com)

Two data points worth noting as you set expectations: DevOps Agent has been used internally at Amazon and reported an estimated >86% rate of identifying incident root causes during escalations; and DevOps Agent integrates with mainstream tools—CloudWatch, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk, GitHub, GitLab, ServiceNow, Slack—so you’re not rebuilding your toolchain. (aboutamazon.com)

Kiro’s preview is rolling out to Pro, Pro+, and Power users at no additional cost during the preview (with weekly usage limits), and it never merges changes on its own—it opens pull requests for you to review. That’s a small detail with a big governance impact. (kiro.dev)

Why this matters now

AWS has been shipping a steady drumbeat around agentic development—new AgentCore capabilities, Nova model updates, and now production‑minded agents targeting the pain between tickets, repos, pipelines, and pagers. The message at re:Invent 2025 was clear: AI assistants are giving way to AI agents that can operate for extended periods and deliver outcomes, not just suggestions. (techcrunch.com)

For engineering leaders, that translates into two opportunities. First, compress toil in security and ops without adding headcount. Second, orchestrate multi‑repo changes and long‑running tasks (dependency upgrades, test coverage lifts, cross‑cutting refactors) while humans stay on product work. Done right, this shifts your mean time to value, not just mean time to resolution.

A 30‑Day Pilot Plan for AWS frontier agents

This plan gets you signal fast without risking production. Scope it to one product area or platform slice (5–15 services) so results are measurable and politically survivable.

Days 0–3: Approvals, access, and guardrails

• Name an owner (Staff+ engineer), a security partner, and an SRE partner. Give the trio decision authority for the pilot.

• Create a dedicated AWS account and GitHub org or sub‑org for the pilot. Use read‑only roles initially for production resources; write perms restricted to non‑prod repos and ephemeral infra.

• Establish branch protection on all pilot repos. Kiro won’t merge; keep it that way. Require 1–2 human reviews and passing checks. (kiro.dev)

• Define data boundaries. Agents should not access customer PII, regulated datasets, or prod secrets during weeks 1–2. Start with masked fixtures and synthetic traces.

• Draft a short “Agent Operating Agreement” covering: scope of authority, allowed tools, logging, rollback, and a human‑in‑the‑loop rule for any change to prod‑adjacent systems.

• Optional but helpful: if your roadmap includes building your own domain agents, align your pilot with our AgentCore 30‑day launch plan so governance and evaluation carry forward. (aboutamazon.com)

Days 4–7: Instrumentation and integrations

• Connect DevOps Agent to observability and collaboration tools (CloudWatch plus your APM—Datadog, New Relic, or Dynatrace—and Slack, ServiceNow, PagerDuty). Validate that alerts auto‑open an investigation thread and that hypotheses/findings are posted back to chat. (aws.amazon.com)

• Connect Kiro to the pilot repos. Confirm it can create PRs in a sandbox branch, run tests in CI, and respect your CODEOWNERS. (kiro.dev)

• Enable Security Agent for design document review (arch docs, ADRs) and PR scanning on two active services. Set org‑specific rules once so reviews validate your standards automatically. (aws.amazon.com)

• Baseline metrics: MTTR, alert volume per week, false positive rate in security findings, PR cycle time, and deploy frequency for the pilot slice.

Days 8–14: First real work

• Kiro: Assign 3–5 multi‑repo tasks your team normally defers: library upgrades across services, roll out golden lint/test configs, or increase coverage on risky modules. Expect it to work asynchronously and open multiple PRs for review. (kiro.dev)

• Security Agent: Run on‑demand penetration tests against a non‑prod environment for one customer‑facing service. Expect validated, reproducible findings with remediation guidance in hours, not weeks. (aws.amazon.com)

• DevOps Agent: Stage two game‑day incidents in a clone environment (network ACL misconfig, exhausted connection pool). Measure time to first hypothesis and time to root cause. AWS reports the agent has hit >86% root cause identification in internal use; treat that as directional, not a guaranteed SLA. (aboutamazon.com)

• Keep humans in the loop. Require engineers to annotate agent PRs with “accept/as‑is,” “accept/with‑changes,” or “reject/why.” Those annotations become training feedback for what “good” looks like in your org.

Days 15–21: Scale the scope, raise the bar

• Expand Kiro to a second service cluster or frontend+backend pair. Let it run up to 10 concurrent tasks if your preview tier allows. (kiro.dev)

• Move Security Agent reviews earlier: architecture drafts and threat models before code, plus auto PR reviews on every change in the pilot slice. Track reduction in late findings and rework. (aws.amazon.com)

• Let DevOps Agent start a “reliability backlog.” It should propose improvements across observability gaps, deployment pipeline hygiene, infra right‑sizing, and resilience patterns. Log the proposals and pick 2–3 to implement. (aws.amazon.com)

• Add cost and time tracking. Hours of human work avoided, MTTR deltas, PR cycle time deltas, and any infra savings from right‑sizing suggestions.

Days 22–30: Decision window

• Run a final Security Agent pen test on another non‑prod environment with feature flags simulating peak traffic.

• Tally impact: incidents resolved faster, hours saved on backlog chores, security findings discovered earlier, and successful multi‑repo changes landed.

• Governance checkpoint: do agents stay read‑only in prod for now? Where can you safely grant limited write in staging to accelerate toil removal? Document the new guardrails.

• Decide on expansion, pause, or rollback. Expansion candidates: extend to a second business domain, or pilot across a different tech stack (e.g., Node + Python + mobile). If you plan to customize models for domain‑specific reasoning later, now’s also the time to evaluate whether Nova Forge’s build‑your‑own model path fits your 2026 roadmap. (wired.com)

Architecture and integration patterns that work

Think of each agent as a consumer of your existing systems, not a replacement. Kiro consumes repos, CI, and issue trackers; Security Agent consumes designs and PRs and exercises a target app for pen testing; DevOps Agent consumes telemetry, runbooks, and deployment metadata to correlate cause and effect. (aboutamazon.com)

For DevOps Agent, start with one chat system (Slack) and one APM (Datadog or New Relic) plus CloudWatch. More signals are not always better; correlated, high‑quality signals are. Ensure the agent can open tickets and pages directly. (aws.amazon.com)

For Security Agent, your critical path is “define org standards once.” Put those rules under version control and keep them close to the security team. That’s how you get tailored findings instead of generic checklists—something AWS calls out explicitly. (aws.amazon.com)

For Kiro, lean into its independence and context memory. Let it sandbox, run tests, and open PRs. Review remains human. Protect main branches. This is the safest way to discover where it shines. (kiro.dev)

Guardrails, risks, and gotchas

• Preview is preview. All three agents are in preview as of December 2025; features and pricing can change. Keep them in non‑prod for the first month and bake rollback into your rollout plan. (aboutamazon.com)

• Pricing opacity. Kiro’s autonomous agent is free in preview (with weekly limits). Neither Security Agent nor DevOps Agent list public pricing yet. Use budgets and usage SLOs so the pilot can’t spiral. If you’ve wrestled with metered AI costs in IDEs, you know how quickly “just a few calls” becomes a line item—see our practical tips in avoiding surprise Copilot bills. (kiro.dev)

• Data boundaries. Don’t point agents at customer data stores or secrets early on. Security Agent’s on‑demand pen tests should hit non‑prod targets with synthetic identities until your security team signs off. (aws.amazon.com)

• Multicloud nuance. DevOps Agent can correlate across multicloud/hybrid environments via your telemetry and pipelines, but only if integrations are wired and RBAC is sane. Start small, then extend. (aws.amazon.com)

• Human factors. Treat agents like interns who can sprint forever. They need context, feedback, and guardrails. If reviews are slow or feedback is vague, your ROI will be too.

People also ask

Do I need Bedrock AgentCore to use AWS frontier agents?

No. You can pilot Kiro, Security Agent, and DevOps Agent as managed previews and get value immediately. If your 2026 plan includes building bespoke, policy‑aware agents, AgentCore is where you’ll formalize tools, memory, policies, and evaluations—our AgentCore 30‑day plan walks through that step by step. AWS also announced new AgentCore capabilities and prebuilt evaluations at re:Invent 2025, which is relevant as you scale. (aboutamazon.com)

Are these agents safe for regulated industries?

They can be, if you stage them properly. Keep pilots in segregated accounts, use read‑only roles, restrict data sources, and log everything. Security Agent’s value add is tailored org rules plus verifiable findings; that reduces noise and helps compliance teams reason about risk. Validate with your security and legal partners before expanding scope. (aws.amazon.com)

Will Kiro replace my developers?

No. Kiro creates PRs; it doesn’t self‑merge. Its sweet spot is parallelizing routine or cross‑cutting tasks and learning your patterns over time so humans can focus on product work. Treat it like a tireless teammate that needs review and feedback. (kiro.dev)

What changed versus IDE copilots and chatbots?

Three things: autonomy, concurrency, and persistence. Instead of prompting one file at a time, you describe an outcome and Kiro executes across repos while you work elsewhere. Security Agent moves from periodic checklists to continuous, org‑specific validation and on‑demand pen testing. DevOps Agent correlates telemetry, code, and deploys to triage and prevent incidents, not just page a human. That’s a structural shift, not a UI upgrade. (aws.amazon.com)

If you’re thinking about cost control and usage patterns after getting burned by “premium requests” in other tools, you’re not wrong. Put budgets, alerts, and usage reviews in place on day one. For practical levers, see our field notes on Copilot cost controls.

A simple evaluation framework you can copy

Define a scorecard with five weighted categories (0–5 each):

• Reliability: delta in MTTR and percent of incidents where DevOps Agent provided correct root cause.

• Security: count of validated findings per week and rework avoided by earlier design reviews.

• Delivery: PR cycle time reduction and number of multi‑repo changes landed via Kiro.

• Quality: test coverage lift and regression rate after agent‑driven changes ship.

• Effort: human hours avoided and engineer sentiment (weekly pulse 1–5).

Set expansion criteria: total score ≥18, no Sev‑1s caused by agent actions, and positive sentiment from at least 60% of reviewers.

What to do next

• Pick a 5–15 service slice with clear pain (ops toil, security backlog, stale dependencies). Appoint a pilot trio: Staff+ engineer, security lead, SRE lead.
• Wire integrations intentionally: one chat, one APM, CloudWatch, GitHub/GitLab, CI, and ticketing. Keep the surface area small at first. (aws.amazon.com)
• Run the 30‑day plan above. Keep humans in the loop on every change; require PR review and change‑management notes. (kiro.dev)
• Decide on expansion, pause, or rollback using the scorecard—and if your roadmap includes custom agents or models, plan an AgentCore/Nova Forge workshop. Our take on whether you should build a custom model can help shape that call. (wired.com)
• If you want a partner for a scoped pilot, our services team can set up the sandbox, wire integrations, and stand up governance in a week. Or just reach out and we’ll tailor this playbook to your stack.

Zooming out

AWS didn’t just ship features this year; it shipped a point of view: agents should act like teammates, not tools. With frontier agents in preview and deeper guardrails in AgentCore, the building blocks are here. If you run a software org, the right move isn’t to wait for theoretical maturity—it’s to run a controlled pilot with real work, real controls, and real metrics. You’ll know in 30 days whether these agents earn a seat on your team. (aboutamazon.com)

And if you’re rethinking how your ops model and budgets shift as AWS keeps abstracting glue work—Lambda’s managed instances, AI‑assisted ops, and database savings—your operating model is changing too. We’ve covered how these shifts affect teams and cost lines in our write‑up on Lambda Managed Instances. Combine that with this pilot, and you’ll have a practical 2026 plan that balances speed, safety, and spend.