From new FinOps and Strands agents to AWS Continuum and innovation for AWS Outposts and Bedrock AgentCore, here are the 10 coolest new Amazon Web Services tools and products unveiled in 2026 that partners need to know about.
Amazon Web Services launched a slew of new innovation for AI agents, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, lifecycle management, Amazon Quick and so much more this year.
The $150 billion Seattle-based cloud leader focused the majority of AWS’ new tools and products around artificial intelligence in 2026.
AWS generated $37.6 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2026, up 28 percent year over year, as AI-related sales rapidly expand.
[Related: Top 10 AWS News Stories Of 2026 So Far: OpenAI, Layoffs And AI Innovation]
From AWS Continuum and Amazon Connect Decisions to its new FinOps and Stands Agents, CRN breaks down the 10 hottest new AWS products, tools and features in 2026 that every AWS partner and customer should know about.
New AWS Continuum And Security Agent
The cloud giant launched AWS Continuum for code vulnerabilities that addresses the full lifecycle of a code vulnerability at speed—from discovery through actions.
AWS Continuum reasons overs a user’s full environment, confirms what is real, and drives toward a resolution.
This includes structured data already living in AWS such as infrastructure, permissions, network topology and code, as well as the unstructured data that captures how organizations operate such as internal documents and communications.
AWS launched a new Security Agent as part of Continuum.
AWS Security Agent is a frontier agent that proactively secures a client’s applications throughout the development lifecycle across all their environments. Users can perform on-demand penetration testing customized to their application to discover security risks verified through exploitability testing.
AWS Bedrock AgentCore is the company’s flagship agentic platform for building, deploying and operating agents at scale using any framework, model or protocol.
AWS continued to launch new capabilities for AgentCore throughout 2026 including AgentCore Web Search, a new tool that lets agents get information from the web without infrastructure overhead. Users leverage the web search tool to enable agents to ground responses in current, cited web knowledge with zero data egress from customers’ secured AWS environment.
Additionally, AWS has integrated AgentCore with AWS Bedrock Guardrails, which evaluates every agent action for prompt injection attempts, harmful content and sensitive data exposure.
Another big new feature inside AgentCore is Harness, which simplifies AI agent development to two API calls. The service is designed to simplify the challenges of scaling AI agents by providing managed support for concurrency, memory, identity and state management.
Click through to read the other 8 Coolest AWS Products of 2026.
AWS Outposts Automates Lifecycle Management
AWS Outposts extends AWS infrastructure, services and APIs to on-premise.
This year, AWS Outposts launched new self-service capabilities around configuration, quoting, ordering, subscription management, renewal, and decommissioning directly from the AWS Management Console, CLI, and API.
Previously, customers relied on AWS teams for managing their Outposts lifecycle, from evaluation through end of term.
A new configuration and quoting tool for Outposts generates real-time cost estimates across payment options and term lengths, and proactively surfaces account and regional constraints before order submission.
Quotes are generated in seconds and can be converted to orders directly in the console, for both new deployments and capacity additions.
Subscription details like term dates and billing are now available in the console and programmatically, eliminating the need to contact AWS for contract information.
Amazon Quick’s New Desktop App
Amazon’s AI assistant Quick launched a new desktop application that creates a personalized experience by staying connected to a user by accessing local files, apps, and learning from every session to understand a user’s work.
The new service application can connect enterprise applications and includes integrations with Google Workspace, Zoom, Slack, Microsoft 365, Teams and other third-party products.
Within the new Quick desktop application, clients can create presentations, images, dashboards and other applications. The desktop app runs continuously in the background, monitoring across the ecosystem and surfacing relevant information.
The desktop app introduces new content creation and connection capabilities, automates browser-based workflows and connects to developer tools including Claude Code and Kiro CLI.
AWS FinOps Agent
AWS launched a new FinOps Agent for FinOps practitioners and engineering teams that answers cost questions, surfaces optimization opportunities, investigates cost anomalies, and runs recurring FinOps workflows on a defined schedule.
Customers can use it to query their AWS costs, generate cost reports for finance and engineering teams, and surface rightsizing, idle resource, and Savings Plans recommendations from AWS Cost Optimization Hub and AWS Compute Optimizer.
The frontier FinOps Agent can open Jira tickets on a user’s behalf based on those recommendations.
When a cost anomaly is detected, FinOps Agent can automatically investigate the root cause and post findings to a Slack channel.
AWS Connect Decisions
AWS launched the next generation of supply chain technology with Amazon Connect Decisions.
The new Amazon Connect Decisions is a supply chain planning and intelligence solution with AI teammates that work alongside a client’s team harmonizing demand signals into consensus forecasts.
It also generates constraint-aware supply plans and actively monitors a customer’s operations to prevent problems, resolve issues, and identify root causes for continuous improvement.
Amazon Connect Decisions adapts to how a user works, driven by their operating procedures and rules, as well as integrates with existing systems and learning from a user’s decisions, AWS said.
The new solution leverages Amazon supply chain expertise to deliver effective plans and recommendations from day one.
AWS Strands Agents
AWS’ popular Strands Agents offering is an open source toolkit for building production agents. Strands takes a model-driven approach to building and running AI agents in just a few lines of code.
New capabilities inside Strands include better context management in the Harness SDK, a new isolated execution environment with Strands Shell, and chaos testing and red teaming in Strands Evals.
Strands Shell is a new open-source project that gives agents a secure execution environment with sub-millisecond startup.
In terms of improved context management, large tool results are offloaded to external storage and replaced with a truncated preview. Old messages are compressed into structured summaries rather than dropped.
Strands Evals is an SDK for evaluating a user’s agents as they build it. Features include helping test a user’s agent from multiple angles including chaos testing and red teaming.
AWS CloudFormation Express Mode
AWS CloudFormation Express mode is a new deployment mode that accelerates deployments for developers and AI tools iterating on infrastructure.
Express mode accelerates deployments by completing when CloudFormation confirms resource configuration is applied, rather than waiting for extended stabilization checks.
AWS said the new Express mode reduces deployment time by up to 4-times for iterative development workflows and production scenarios.
CloudFormation automatically retries dependent resources that encounter transient failures during provisioning within the same stack, without requiring any customer intervention. This built-in resilience handles timing issues between resources as they stabilize.
AWS MCP Server
AWS’ new MCP Server became generally available in May, giving AI agents and coding assistants secure, authenticated access to all AWS services through a small, fixed set of tools.
Agents can search AWS documentation and retrieve service information without authentication. To execute AWS API calls, run Python scripts in a sandboxed environment or follow curated skills, agents authenticate through a user’s existing IAM credentials.
All capabilities are available through a single endpoint with CloudWatch metrics and IAM-based access controls.
The AWS MCP Server supports IAM context keys, so a client no longer needs a separate IAM permission to use the server and can express fine-grained access in a standard IAM policy. Documentation retrieval no longer requires authentication.
Amazon Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base
AWS’ new Bedrock Managed Knowledge Base, a new set of capabilities that enables developers to build enterprise-grade generative AI applications with their proprietary data in minutes.
Managed Knowledge Base removes the complexity of building and managing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, allowing developers to focus on business outcomes rather than infrastructure management.
Users can build enterprise RAG pipelines with the new managed Knowledge Base on Bedrock.
It provides native data connectors, Smart Parsing for automatic multi-format data preparation, and an Agentic Retriever for complex multi-step queries—all integrated with AgentCore Gateway.
