Amazon Web Services has debuted an agent that it says will evaluate your cloudy environment “as an experienced cloud architect would” and recommend useful changes. The cloud colossus named its bot the “AWS Well-Architected Agent,” a nod to the Well-Architected Framework that outlines best practices for using the Amazonian cloud. Amazon’s announcement says the agentic incarnation of the Framework analyzes AWS environments “against Well-Architected best practices across 65+ AWS services” and then delivers “targeted, contextual recommendations for improving your applications’ cost, security, performance, and resilience.” “It generates recommendations aligned to your declared business goals, delivers implementation packages with every finding, and surfaces cross-pillar trade-offs making it simpler to remediate the findings,” we’re told. The agent also delivers “ready-to-implement fixes” and “provides individual resource findings with specific dollar impact (where applicable) and step-by-step remediation, consolidated findings across multiple resources scoped to your application, and broad architectural patterns and designs with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) code changes needed to align with Well-Architected best practices.” AWS offers myriad services — some of them with overlapping features and functions. Customers often find themselves using more services than they intended, or using services that aren’t quite right for their intended use. AWS is generally happy if customers change to more appropriate services, even when that sees them spend less, and offers assistance from its own staff or channel partners to make it happen. This agent may make some of that human assistance less necessary. AWS is far from alone in suggesting agents should take on some of the chores that human IT professionals perform today - an approach that’s come to be known as AIOps. When your correspondent chats to IT pros about AIOps, they express distrust on grounds that they cannot be sure agents make valid suggestions and feel following bad advice offered by a machine would indefensible if things go pear-shaped. Vendors I’ve spoken to believe IT pros will first cautiously verify recommendations from AIOps systems, and if they see good results allow agents to take more actions without human oversight - but always with the ability to quickly roll back changes. AWS seems to recognize that users won’t go all-in immediately and therefore offers several manual means to apply recommendations the agent suggests, including the command line interface. For now, the agent is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) regions, but can handle workloads from any AWS commercial Region. It’s only available for users with an AWS support plan. ®

Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft’s status page says it has “paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event.” The event started at 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026. ExpressRoute Gateway is a service that connects on-prem networks to virtual networks in Azure, making it an important element of a hybrid cloud. Azure VPN Gateway creates a secure tunnel between on-prem infrastructure and Azure. Microsoft pitches its Azure VMware Service as an ideal way to build a hybrid cloud on VMware. This incident is therefore likely to make life hard for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud customers. At the time of writing, the incident impacts 18 Azure regions: West US, West US 3, North Europe, West Europe, France Central, UK West, UK South, Switzerland North, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Japan West, Korea Central, South Africa North, UAE North, Mexico Central, Germany North, South India, and Jio India Central. The Azure VMware service isn’t impacted in the last four of those regions. As of 23:13 UTC, Microsoft says it is “seeing continued recovery across impacted ExpressRoute gateways and are monitoring this recovery to confirm that it remains durable.” The company also advised that some affected VPN Gateways have experienced reduced redundancy rather than a complete loss of connectivity. “Some supporting network management components have not recovered automatically and are contributing to management operation failures in a subset of affected regions,” the update adds. “Engineering teams are actively restoring these components using alternate healthy instances where available.” Microsoft doesn’t know what happened, or why, but says its investigation “continues to show a correlation between this event and infrastructure operating system servicing activity.” The Register will update this story as Microsoft releases more information. ® UPDATED AT O3:30 UTC, OCTOBER 1 To add that Microsoft says it has mitigatged the incident, in a status update which also mentions more products – the Azure Firewall, Application Gateways, and Web Application Firewall – as being impacted. Redmond has promised to release more info, too.