AWS Weekly News: Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments, Agent Toolkit for AWS, and More (May 11, 2026)

This week, AWS unveiled the preview of the first managed payments feature, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments. It enables agents to autonomously access and pay for APIs, MCP servers, web content, and other agents, and reduces the burden of building billing, credential management, and compliance through integrations with Coinbase and Stripe. Users can connect a Coinbase CDP wallet or Stripe Privy wallet and set per-session spending limits.

• Agent Toolkit for AWS: A bundle of production-ready tools and guides for AI coding agents. It is provided at no additional cost, reduces errors, lowers token costs, and offers enterprise-grade security controls. It is the successor to AWS Labs' MCP servers, plugins, and skills.

• AWS MCP Server GA: A managed remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI agents and coding assistants secure, authenticated access to AWS services through a small, fixed set of tools. This server is part of the Agent Toolkit for AWS.

• Amazon WorkSpaces for AI agents (Preview): AI agents can safely operate desktop applications in a managed WorkSpaces environment while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and compliance.

• EC2 M8idn/M8idb and R8idn/R8idb: Equipped with AWS-exclusive custom 6th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and the latest 6th generation AWS Nitro cards, delivering up to 43% better compute performance per vCPU compared to the previous generation. M8idn/R8idn support up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth, and M8idb/R8idb support up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth.

• Valkey marked its 2nd anniversary by surpassing 100 million Docker pulls, a 17x increase year-over-year. More than 225 contributors submitted 1,500+ pull requests, and it was described as developing roughly twice as fast as Redis over the same period. Valkey 9.0 is available on Amazon ElastiCache.

• Amazon S3 Vectors now enables querying billions of vectors with standard SQL in Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition, allowing vector similarity results to be combined with price, inventory, and tenant filters in a single query.

• AWS DevOps Agent integrates with CloudWatch, Splunk, GitHub, and Slack via DevOps Agent Spaces to define investigation scope, trigger automated investigations via webhooks, and generate mitigation plans, handing off implementation specs to coding agents like Kiro.