Amazon Redesigns Cloud Infrastructure for AI Agents

The tech industry is shifting towards a world where AI agents are increasingly common, and cloud providers are adapting to meet this new reality.

Cloud infrastructure has long been designed around humans who search, click, scroll, and stream in a steady and predictable fashion. AI agents behave differently. They can unleash a swell of activity, spinning up multiple sub-agents that query hundreds of databases, search documents, and call APIs in seconds and then disappear as quickly as they arrived.

Amazon's New OpenSearch Serverless

Amazon is redesigning a core piece of its cloud infrastructure to meet this new demand. On Thursday, AWS launched its next generation of OpenSearch Serverless, a fully managed search and vector database — essentially a system for storing and retrieving information at scale — that’s designed specifically for agentic workloads. AWS says the new system can instantly scale up when agents trigger tasks and scale back down to zero when idle.

A Growing Realization Across the Industry

The launch reflects a growing realization across the tech industry: infrastructure originally designed for a human-driven internet doesn’t work as well in a world increasingly populated by agents. While AI agents still represent a relatively small portion of internet activity, machine-generated traffic is already significant, and poised to grow. Cloudflare says bots accounted for 31% of overall HTTP traffic over the last six months. AI crawlers, search engines, and assistants made up roughly a quarter of all bot requests during that period.

Enterprises Are Deploying Agents Internally

At Google’s I/O developer conference last week, the company said users will be able to start delegating tasks to AI systems, like researching purchases, booking travel, browsing the web, and interacting with apps. But the buck doesn’t stop at consumer-focused AI agents. Enterprises are increasingly deploying agents internally and for their customers, creating new kinds of machine-generated traffic behind the scenes.

Redesigning Infrastructure for Agents

As a result, cloud providers and infrastructure companies have been reckoning with how to adapt systems built for humans to a world of agents that are constantly and autonomously retrieving information, invoking tools, and generating machine-to-machine traffic. AWS’s new OpenSearch Serverless is designed to address this challenge. The key technical change with this new generation is that it decouples compute from storage, allowing compute to scale up in seconds to accommodate agent traffic bursts and to scale down to zero, so customers pay $0 when agents are idle.

A Shift Across the Cloud Industry

The shift is emerging across the cloud industry. Databricks and Snowflake are repositioning themselves as AI memory and retrieval systems for enterprise data. Microsoft has rolled out updates to Azure designed to handle AI agent bursts and share memory between agents. Cloudflare, in a similar vein to Amazon, last month introduced infrastructure aimed at giving agents persistent environments and instant scalability.

A World of Agents

The more companies deploy AI agents, the more pressure there will be to redesign infrastructure around machine-generated workloads, which in turn could make agents cheaper and easier to deploy at larger scales. The tech industry is shifting towards a world where AI agents are increasingly common, and cloud providers are adapting to meet this new reality.