The Rise of Autonomous Ops: Inside AWS’s DevOps Agent with David Yanacek
Show notes
In this episode, Corey Quinn sits down with AWS Senior Principal Engineer David Yanacek to explore the next evolution of DevOps. After two decades of building systems to reduce operational pain, David shares how AWS’s new DevOps Agent is pushing automation to a whole new level, autonomously diagnosing incidents, suggesting fixes, and proactively improving systems before engineers even log in. From pager overload to autonomous remediation, this conversation is a glimpse into a world where software isn’t the bottleneck anymore, operations are evolving into something entirely new. If you care about DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, or just want fewer 3 a.m. alerts, this episode is for you. Show highlights: (00:00) DevOps Meets Agents (00:13) Welcome and Sponsor Break (01:29) David Yanacek Backstory (02:34) DevOps Roots at Amazon (04:22) DevOps Agent GA Overview (05:32) LLMs MCP and Any Cloud (08:32) Guardrails and Safe Changes (11:47) Beta Results and Consistency (14:13) Troubleshooting Theory and On Demand (17:29) Future of DevOps and Closing About David: David Yanacek is a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS and a lead advisor on the Agentic AI team. His current work focuses on Kiro, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and AWS’s operational agents, where he helps shape the future of intelligent, autonomous systems. Over a 19+ year career at Amazon and AWS, David has been at the forefront of building services that simplify life for developers and operators. His experience spans serverless, DevOps, and CloudOps, including launching Amazon DynamoDB and AWS IoT Core, and contributing to the direction of cornerstone services like AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon CloudWatch. David also served as the lead publisher for the Amazon Builders’ Library, helping customers apply Amazon’s hard-earned architectural and operational lessons to their own systems. Outside of engineering, David plays the French horn in a local Seattle ensemble. Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-yanacek/ Website: https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/authors/david-yanacek/ Sponsored by: duckbillhq.com
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