AWS Cloud Architect & AI Expert
MCP is a tool pipe. The 2025-11-25 spec requires OAuth 2.1 and Protected Resource Metadata on HTTP. A local stdio server must not pretend that flow applies. Tool descriptions are not a permission boundary.
There is no native Shopify AgentCore connector. Pin Admin GraphQL, start with read scopes, and keep write_orders off. Browser-on support turns have run about 3× the platform spend.
On 23 Sep 2026 AWS added Salesforce and Zendesk connectors. The managed Salesforce crawl is 4 entity flags; the classic preview lists 21 CRM objects. New customer-managed Salesforce connectors stop on 30 Sep 2026.
On September 21, 2026 the Strands Agents team reported 28% lower token cost across six benchmarks, and 77% less than Claude Code with Fable 5 on Terminal-Bench. That figure is not an AgentCore bill.
Managed Knowledge Base Web Crawler, GA with the service on 17 Jun 2026, follows up to 300 URLs per minute from 10 seeds or 3 sitemaps. A 10,000-URL help center is at least 34 minutes at that cap, and the crawler still has no per-page ACL.
On 18 Sep 2026 SNS raised the payload ceiling to 1 MiB, four times 256 KiB, but only after you set MaximumMessageSize. A full 1 MiB Standard publish is 16 requests. At 50 cents per million requests, one million of those publishes cost 8 dollars before the free tier.
On September 22, 2026 AWS shipped Claude Opus 5.5 with a 1M-token context, thinking always on, and ZDR by default on Bedrock. Anthropic lists $4/$20 per million tokens. This post covers the routing call and what breaks from Opus 5.
On September 22, 2026 AWS made GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna generally available on Bedrock. OpenAI’s internal eval found Sol makes about half as many factual mistakes as GPT-5.6 Sol. GPT-6.1 Sol followed on September 29, Ultrafast on October 8, and GPT-6.1 Terra on October 26 at half the price of 6.1 Sol. This post covers the lane routing.
Assemble the hold reason, aging, and promise-to-pay. Finance releases the order. The agent does not. The account-manager list still caps at 5 priorities. A hold is one of those 5, not a button.
Tell the shopper whether the order is in the return window and offer an exchange first. Do not buy the label and do not call createRefund. Where-is-my-order is about 18% of tickets; this is the next slice, not a second cashier.
DuckLake spec 1 shipped on 13 April 2026 and keeps lake metadata in a SQL database. DuckDB's architecture note puts Iceberg planning at about 100 ms per sequential S3 GET, roughly half a second before a query starts. On AWS, stay on S3 Tables when Athena, Glue, or Redshift must read the table.
Count sessions, handoffs, writes denied, and one wrong answer. At 50,000 sessions the published AgentCore silhouette is about $791 a month, which is a bill to plan, not money saved. We are not publishing a containment rate.
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