Celebrating One Year of AWS Transform: A Milestone in Enterprise Modernization
Just over a year ago, AWS launched AWS Transform—an agentic AI service tailored for modernizing enterprise applications at scale, targeting .NET, mainframe, and VMware workloads. Since then, the service has evolved rapidly. At re:Invent 2025, AWS introduced AWS Transform Custom, empowering organizations to apply managed and custom transformations across their codebases. This allows teams to upgrade language versions, migrate frameworks, fine-tune performance, and analyze code using both ready-made and tailor-made transformation rules. Additionally, full-stack Windows modernization, mainframe reimagination, and automated testing capabilities were added.
In just twelve months, the impact has been remarkable. Thousands of customers have migrated hundreds of thousands of servers, collectively saving over 1.6 million hours and processing more than 4.5 billion lines of code. To mark its first anniversary, AWS Transform agents are now available in platforms like Kiro, Claude, Cursor, and Codex, including an agent builder toolkit called Kiro power for crafting customized transformation agents. For a deeper look into the lessons learned and how these insights have shaped the roadmap, visit the one-year anniversary blog post.
Key Metrics and Insights from the First Year
The first year of AWS Transform yielded four critical lessons that have guided the product’s evolution. These include the importance of automation in complex migration scenarios, the need for flexible customization, the value of cross-platform agent support, and the power of combining AI with human oversight. The detailed findings are available in the anniversary blog post, which outlines how these insights are driving future enhancements.
Recent AWS Launches That Caught Our Eye
Alongside the Transform anniversary, AWS announced several new offerings last week that expand developer capabilities and optimize performance across compute, data, and AI services.
Claude Platform on AWS Now Generally Available
Developers can now access Claude Platform on AWS directly through their existing AWS account. This integration provides the full Anthropic Claude experience—including APIs, console, and early-access beta features—without the need for separate accounts, billing, or tracking. Note that the service is operated by Anthropic, and customer data is processed outside the AWS security boundary. For a comprehensive overview, read the deep dive blog post.
Amazon EC2 M3 Ultra Mac Instances: More Power for Apple Developers
The new EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances are built on Apple’s M3 Ultra Mac Studio computers, featuring a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, and 256GB of unified memory. Compared to the previous M4 Max instances, these offer:
- 2x unified memory (256GB vs. 128GB)
- 1.75x CPU cores (28 vs. 16)
- 1.5x GPU cores (60 vs. 40)
- 2x Neural Engine cores (32 vs. 16)
This headroom enables developers to run significantly more Xcode simulators simultaneously and accelerate on-device machine learning workflows, helping bring products to market faster.
Amazon Redshift RG Instances Powered by AWS Graviton: Better Performance, Lower Cost
The new Redshift RG instances leverage AWS Graviton processors to deliver up to 2.4x faster performance for data warehouse and data lake workloads compared to previous-generation RA3 instances, at a 30% lower price per vCPU. These instances include Redshift’s custom vectorized data lake query engine, which efficiently processes Apache Iceberg and Parquet data directly on cluster nodes.
Amazon Bedrock Advanced Prompt Optimization Now Available
With Amazon Bedrock Advanced Prompt Optimization, developers can fine-tune prompts for any model on Bedrock. The tool allows side-by-side comparison of original and optimized prompts across up to five models simultaneously. Whether migrating to a new model or seeking better performance on an existing one, this feature provides a streamlined way to enhance prompt effectiveness.
These updates reflect AWS’s ongoing commitment to helping organizations modernize workloads, innovate faster, and optimize costs—all while maintaining the flexibility to choose the best tools for their needs.