Help AI coding agents build, deploy, and manage applications on AWS.
The Agent Toolkit for AWS gives AI coding agents the tools, knowledge, and guardrails they need to work with AWS services. It works with the coding agents developers already use — including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Kiro.
Apache-2.0 — the text of every chapter is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.
Discovery
118 chapters found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 16 distinct layouts observed: plugins/aws-agents-for-devsecops/skills/*/SKILL.md, plugins/aws-agents/skills/*/SKILL.md, plugins/aws-core/skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/core-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/analytics-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/database-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/ec2-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/migration-and-modernization-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/networking-and-content-delivery-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/operations-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/resilience-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/security-and-identity-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/serverless-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/storage-skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/specialized-skills/system-table-skills/*/SKILL.md, .
Chapter 18: Agents HardenUse when preparing your agent for production — IAM scoping, inbound auth (JWT, SigV4), secrets management, cold start optimization…
The plugins are available on the official Anthropic marketplace (claude-plugins-official) which is added to your Claude Code installation by default.
Use the following commands to install supported plugins from the toolkit:
For aws-core that covers service selection, CDK/CloudFormation, serverless, containers, storage, observability, billing, SDK usage, and deployment:
/plugin install aws-core@claude-plugins-official
Tip: If you get Plugin not found, update your local marketplace index first:
For aws-agents-for-devsecops used to investigate incidents, review code and execute UAT for release readiness, scan code for vulnerabilities, and run penetration tests with AWS DevOps Agent and AWS Security Agent.
/plugin marketplace add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws/plugin install aws-agents-for-devsecops/reload-plugins# Or from Claude's official marketplace:/plugin install aws-agents-for-devsecops@claude-plugins-official/reload-plugins# Setup:/aws-agents-for-devsecops:setup
Add this repository as a team marketplace from Settings → Plugins → Team Marketplaces → Add Marketplace → Import from Repo, pointing it at aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws. Cursor indexes the plugins listed in .cursor-plugin/marketplace.json (opens in a new tab) on import.
Then open the Plugins panel and install the aws-core plugin (start here), or aws-agents and aws-data-analytics as needed. Each plugin bundles the AWS MCP Server configuration and agent skills.
Kiro setup has two independent parts: the AWS MCP Server (for runtime AWS API access and documentation search) and local skills (for task-specific agent guidance). They complement each other but work independently — skills don’t require the MCP server, and the MCP server doesn’t serve locally-installed skills.
1. Add the AWS MCP Server to your Kiro MCP configuration (.kiro/settings/mcp.json):
Note: It is recommended to pin to a specific version (e.g., @1.6.4) to ensure reproducible behavior and protect against supply chain risks. We recommend regularly checking PyPI (opens in a new tab) for new stable versions and updating accordingly.
The MCP server gives your agent access to AWS APIs, sandboxed script execution, and real-time documentation search.
2. Install skills from this repository:
npx skills add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws/skills
This installs skill files to ~/.kiro/skills/ (global) or .kiro/skills/ (project-level). Each skill is a directory containing a SKILL.md file and optionally a references/ subdirectory with additional context the agent reads from the local filesystem when needed. Kiro discovers installed skills automatically and activates them on demand when a task matches.
Prerequisites: You need uv (opens in a new tab) installed. An AWS account with credentials configured locally is required for API calls and script execution, but not for documentation search or skill discovery. See the user guide (opens in a new tab) for detailed setup instructions.
Prerequisites: You need uv (opens in a new tab) installed. An AWS account with credentials configured locally is required for API calls and script execution, but not for documentation search or skill discovery. See the user guide (opens in a new tab) for detailed setup instructions.
Plugins are currently available for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. For other agents, configure the AWS MCP Server directly and install skills from this repository.
Agent skills are curated packages of instructions and reference materials that help agents complete specific AWS tasks. Skills are loaded on demand — agents discover and retrieve only what’s relevant to the current task.
Recommended project-level configuration files that tell agents how to use AWS most effectively — for example, by using the AWS MCP Server, discovering available skills, or searching documentation before acting.
In 2025, AWS began releasing MCP servers, skills, and plugins as part of AWS Labs (opens in a new tab). The Agent Toolkit for AWS is the successor to those tools. We recommend using the Agent Toolkit for AWS, because it offers key features including:
IAM condition keys that distinguish between agent actions and human actions, so you can write policies that apply only to agents. For example, you can write policies that only allow read-only actions through the MCP server, even if the user’s underlying IAM role can take write actions).
CloudWatch metrics and CloudTrail audit logging for every request, so you can monitor and audit coding agent activity.
Agent skills that have undergone thorough end-to-end evaluations, so you can be confident that workflows will complete successfully.
AWS Labs (opens in a new tab) MCP servers, skills, and plugins will continue to work and accept contributions, and over time the best of AWS Labs will be transitioned to the Agent Toolkit for AWS to ensure that customers can access the broadest array of tooling and guidance for their agents.
28 mirror copies folded into their canonical chapter — republished for Alternate. Copies match on content hash and on position once a leading per-agent prefix is stripped, because the same skill is routinely shipped under a dozen agent directories with a dozen different hashes.
Issue colours
Resolved from a curated brand profile — hue 65°, chroma 0.174. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.
Heading repairs
1 repair applied to the front matter so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:
Removed “Agent Toolkit for AWS”, a leading h1 that duplicated the chapter title.
Images inside a chapter come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.
Marketplace
A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Amazon Web Services, declaring 4 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.
Signal
Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.
Agent surfaces
The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws.md, and each chapter at its own .md URL.
Publication
Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.
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