Amazon Web Services Inc. today enhanced its database services to simplify the process of building and operating agentic artificial intelligence applications while also lowering the barriers to cloud migration for users of Microsoft Corp.’s SQL Server.

The announcements add built-in durability for Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey and a new bring-your-own-media option for Amazon RDS for SQL Server. AWS said the enhancements extend its strategy of bringing AI capabilities to existing enterprise data platforms rather than requiring customers to adopt entirely new architectures.

The ElastiCache enhancement addresses a growing persistent memory challenge for organizations deploying AI agents. Caches have long been used to accelerate application performance, but enterprises are finding new uses for them as a way to store agent state, long-term memory and retrieval-augmented generation knowledge bases without risking data loss.

The new durability capability enables users to add persistence to existing ElastiCache deployments through a configuration setting rather than migrating to a separate database platform. Customers can choose between synchronous writes, which are designed to provide zero data loss, and asynchronous writes, which prioritize performance while allowing for a limited risk of data loss during failures.

“We heard from customers that they want to have a more flexible way of managing their caches,” said Ganapathy Krishnamoorthy, vice president of databases at AWS. “Rather than actually needing to know ahead of time whether they are going to need persistence or not, they can get started with ElastiCache on Valkey and then, as their workload evolves, simply configure persistence.”

Valkey is a fully managed, in-memory key-value data store used for caching, session management, and messaging. It’s an open-source alternative to Redis, a high-performance cache, database and message broker.

The feature is particularly relevant to AI applications, where agents must retain context across interactions. AWS said durable ElastiCache can serve as a repository for both short-term and long-term agent memory while maintaining microsecond-level read latency. Synchronous durability persists data across multiple availability zones before committing a write, while asynchronous durability offers similar performance to traditional caching with a recovery point objective of no more than 10 seconds of data loss.

Krishnamoorthy said persistent memory has become a critical requirement for agentic systems.

He cited the example of scheduling a vacation, which typically involves multiple sessions with various travel services and destination locations over time. Persistence allows agents to “remember” previous interactions, so query responses need not be generated from scratch every time.

“Personalization is really important when you’re building an agent application,” he said. “We have made it really easy for you to use ElastiCache and Valkey in those frameworks.”

SQL Server migration simplified

For AWS customers running SQL Server workloads, AWS is introducing BYOM support for its fully managed RDS for SQL Server. That means customers can migrate existing SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Edition licenses covered by Microsoft Software Assurance to the managed database service without incurring additional license fees. Previously, customers wanting to use existing licenses had to run self-managed SQL Server environments on Amazon EC2 or use Amazon RDS Custom.

Under the new model, they can upload their SQL Server installation media to Amazon S3 storage and launch managed RDS instances that are compatible with their existing licensing agreements. AWS License Manager automatically tracks license usage and compliance reporting.

Krishnamoorthy said the change could significantly reduce migration costs for organizations with large SQL Server estates by avoiding the need to pay for a second set of licenses. “We are offering them the ability to bring their applications and databases into RDS for SQL Server in a simplified manner,” he said.

Both announcements reflect AWS’ broader effort to position its database portfolio as a foundation for enterprise AI. Rather than requiring customers to move data into specialized AI platforms, AWS is extending AI-related capabilities such as vector search, memory management and model connectivity into existing database and caching services.

For example, Krishnamoorthy noted that AWS introduced support for the Model Context Protocol, it did so across all its database offerings.

“If you want to build an agent that needs to work across multiple systems, we made sure that it’s easy for you to  access all of that data,” he said. “We want to make sure that all your data is easily accessible to your agentic applications.”

The new ElastiCache durability feature is available in all AWS commercial regions, AWS GovCloud and AWS China regions running Valkey 9.0. BYOM support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server is available in all AWS regions where the managed database service is offered.

Photo: AWS