Meet AWS Startup Advisor and AI migration to AWS, built for founders
Every week, I talk to founders who are building incredible things on AWS: technical builders pushing the boundaries of our AI and infrastructure stack, nontechnical entrepreneurs bringing their first idea to life, and startups ready to level up and migrate to the cloud built for scale. AI has fundamentally changed what’s possible for all of them. A great idea no longer requires a computer science degree to get off the ground, and the time between prototype and revenue has never been shorter. We’ve spent the last three years evangelizing AI as a transformative force for startups—and increasingly we’re looking to apply AI to the founder experience itself, so builders can spend less time figuring out the “how” and more time building the “what”.
Today we’re launching two AI-powered capabilities that are purpose-built for startup founders: AWS Startup Advisor and new agentic migration tooling available on startups.aws and IDEs like Kiro and Claude Code. Together, these capabilities enable founders of all types — whether you’re a deeply technical builder or a nontechnical founder turning an idea into reality for the first time — to get personalized, tailored guidance that helps accelerate development cycles and enable faster growth.
AWS Startup Advisor: your own AI-powered solutions architect
In the AI era, a founder doesn’t need to be a cloud expert to get started. What you need is a trusted advisor that knows what you’re building and can help you plan what to do next.
That’s what AWS Startup Advisor delivers. AWS Startup Advisor is an AI-powered builder assistant informed by expertise from thousands of AWS Solutions Architects and patterns drawn from billions of interactions across the more than 350,000 startups that run on AWS. It can be downloaded the moment you sign up for an AWS account. It learns about your stack and the stage of your company, so every recommendation is tailored to what you’re actually building. If you are part of our credits program, AWS Activate, AWS Startup Advisor will even help monitor your balance and help you make the most of your credits.
AWS Startup Advisor helps founders at every stage, including nontechnical founders who are using AI to build for the first time. It alerts you about spending, so you don’t burn through runway; suggests the right AWS service at the right time, so you’re not over-engineering or under-building; and delivers prompts and next actions tailored to your build, stack, and stage. What it recommends at MVP level is different from what it recommends when you’re selling to enterprises. It evolves with your business as your architecture, costs, and security needs change. It’s like having a senior engineer or a solutions architect on call, regardless of your technical background.
AWS Startup Advisor is available wherever you’re already building: on startups.aws, as an IDE extension for Kiro, VS Code, and Cursor, and as a plugin for Claude Code. Same skills, same context, every entry point.
Here’s what it does:
Gets your AWS environment right from Day 1. Focus on what you want to build. Let AWS Startup Advisor handle your AWS setup—IAM, billing, and security baselines—so you’re building on a solid foundation from the start.
Scaffolds your infrastructure. Tell AWS Startup Advisor what you’re building or let it read your project. Get AWS-vetted infrastructure recommendations you can act on right in your editor.
Cuts costs before they burn through your runway. Set up specific savings actions—so you’re not spending where you don’t need to.
Hardens security for your stage. Get a security baseline matched to where you are.
Surfaces proactive alerts. Analyzes your IAM, budgets, Amazon Bedrock usage, and CloudWatch.
There’s no cost to use AWS Startup Advisor. Generating recommendations, invoking skills, and getting guidance are all included as part of the experience. You only pay standard AWS pricing if you deploy recommended resources.
Making AI-powered migrations easier and faster
When startups get serious about scale, they come to AWS. Whether they need the economics and model choice of Amazon Bedrock (instead of being tied into a single AI provider), more than 240 fully-feature services designed to work together, or infrastructure built to win enterprise customers, AWS is where ambitious startups go to grow.
We kept hearing from founders that they knew they needed to be on AWS, but moving their infrastructure or AI stack felt like a project they couldn’t afford to take on. That changes today. With new AI-powered migration capabilities available on startups.aws and through IDE plugins for Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor, founders can move critical infrastructure, AI models, and applications to AWS in days, not weeks or months.
Here’s how it works:
Start on the web or in your IDE. Use the web experience at startups.aws or download our plugin for Kiro, Claude Code, or Cursor and ask it to start a migration.
Answer a few questions. Provide context about your business and technical priorities.
Share your data. Upload your billing data and infrastructure as code. The more you share, the more tailored your plan will be.
Get your plan. In minutes, receive a personalized migration plan, including service mapping, cost estimates, architecture diagrams, Terraform templates, credit eligibility, and a step-by-step runbook.
Migrate. Choose the execution path that fits your workload. And don’t worry, you can always change your mind later.
AI-guided: Run the migration with agents helping as you go. Our agents handle provisioning, data migration, configuration updates, and testing. You confirm key decisions at each step.
Work with an AWS expert: Share your plan and get guidance on architecture decisions, edge cases, and execution.
Connect with a certified AWS Partner: They handle execution end to end.
There’s no cost to generate plans; you only pay for the AWS resources you provision during your actual migration. You may also qualify for AWS credits to help offset migration costs.
These new AI-powered migration capabilities support GCP infrastructure migrations—Kubernetes to EKS/ECS/Fargate, PostgreSQL/MySQL to RDS/Aurora, Google Cloud Storage to S3—and AI/LLM inference migrations from Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenAI to Amazon Bedrock.
Why startups choose AWS
The majority of the top 100 startups globally use AI services on AWS. In the U.S. alone, more of the top 500 startups use AWS as their primary cloud provider than the next two providers combined, by a considerable margin. The reasons are straightforward: more than 240 fully featured services across compute, AI, databases, and security, designed to work together. Infrastructure built for always-on availability, distributed across the globe, that grows with you. A quicker path to revenue with AWS Marketplace, so you can showcase your products and services where organizations already buy and shorten your sales cycle. Last year alone, startups on AWS Marketplace more than doubled their sales year over year.
Get started
Both features are available now on startups.aws. Get started with the AWS Startup Advisor on the web or download the extensions here. To generate your first migration plan on the web, head to startups.aws/migrate/wizard.
We’ve spent the last few years telling founders that AI changes everything. Now we’re proving it, starting with how you build on AWS.
Jason Bennett is the VP and Global Head of Startups and Venture Capital at AWS.
