Hidden Cost Amazon Nova. A recent announcement by Amazon at AWS re:Invent 2025 has sparked interest in its new AI offering, Nova 2.
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Firmly integrated with Amazon Bedrock, Nova 2 is touted as a frontier-grade model that’s part of a growing ecosystem of “frontier agents” and the AgentCore framework introduced during the same event.
The Nova 2 model is technically impressive, featuring better tools and a single platform for building, deploying, and scaling agentic AI.
Vendor lock-in vs. actual value
While Nova 2 appears to simplify complexity, there’s a catch: it pushes you toward a “tightly coupled” system.
This means you’ll be deeply anchored in AWS-specific APIs, runtimes, and orchestration semantics, making it harder to move to other clouds.
So, the question remains: Are you optimizing for short-term gains or long-term value?
Agentic fabric: native vs. portable
A “cloud-portable” fabric is essential for a multicloud strategy, but AWS’s vision for a cloud-native fabric makes this challenging.
While a cloud-native fabric might be smooth within AWS, it’s limiting when trying to move to other clouds or on-premises environments.
Operational burden or simplification
AWS is selling Nova 2 as simplifying complexity, but in reality, it’s encapsulating it within black boxes.
This means you’ll still need teams to understand your agents’ behavior, even as you rely on AWS’s code and policies.
Taking the long view
When you adopt Nova 2, you’re choosing a vertically integrated stack with immediate benefits.
However, the downsides become apparent over time, such as losing leverage on pricing and finding it harder to adopt innovations on other clouds.
The payoff for more open and portable approaches is flexibility, allowing you to change direction when needed without rewriting your enterprise’s nervous system.
