DEV Community: Channy Yun

Deploy OpenClaw on AWS: Choose the right options for your AI workload

Channy Yun — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:43:29 +0000

Since introducing OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail on March 4, 2026, customers ranging from individual developers to enterprises have requested deployment options tailored to their specific workload requirements. This post presents four AWS offerings for running OpenClaw, each optimized for different use cases, organizational requirements, and scale.

Use this comparison to choose the deployment option that best fits your workload requirements. Amazon Lightsail provides simplicity for individual developers, while Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers greater control and deeper AWS service integration. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore delivers a serverless approach for variable agentic AI workloads, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) provides enterprises with multi-tenant isolation and advanced orchestration capabilities.

The following sections explain how to get started with each deployment option.

OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail
You can deploy OpenClaw using a prebuilt blueprint in Amazon Lightsail. With just a few clicks, you launch a fully configured instance with OpenClaw already integrated with Amazon Bedrock. The setup includes built-in security through device pairing, ensuring only authorized devices can access your AI assistant.

To get started, visit my previous blog post and getting started guide in the AWS documentation.

I want to introduce the Agent in Action, a hands-on lab guide built by Jorge Rodriguez, an AWS community leader. You can build a functional AI agent from scratch in about 45 minutes with OpenClaw on Amazon Lightsail. You’ll get web search capabilities and human-sounding voice responses powered by Amazon Bedrock.

OpenClaw on Amazon EC2
For those who need deeper AWS integration and control, Amazon EC2 provides the flexibility you need. Using AWS Graviton processors, you can save 20-40% on compute costs compared to x86 instances. AWS Systems Manager Session Manager provides secure shell access without exposing SSH ports to the internet. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoints ensure your traffic never leaves the AWS network, and AWS CloudTrail automatically logs every API call for compliance and auditing.

Follow this hands-on lab guide to deploy EC2 instances. If you want to deploy with AWS CloudFormation templates, visit the AWS Sample project.

OpenClaw on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
While Lightsail and EC2 work well for getting started, they aren’t ideal for multi-user scenarios. Each user requires a dedicated instance, which limits scalability and lacks built-in user isolation. Additionally, you pay for compute resources whether they’re being used or not. For serverless deployments, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore offers a better solution.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is a purpose-built serverless runtime specifically designed for AI agents. You can focus on your agent logic, skills, and prompts, while AWS manages scaling, security, and availability. You can deploy OpenClaw on Bedrock AgentCore with this AWS Sample project.

The architecture supports asynchronous invocation—AWS Lambda immediately acknowledges the webhook, stores the message in Amazon DynamoDB, then invokes AgentCore in the background as an asynchronous event. The agent processes at its own pace and responds through the channel. This decoupling ensures no timeouts, provides built-in retry logic, and creates an audit trail of all interactions. It’s a production-grade pattern that handles the reality of serverless cold starts gracefully.

This sample project provides a deployment with Infrastructure-as-Code using AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). Clone the GitHub repository, run the deployment script, and within minutes you have a production-ready OpenClaw microVM running on Bedrock AgentCore.

I recommend that you use Kiro, an agentic AI development tool, to simplify the installation process and onboard quickly. Kiro will help you through the entire process of configuring a development environment, identifying dependencies, and deploying to AWS.

OpenClaw on Amazon EKS
Multi-tenancy represents the defining challenge for enterprise OpenClaw deployments. Amazon EKS with virtual machine (VM)-level isolation delivers the operational simplicity of shared infrastructure combined with the security advantages of dedicated VMs. Each tenant’s workload runs in a lightweight VM, providing hardware-level isolation while maintaining Kubernetes’s orchestration benefits. This approach has been validated in production by financial services and healthcare organizations with strict compliance requirements.

For multi-tenancy deployments of OpenClaw with Amazon EKS, there are two complementary approaches:

Kata container builds a standard implementation of lightweight VMs that perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs. It’s application-agnostic, treating OpenClaw like any other workload. To getting started, visit the Multi-tenancy OpenClaw on EKS and OpenClaw on EKS with Kata Containers and LiteLLM.

OpenClaw Kubernetes Operator directly deploys and manages OpenClaw AI agent instances in Kubernetes clusters with production-grade security, observability, and lifecycle management. To get started, visit the Amazon EKS deployment guide.

You can think of the Kata Container as providing the foundation and the OpenClaw Kubernetes Operator as the specialized orchestration layer. You can choose these open source-based sample architectures for organizations serving hundreds or thousands of OpenClaw users from a single Kubernetes cluster.

Wrap up
Choose the deployment option that matches your requirements and scale. For individual developers and early experiments, Amazon Lightsail provides the fastest path—pre-configured, simple, and ready in minutes. Startups with AWS experience should consider Amazon EC2 for better integration and control. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is transformative for teams without operation resources—it’s serverless, auto-scaling, and cheaper for other multi-user scenarios. Finally, enterprises with complex security requirements and multiple teams should use Amazon EKS for its VM-level isolation, sophisticated orchestration, and production-proven scalability.

You can start simple and evolve—begin with Lightsail for prototyping, then migrate to Bedrock AgentCore or EKS as your needs grow.

— Channy

How Student Builders Change the World on AWS

Channy Yun — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 04:50:07 +0000

Public health systems often struggle to connect data across agencies and systems — leaving some communities without the insights they need to allocate resources optimally or to take action in the face of emerging epidemics. Online maps and collected data that show how the new coronavirus has spread across South Korean were accessible for people to try to avoid the potentially fatal virus.

For example, the Corona Map was built on AWS by Mr. Dong-hoon Lee, a student developer at Kyunghee University and co-founder of Modoc, a mobile app of self-diagnosis for hair loss. He wanted to share transparent information about spreading the virus with his programming skills. The site shows the latest figures and movements of confirmed and suspected cases gathering government data and news articles. It shows colored-circles and lines that indicate the movements of people who have been diagnosed with the virus for others to avoid potential risks.

This site launched on 30 January when the country had confirmed six confirmed cases, which has attracted nearly 8 million visits in the first five days of its launch. AWS Korea decided to support his cost to pay for its cloud resources for helping the public health in the country. It has now accumulated over 37 million views on 23 March.

Screenshots of CoronaMap and Corona NearBy web site

The Corona Nearby built on AWS also became the popular site developed by four students, not to major in computer science at Korea University. It allows users to enter their location and see affected venues in the vicinity and see the information of hospitals and health centers that potential patients can visit.

Rerunning the pandemic of Middle East respiratory syndrome(MERS) in 2015, a massive outbreak occurred in South Korea. Lots of people fell into panic due to a lack of information. MERSMap built by student developers on AWS played a crucial role to share user-friendly information. It had acquired 5 million users and fielded 340 different reports that linked to the government’s site and other resources.

Three sites have one thing in common besides the purpose of providing public health information. They learned coding skills in a national-wide nonprofit programming club called Like Lions aims to alleviate students' stereotypes and fears about coding, and provides non-majors and humanities students with the opportunity to tackle various social problems through coding.

It was founded in 2013 by Duhee Lee, and over 5,000 students from 130 universities went through the club for seven years. AWS has supported educational resources and credit codes to students building cloud-based applications since 2015, which became the partner of AWS Educate program in 2017. Every year, this program kicks off on March and learning web programmings via online classes and offline discussions during the semester for selected students.

Photo of LiKeLion Hackathon at KBS Arena in 2018

It generated over 100 startups founded by graduated students inspired by ideas of the large-scale hackathon that around 900 college students developed their plan to web applications staying up all night. One of the insightful startups from this hackathon was Tojung, a shopping mall for bills from National Assembly that could change our life and society developed by Yae-in Kim and her team at Sogang University. It also offers a list of proposed legislation that users can purchase. If enough money is gathered, Tojung places an offline advertisement in an influential location like the Gangnam subway in Seoul, where Tojung’s most popular bill about preventing sexual violence was advertised, catching the eye of local news media.

Mr. Du-hee Lee, the founder of LikeLion, said, "AWS is helping us to bring student's ideas to be realized quickly." and appreciated AWS's continuous supports.

AWS provides tools for students around the world dreaming of a technology career. Especially hundreds of thousands of students studying more than 2,400 institutions receive credits for hands-on experience with AWS technology, training content, career pathways by the job board, and building own startups. For more information, please refer AWS Educate for students and AWS Activate for Startups.

– Channy Yun;