AWS MCP Server with Claude Code

AWS recently announced the general availability of the AWS MCP Server. It gives AI coding assistants like Claude Code direct access to over 15,000 AWS API operations, live documentation, and sandboxed script execution — all via the Model Context Protocol.

I set it up for my own workflow and ran into a few stumbling blocks. Here’s the short version of what actually works.

What is the AWS MCP Server?

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard that lets AI assistants call external tools. The AWS MCP Server acts as a proxy between your AI assistant and AWS — handling SigV4 authentication and routing requests to the right services.

With it connected, I can ask Claude Code things like “what Lambda functions are deployed in eu-central-1?” and get a real answer, not a hallucinated one.

Prerequisites

• Claude Code installed — get it at claude.ai/code
• uv installed — the Python package manager that runs the proxy

Windows (winget):

winget install astral-sh.uv --accept-source-agreements --accept-package-agreements

macOS/Linux:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

• AWS credentials configured locally (~/.aws/credentials or environment variables)

Setup

Open a terminal (Git Bash, PowerShell, or any shell) and run:

US East (N. Virginia):

claude mcp add-json aws-mcp --scope user \
  '{"command":"uvx","args":["mcp-proxy-for-aws@latest","https://aws-mcp.us-east-1.api.aws/mcp","--metadata","AWS_REGION=us-east-1"]}'

Europe (Frankfurt) — recommended for EU workloads:

claude mcp add-json aws-mcp --scope user \
  '{"command":"uvx","args":["mcp-proxy-for-aws@latest","https://aws-mcp.eu-central-1.api.aws/mcp","--metadata","AWS_REGION=eu-central-1"]}'

The --scope user flag saves the server globally, so it’s available across all your projects.

Verify

In Claude Code, type /mcp — the aws-mcp server should appear as connected. If you’re using the VS Code extension, restart VS Code and check /mcp again.

That’s it.

What you can do with it

A few things I’ve tested:

• List deployed Lambda functions and their configurations
• Query CloudFormation stack outputs
• Search AWS documentation without leaving the editor
• Run sandboxed Python scripts against AWS APIs

The call_aws tool covers all 15,000+ AWS API operations. If you can do it with the AWS CLI, you can now ask Claude Code to do it instead.