Amazon Bedrock AgentCore still needs to prove it can meet its big vision

Last week, AWS announced the preview of a new tool, called Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The company describes it as "a comprehensive set of enterprise-grade services that help developers quickly and securely deploy and operate AI agents at scale using any framework and model, hosted on Amazon Bedrock or elsewhere." That last point is key. It's not tied to the Amazon cloud platform, at least not exclusively, and that could be a big difference maker as Amazon tries to find its footing in the new AI-centric world.

It includes some key pieces including a serverless runtime component, identity, observability, a browser, memory management and other important functions. While it mentions security and compliance, it doesn't explicitly state how that will work. This needs further clarification, and I expect we’ll hear more at re:Invent in December.

As Jon Turow, a partner at Madrona Ventures, observed in a conversation with me during last year’s re:Invent, missing among the flurry of announcements was an agentic orchestration tool. Such a tool would let agents from different vendors work together, and deal with the underlying infrastructure for developers, an essential capability that's been mostly absent so far. 

He sees AgentCore as a step in that direction by appealing to enterprise users, who are looking for a unified way to build agents from a trusted source. “An enterprise has to think from the very beginning about trust, scale, procurement, security — all the things AWS is bulletproof on,” Turow said. “If I can buy [a complete solution] from AWS, that makes it much more appealing to an enterprise. So as enterprises start to build more of their own agents, the bundle will be especially attractive to them.”

Reality versus hype

Yet there is often a big gap between the initial announcement and the deliverable. Keeping in mind that this is a preview and still subject to change as the company gets feedback about what it has initially created, not everyone was impressed with the announcement.

David Linthicum, a cloud consultant, who attended the AWS Summit NY where the company announced the new tool, wasn’t exactly dazzled. “From my perspective, much of what is being presented under the “agentic AI” banner appears to be a collection of existing AWS tools packaged with some new abstractions,” Linthicum told FastForward. 

He described many of the components as incremental improvements or rebrands of existing AWS capabilities rather than a bold rethink of what agentic systems could deliver and he questioned what the business case was for a tool like this.

Not everyone agreed with Linthicum's assessment, however. Jason Anderson, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy saw a lot of potential from the new tool.“AgentCore is a valuable extension to the existing Bedrock services, providing a consistent foundation for developing with AI,” he said. He elaborated that as developers strive to create more autonomous agents, AgentCore should help promote this autonomy, but organizations could require some help getting to that point, even as AgentCore provides a set of foundational services.

“It will be interesting to see how AWS ultimately packages AgentCore when it goes GA. Additionally, Bedrock is designed for an advanced high-scale operation. It’s likely that customers will need some assistance to get it to stand up technically,” he said.

While AgentCore certainly is a step in the right direction to provide a set of services for building, launching and maintaining agents; there are still a lot of open questions. As Amazon refines the set of underlying services with feedback from customers in the coming months, it has the potential to solve a major agentic management problem, but it could take some work to shake out a finished product.

This is an expanded version of a post that originally appeared in FastForward #29: When deals fall apart.

Featured photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash