Bedrock Agents vs Bedrock Agentcore

Amazon Bedrock Agents and Amazon Bedrock AgentCore serve different purposes in the AI agent ecosystem, though your EKS vs. Fargate analogy isn't quite accurate.

Amazon Bedrock Agents is a fully managed service that allows you to build and configure autonomous agents without managing infrastructure or writing custom code. It handles prompt engineering, memory, monitoring, encryption, user permissions, and API invocation for you. Key features include API-driven development, action groups for defining specific actions, knowledge base integration, and a configuration-based implementation approach.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (currently in preview) is a comprehensive set of services designed to deploy and operate AI agents securely at scale using any framework and model. It provides infrastructure specifically built for dynamic agent workloads and works with various frameworks like CrewAI, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, and Strands Agents. AgentCore includes several components:

1. Runtime: Provides serverless environments for agent execution
2. Memory: Manages session and long-term memory
3. Observability: Offers visualization of agent execution
4. Identity: Enables secure access to AWS and third-party services
5. Gateway: Transforms APIs into agent-ready tools
6. Browser-tool: Enables web application interaction
7. Code-interpreter: Securely executes code across multiple languages

Rather than one having more features than the other, they serve different needs. Bedrock Agents offers a more managed, configuration-based approach for building agents, while AgentCore provides flexible infrastructure services for deploying and operating agents built with any framework.

If you master AgentCore, you might still want to use Bedrock Agents for scenarios where you prefer a fully managed, configuration-based approach without needing to build agents from scratch. Conversely, if you're using custom frameworks or need more flexibility in your agent architecture, AgentCore would be more appropriate even if you're familiar with Bedrock Agents.

The choice depends on your specific requirements, development preferences, and the level of control you need over your AI agent implementation.
Sources
Amazon Bedrock Agents - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore (Preview) - AWS
Build agentic systems with CrewAI and Amazon Bedrock | AWS Machine Learning Blog
Strands Agents SDK: A technical deep dive into agent architectures and observability | Artificial Intelligence
Introducing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Securely deploy and operate AI agents at any scale (preview) | AWS News Blog