Difference between working draft and versions in bedrock agents

When working with Amazon Bedrock agents, understanding the difference between the working draft and versions is crucial for testing and deployment.

The working draft is your development environment where all changes are applied. Every time you update your agent's configuration, these changes are made to the working draft. This is where you iterate and refine your agent's behavior. When you prepare your agent, it packages your latest changes into the working draft.

Versions, on the other hand, are immutable snapshots of your agent at a specific point in time. When you create an alias, Amazon Bedrock automatically creates a version that preserves the agent exactly as it exists at that moment. Versions are numbered sequentially starting from 1.

If you're seeing different responses between your working draft and the latest alias/version, this indicates that you've made changes to the working draft after creating the version. These newer changes exist only in the working draft and haven't been captured in any version yet.

To test your latest changes, you should:

1. Make sure your working draft is prepared (check the "Last prepared" time in the Agent overview section)
2. Test using the working draft

If you want these latest changes to be available in production, you'll need to create a new version and update your alias to point to this new version.

It's worth noting that when testing from the AWS Console UI, you're typically testing the DRAFT version by default. However, when invoking the agent from code (like a Lambda function or web application) using the AWS SDK, you're running the version specified in the agent alias. This distinction explains why you might see different behaviors in different environments.
Sources
Deploy an agent - Amazon Bedrock
Test and troubleshoot agent behavior - Amazon Bedrock
BedRock Agent ignoring lambda provided to answer questions | AWS re:Post