When you move AI agents from prototype to production, the infrastructure challenges multiply. Your agents need to persist state across multi-step workflows that run for hours or days. They need to coordinate with other agents, share context, and sometimes access GPUs for specialized tasks.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime microVMs provide a fully managed environment for invocations that can run for up to 8 hours and support stateful workflows through managed session storage. Some workloads also benefit from dedicated, larger-capacity environments—for example, when agents need to run continuously for multiple days, access GPUs or the underlying OS, or run multiple collaborating agents on the same host.
Today, I'm happy to announce runtime instances, a new complementary compute option in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime that gives your agents persistent, managed infrastructure purpose-built for complex agent workloads.
What you get
Runtime instances provides AWS-managed EC2 infrastructure where you deploy multiple agents in a single runtime, each with their own dependencies and artifact types. Your agents can collaborate on the same host within shared sessions that persist for up to 14 days. The service supports GPU acceleration for compute-intensive tasks, session stop/restart to save costs during idle periods, and containerized deployments for teams that want to ship independently.
For knowledge that needs to survive beyond a session, runtime instances pairs naturally with Amazon EBS and AgentCore Memory, which gives your agents long-term recall across sessions and environments.
Before today, if you wanted to keep your agents running for days or they needed GPU access or multi-agent coordination, you had to build and manage that infrastructure yourself. Runtime instances handles all of that for you while integrating with the same AgentCore APIs, identity controls, and observability you already use with AgentCore Runtime microVMs.
Key features
- Agents can call each other as tools within a shared session, iterating autonomously until the job is done.
- Bring any framework (CrewAI, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Strands) and any model.
- Packaging is minimal: an
@app.entrypointdecorator and a zip file or container image. - Workflows can span days—hibernate Monday night and resume Wednesday morning with everything intact.
Complementary to runtime microVMs
Runtime microVMs and runtime instances are complementary compute options that you can use independently or together through the same AgentCore runtime APIs. A lightweight orchestrator agent on runtime microVM can coordinate and dispatch work to specialized worker agents running on instances. The orchestrator handles API calls, task routing, and result aggregation using runtime microVM's fast scaling, while workers on instances perform compute-intensive tasks like code compilation, security scanning, or GUI automation that require persistent state and direct OS access.
Demo: code writer and reviewer agents
The team built two agents for a demo: a code writer agent that generates Python code from natural language descriptions, and a code reviewer agent that analyzes the generated code for bugs, security issues, and style improvements. Both agents share the same file system, so the reviewer can read whatever the writer produces without any data transfer or API calls between them.
The demo walks through creating a capacity provider (defining EC2 infrastructure), creating a runtime and deploying the first agent, then invoking the reviewer agent in the same session. The two agents never exchanged messages or called each other's APIs—they collaborated through the shared file system that runtime instances provide within a session.
Key details
- Supported OS: Linux (ARM64 and x86_64) at launch.
- Session persistence: Sessions persist for up to 14 days.
- Runtimes: Python 3.11-14 with native code support. Container images also supported.
- GPU: Support for GPU-accelerated instance types.
- Integration: Uses the same AgentCore APIs, identity, observability, and policy controls as AgentCore Runtime.
- Pricing: Standard EC2 pricing plus a management fee for AgentCore orchestration.
- Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland).
To get started, visit the runtime instance in the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore documentation.