The new AgentCore runtime: Elastic, optimized, and consistently fast starts
aws ·
AWS announces a new Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime designed to support production agents with greater elasticity, efficiency, and predictable startup performance. It pages memory in as needed and reclaims memory that is released or becomes idle, so usage and billing more closely follow the session’s actual workload rather than its peak allocation. The runtime also initializes an environment once, snapshots the working state, and restores that snapshot for new instances instead of repeating the full startup process. In AWS testing, the new runtime delivered a P75 cold-start latency of about two seconds for image sizes from 200 MB to 2 GB, while the original runtime increased from roughly 5.4 seconds to nearly 30 seconds as image size grew. It retains scale-to-zero and usage-based billing, allowing agents to remain idle without running capacity while avoiding charges for unused memory. Developers can enable the new runtime by setting platformVersion to V2, while planned additions include baseline pricing, larger compute and storage options, x86 support, lifecycle controls, and scoped identities for unattended agents.
aws