Manage your data on Runtime Instances

When you host agents on the Instances compute type, your data is stored on Amazon EBS volumes in your own AWS account.

This topic describes what AgentCore stores there, and how you read it, change it, get it out, and delete it.

For information about the shared responsibility model that applies to all of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, see Data protection in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.

What Instances stores, and where

Instances stores two categories of data. The following table shows where each category lives and which resource controls its lifecycle.

Category	Where it is stored	Lifecycle is controlled by
Volume content	Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes that AgentCore creates in your AWS account and mounts into your agent	The session that mounts the volume
Resource configuration	The capacity provider and agent runtime records, including the name, description, allowed instance types, networking, and storage definitions	The capacity provider and agent runtime

Volume content is whatever your agent reads and writes at its mount path. The Amazon EBS volumes are created in your account, so your existing account controls apply to them. For information about how volumes are encrypted, see Encryption at rest for Runtime Instances.

Read and change your data

Your agent reads and writes volume content at its mount path, so it changes that content the same way it created it. The following table shows where to find the operations for everything else.

To do this	See
Read or change volume content from outside the agent	Execute shell commands in AgentCore Runtime sessions. InvokeAgentRuntimeCommand runs a shell command in the running session, with the same filesystem your agent sees.
Find the instances and volumes that back your sessions	Amazon EC2 managed instances. AgentCore provisions them as managed instances, which are hidden from list operations and your Amazon EC2 console views by default. Use describe-instances --include-managed-resources to list them, or change the managed resource visibility setting.
View mount paths and storage settings	File system configurations for AgentCore Runtime
View your capacity provider configuration	GetCapacityProvider and ListCapacityProviders. To find the agent runtimes that use one, use ListAgentRuntimeVersionsByCapacityProvider.
Change your capacity provider configuration	Only the description can change, through UpdateCapacityProvider. For any other setting, create a new capacity provider and associate your agent runtimes with it. In the console, use the duplicate flow to start from the existing configuration.
View metrics and logs	Observability, or Observability and Logs and tracing on the runtime’s detail page in the console

Export your data

There is no export operation for volume content, and you can’t take an Amazon EBS snapshot of a capacity provider volume. AgentCore creates and operates these volumes as managed resources, so the snapshot operations that you use on volumes you create yourself aren’t available for them.

To get volume content out, write it to a destination you control, such as an Amazon S3 bucket. You have two ways to do that:

• Run a command in the session with InvokeAgentRuntimeCommand. For more information, see Execute shell commands in AgentCore Runtime sessions.

• Invoke your agent and have it copy the data, or return it in the response.

Either way, the copy runs with the agent runtime execution role, so grant that role write access to the destination. For more information about the role, see AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles.

Important

Export what you want to keep before you delete a session or a capacity provider. Deleting either one deletes the volumes.

To export your capacity provider configuration, call GetCapacityProvider and save the response.

Delete your data

Deleting volume content is a property of the session, not of the individual agent. Stopping one agent runtime in a session does not delete data, and does not terminate the instance.

Only persistent volumes hold data across a session stop. The root volume and any ephemeral volumes go away when the instance terminates, so anything your agent writes outside a persistent mount path is temporary. For information about the volume types, see Encryption at rest for Runtime Instances.

Persistent volumes survive every event except an explicit delete. The following table shows what each event does to them.

Event	What it stops	What happens to your persistent volumes
StopRuntimeSession	One agent runtime within a session. Other agent runtimes in the session are unaffected.	Retained. AgentCore keeps the volume attached to the session.
Idle timeout	The instance, after all of its agents have been idle for idleInstanceTimeout seconds.	Retained. AgentCore re-attaches the volume when you invoke the session again.
Maximum lifetime reached	The instance, regardless of activity, at maxLifetime.	Retained. AgentCore re-attaches the volume when you invoke the session again.
DeleteCapacityProviderSession	The entire session, including its Amazon EC2 instance and network interface.	Deleted. AgentCore deletes the session’s persistent volumes.
DeleteCapacityProvider	The capacity provider and all of its sessions.	Deleted. AgentCore deletes the volumes of every session that belongs to the capacity provider.

For information about the idle and lifetime settings, see Configure Amazon Bedrock AgentCore lifecycle settings.

To delete a session, you need the runtimeSessionId that you supplied when you invoked it. Keep a record of the session IDs you use. If you no longer have them, delete the capacity provider to delete all of its sessions and their volumes.

Before you can delete a capacity provider, remove the agent runtimes that reference it by deleting the associated runtimes, versions, or endpoints. Otherwise the request fails with a ValidationException.

For information about the operations and examples, see Get started with Instances using the AWS CLI or SDK. For information about the console steps, see Get started with Instances using the console.