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Get started with Instances using the console - Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Step 1: Create a capacity providerStep 2: Create an agent runtime that uses the capacity providerStep 3: Invoke and monitorStep 4: Clean upNext steps

Get started with Instances using the console

This tutorial walks through hosting an agent on the Instances compute type using the AWS Management Console. You first create a capacity provider that defines the EC2 infrastructure, then create an agent runtime that uses it, and finally invoke and monitor the agent.

For the prerequisites, see Get started with Instances.

Step 1: Create a capacity provider

  1. Open the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore console and choose Runtime.

  2. On the Capacity providers tab, choose Create capacity provider.

  3. Under Capacity provider detail, enter a Name. Valid characters are letters, digits, and underscores; the name must start with a letter and can have up to 48 characters.

  4. For Operating system, choose the operating system for your EC2 instances (for example, Linux (64-bit x86)). This determines which software and applications are compatible with your environment.

  5. For Allowed instance types, choose up to 30 EC2 instance types that meet your workload requirements. Filter by vCPU, memory, and CPU manufacturer to find a match.

  6. Under Security, choose the VPC that controls network access for your instances. Optionally, configure subnets and the container network mode under Additional details.

  7. (Optional) Under Storage configuration, choose Add volume to attach an Amazon EBS volume for persistent storage. Configure the volume type, size, throughput, IOPS, and encryption. This saves the volume configuration; AgentCore creates each volume on the session’s first launch.

  8. Under Service access, choose the instance profile attached to the EC2 instance (used by AgentCore to collect system logs; it does not grant permissions to your agent code) and the Infrastructure role (used by AgentCore to manage EC2 instances on your behalf). You can use existing roles or let the console create new ones.

  9. Choose Create capacity provider. The capacity provider starts in a CREATING state and becomes ACTIVE after its configuration is validated.

Note

After a capacity provider is created, only its description can be edited. To change other configurations such as instance types, networking, or storage, duplicate the capacity provider and make your updates in the duplicate flow.

Step 2: Create an agent runtime that uses the capacity provider

  1. On the Runtime page, choose Create runtime (or, from the capacity provider’s detail page, choose Host agent/tool).

  2. Enter a Name for the agent or tool.

  3. For Compute type, choose Instances.

  4. For Capacity provider, choose an existing capacity provider, or choose Quick create to create one with pre-configured defaults inline.

  5. Under Agent/tool source, choose your source type and provide the artifact:

    • S3 source – Start from a template, upload a .zip file, or choose an existing object in an S3 bucket.

    • ECR container – Provide an Amazon ECR container image URI.

  6. (Optional) Configure Inbound auth, Advanced configurations (security, environment variables), and Permissions (IAM execution role and KMS encryption).

  7. Choose Create runtime. AgentCore creates version 1 and a DEFAULT endpoint that points to it.

Note

You can’t change the compute type after you create the runtime.

Step 3: Invoke and monitor

  1. From the runtime’s detail page, choose Test and provide a payload, or use the View invocation code snippet to call the agent from your own application.

  2. The first invocation for a new session provisions an EC2 instance in your account and launches the agent, so it typically takes longer than later invocations. Subsequent invocations to the same session are much faster. AgentCore provisions the instance as an Amazon EC2 managed instance, which is hidden from your EC2 console views and DescribeInstances by default. For more information about managed instance visibility, see the managed resource visibility setting.

  3. Use the Observability metrics and Logs and tracing on the runtime’s detail page to monitor sessions, invocations, error rate, and resource consumption.

Step 4: Clean up

To avoid ongoing charges for the Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon EBS volumes provisioned in your account, clean up the resources you created for this tutorial when you’re done:

  1. Delete the session so that AgentCore deprovisions the EC2 instance and its persistent volumes. Stopping a single agent runtime on a session does not terminate the instance. For more information about the API operations, see Get started with Instances using the AWS CLI or SDK.

  2. Disassociate the runtime from the capacity provider by deleting the runtime, its endpoints, or its versions.

  3. Delete the capacity provider once no runtimes reference it.

Next steps