Runtime, Gateway, Memory, Policy and Evaluations on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.
AgentCore Runtime V2 GA (18 Sep 2026) reclaims session memory and holds P75 cold starts near 2s from 200 MB–2 GB images, including eu-west-1. A UK SRE canary and CAB checklist before flipping platformVersion to V2.
AgentCore optimization (17 Jun 2026) turns production traces into failure, intent, and trajectory insights with recommendations, batch evals, and A/B tests. A UK SRE CAB gate for silent agent failures.
AgentCore Gateway HTTP passthrough targets forward HTTPS traffic without protocol translation — ideal for fronting B2B APIs, A2A agents and external MCP. UK production gate: contrast with MCP and Runtime targets, auth, schema and path routing.
AgentCore Gateway Runtime targets are GA: path-routed passthrough to Runtime agents with policy, Guardrails, buffered interceptors and hard bypass locks (SigV4 SourceArn or JWT workload allowlist). UK gate before you expose the runtime ARN.
AgentCore Policy is GA (Mar 2026) with Cedar at the Gateway and Dogwood temporal rules for session trajectory. UK playbook: LOG_ONLY → ENFORCE, session IDs and high-risk tool gates.
Sep 8 2026: AgentCore Memory IngestData extracts long-term memory without creating a short-term event. UK playbook for payloads, verify/redrive and GDPR minimisation.
September 2026 adds an AWS-hosted Consent Portal for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Identity so users can grant OAuth access without the browser holding tokens. Here is the UK IdP and gateway checklist.
AWS's September 2026 pattern wires Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Evaluations into GitHub Actions so PRs fail when agent quality regresses. Here is the UK-ready auth, threshold and evaluator checklist.
MCP 2026-07-28 makes the protocol stateless and HTTP-native. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway can advertise the new version with one UpdateGateway call — here is the UK enterprise checklist before you flip it.
Stop running enterprise MCP tools on laptops. Use Bedrock AgentCore Runtime to host FastMCP containers with IAM or OAuth, session isolation and CloudWatch — and know when Gateway is the better fit.
Agents Classic enters maintenance mode with new-customer cutoff from 30 July 2026. Use this playbook to inventory, dual-run and cut over to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore without a big-bang outage.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is becoming the enterprise standard for how agents discover and call tools. On AWS, AgentCore Gateway turns APIs and Lambdas into governed MCP endpoints—here is how UK ops and platform teams should adopt it.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore gives UK enterprises a production path for AI agents—runtime isolation, gateway tooling, memory, identity and policy—without rebuilding platform plumbing. This guide sets out what to implement first so pilots become governed, auditable services.