Strands, and what is actually GA

Lesson 6 of 6 in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Service by Service.

Strands Agents is where most people get the layering wrong, so state it plainly: Strands is an SDK, AgentCore is infrastructure, and neither requires the other.

Strands is an open-source SDK from AWS, released in May 2025, that takes a model-driven approach: instead of hand-coding an orchestration workflow, you define a prompt and a list of tools, and the model plans next steps, chains thoughts, calls tools and reflects. As of September 2026 it is available for Python and TypeScript. If that sounds like the definition of an agent from the foundations domain, that is the point — Strands is a thin, opinionated expression of the agent loop rather than a graph framework. AWS teams shipped it because they were using it: Amazon Q Developer, AWS Glue and VPC Reachability Analyzer were on it at announcement.

The relationship to AgentCore is symmetric and worth memorising in both directions. AgentCore hosts many frameworks — Strands, LangChain/LangGraph, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, Google ADK, the OpenAI Agents SDK, the Claude Agent SDK, custom code. Strands runs many places — locally, on your own infrastructure, or on AgentCore. Choosing one does not choose the other.

Two different decisions, often confused
	Strands Agents (SDK)	AgentCore (platform)
What it is	An open-source library you import	Managed AWS services you call
What it decides	How your agent is written — loop, tools, model-driven planning	Where it runs and what surrounds it — isolation, memory, tools, identity, policy, telemetry
Runs where	Anywhere: laptop, EC2, Lambda, EKS, AgentCore, another cloud	AWS regions where the services are available
Lock-in shape	Apache-licensed code you can fork; switching costs are refactoring costs	Managed-service dependency; the OTel telemetry and MCP tool surfaces are the portable parts
You still need	Somewhere to run it, and answers to all ten infrastructural problems	An agent — written in something. The harness is the "or almost nothing" option

AgentCore in context — fourteen months of shipping

2025-07-16 — AWS previews Amazon Bedrock AgentCore:
Seven services in four regions — Runtime, Memory, Gateway, Browser Tool, Code Interpreter, Observability, Identity — sold as primitives rather than one opinionated agent object. This is AWS conceding that its 2023 Bedrock Agents abstraction was the wrong shape.
2025-10-13 — Amazon Bedrock AgentCore goes GA:
General availability in nine regions with VPC and PrivateLink, CloudFormation, tagging, A2A support in Runtime, MCP servers as Gateway targets, and consumption-based pricing. A cloud agent platform reaching GA with both protocols wired in is the moment the protocol layer stopped being optional.
2025-12-01 — AgentCore adds Policy and Evaluations in preview:
Policy takes natural-language rules, compiles them to Cedar, and enforces them at the Gateway — authorization outside the model, where an injection cannot argue with it. Evaluations arrived in preview with 13 built-in evaluators, alongside episodic memory and bidirectional streaming.
2026-03-01 — AgentCore Evaluations, Policy, and CLI reach GA:
Evaluations went GA in nine regions and Policy in thirteen, with the AgentCore CLI. Twelve months after the first cloud agent runtime reached GA, the parts reaching GA are measurement and authorization — the two things nobody could buy in 2023.
2026-07-30 — Bedrock Agents Classic closes to new customers:
The 2023 service became Agents Classic in maintenance mode: no new customers from this date and no new features — but AWS states there is no end-of-life date and no migration deadline for existing customers. The abstraction that launched the cloud agent era lasted under three years; plan your own portability accordingly.
2026-08-01 — AgentCore Agent Registry and Runtime Instances reach GA:
The Agent Registry — a governed catalog of agents, tools, and MCP servers with AWS Organizations auto-detection and CMK encryption — went GA alongside Runtime Instances (EC2-backed sessions up to 14 days, GPU families) and AgentCore payments. AWS and Microsoft both now sell an agent inventory, which tells you what their customers were struggling with.

Finally, the question that decides whether you can actually put this in front of an auditor: what is generally available, and where? Preview services are for prototypes; GA plus a region list plus a compliance attestation is what a regulated team can plan against.

The pattern below is the one to carry to any cloud agent platform. The compute went GA first, the governance followed months later, and the discovery layer later still. If someone shows you a platform architecture diagram, ask which boxes are GA in your region — the answer is rarely uniform.

Status and region footprint, verified September 2026 — re-check before you commit
Capability	Status	Notes
AgentCore core (Runtime, Memory, Gateway, Identity, Code Interpreter, Browser, Observability)	GA October 13, 2025	Nine regions at GA (N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Ireland). GA added VPC, AWS PrivateLink, CloudFormation and resource tagging across all services, plus A2A support in Runtime.
Policy (Cedar, natural-language authoring)	GA March 2026	Preview December 2025; thirteen regions at GA. Guardrails checks enforceable at the Gateway from July 2026.
Evaluations	GA March 2026	Preview December 2025 in four regions; GA in nine, with thirteen built-in evaluators plus custom LLM-judge and Lambda evaluators. TypeScript framework support and DeepEval/AutoEval managed evaluators followed in 2026.
AgentCore harness (managed loop)	GA July 2026	Public preview April 2026. GA added memory on by default, more model providers, an AWS-curated skills catalogue, versioning/endpoints, and export to Strands code.
AWS Agent Registry	GA August 2026	Public preview April 2026 in five regions. GA added AWS Organizations auto-detection of Runtimes and Gateways, and customer-managed KMS keys.
Runtime Instances (EC2-backed, 14-day sessions)	GA August 2026	Same nine regions as core AgentCore. Complements — does not replace — the default microVM option.
Web Search connector	GA July 2026	Built-in MCP connector target on Gateway; AWS describes zero data egress from the customer’s AWS environment.
Compliance and GovCloud	ISO and CSA STAR February 2026; SOC July 2026	GA in AWS GovCloud (US-West) May 2026, with Memory, Policy and the harness following in August 2026.

How to keep this current without re-reading a course

Three sources, in this order. The AgentCore release notes page in the Developer Guide is the changelog — it is where the July 2026 Guardrails-at-Gateway entry and the harness GA live. The AWS What’s New feed gives you the region lists. Service Quotas gives you the numbers that actually break your design: concurrent sessions, TPS, payload sizes. Quotas were raised in mid-2026, so any number you read in a 2025 blog post is suspect — including the ones AWS itself repeats.

Two specifics deliberately omitted from this module because they were not verifiable as current: the exact Runtime payload size limit (AWS says "industry-leading"; get the number from Service Quotas) and per-dimension pricing rates (published example figures are region- and time-specific — price from the AgentCore pricing page). What is stable is the metering shape: Runtime bills CPU consumed and peak memory per second, and does not charge CPU while a session sits waiting on model or tool I/O if nothing is using CPU — while memory stays billable for the life of the session.

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