Amazon Bedrock Agents Classic coordinates a foundation model, instructions, and optional tools or knowledge bases to respond to a user’s request. It does not build the underlying business operations, supply your private data, or replace the application work needed to connect, secure, deploy, and test the system. AWS documentation currently says Agents Classic is no longer open to new customers; existing customers may continue using it, and AWS points builders seeking similar capabilities to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. This availability status is from AWS documentation as observed on October 4, 2026, and should be checked again before choosing a service.
What Amazon Bedrock Agents does
Agents Classic provides managed orchestration around a foundation model. You configure the agent’s purpose, choose a model, and give it natural-language instructions. At runtime, the agent can use those instructions to formulate a response, select an available action group, or retrieve information from an associated knowledge base. AWS’s setup documentation describes the minimum configuration and notes that an agent can answer from its model, instructions, and base prompt templates even when it has no action groups or knowledge bases: Create and configure agent manually.
That orchestration is not the same as a finished application. The agent can decide which configured capability is relevant, but your team defines the capabilities, connects them to systems and data, and determines how the overall product behaves.
Action groups provide operations, not the systems behind them
AWS defines the concept this way: “An action group defines actions that the agent can help the user perform.” An action group describes available operations and the information needed to carry them out. For example, a hotel agent could be configured with actions to create, retrieve, or cancel a booking. The schema and implementation that make those operations real are still the builder’s responsibility. See AWS’s action group documentation.
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You must decide what information the agent should ask the user for, define the action parameters, and implement the fulfillment path. That implementation should validate inputs, check authorization, handle downstream errors, and apply the business rules of the connected system. If AWS Lambda fulfills an action, its resource-based policy must allow Amazon Bedrock to invoke the function; AWS documents the relevant service-role and invocation permissions in its service role guidance.
Knowledge bases retrieve from configured information
An agent does not automatically know your organization’s private information. To answer from that information, you must create and configure a knowledge base, connect its data source and vector store, and associate the knowledge base with the agent. The agent can then retrieve relevant material to support a response, including a natural-language answer or, where appropriate, a direct quotation from a source. AWS explains the association flow in Augment response generation with a knowledge base.
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- Your favorite music and content – Play music, audiobooks, and podcasts from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and others or via Bluetooth throughout your home.
- Alexa is happy to help – Ask Alexa for weather updates and to set hands-free timers, get answers to your questions and even hear jokes. Need a few extra minutes in the morning? Just tap your Echo Dot to snooze your alarm.
- Keep your home comfortable – Control compatible smart home devices with your voice and routines triggered by built-in motion or indoor temperature sensors. Create routines to automatically turn on lights when you walk into a room, or start a fan if the inside temperature goes above your comfort zone.
- Do more with device pairing – Fill your home with music using compatible Echo devices in different rooms, or create a home theatre system with Fire TV.
- Say goodbye to drop-offs and buffering - With eero Built-in, Echo Dot doubles as a mesh wifi extender, adding up to 1,000 sq. ft. of wifi coverage to your existing eero network.
Data selection and preparation remain important application decisions: the content must be appropriate, accessible under the intended permissions, and maintained as it changes. Retrieval can only draw on the sources and configuration you provide.
What your team still has to build and configure
- Task and conversation design: Set the agent’s purpose, instructions, model, and expected interaction behavior.
- Business logic: Define action schemas and implement the operations they represent, including validation, authorization, error handling, and downstream system behavior.
- Data and retrieval: Create, permission, curate, and maintain knowledge-base resources and their sources, then associate them with the agent.
- Access control: Configure IAM permissions for model access, action schemas, knowledge bases, and any optional capabilities in use. AWS lists these requirements in its service role documentation.
- Application integration: Build the user experience and connect the application to the deployed agent, including the identity and authorization rules appropriate to your product.
- Operations: Plan monitoring, evaluation, failure handling, cost management, and ongoing ownership. These are responsibilities implied by deploying and operating an integrated application, not evidence that an agent configuration alone provides them.
Guardrails are configurable safeguards that need testing
You can associate Guardrails with an agent to evaluate user inputs and model responses against configured policies. AWS describes available policy types including content filters, denied topics, sensitive-information filters, word filters, and image filters in How Guardrails works.
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- EASE INTO THE DAY - Set up an Alexa routine that gently wakes you with music and gradual light. Glance at the time, check reminders, or ask Alexa for weather updates.
- KEEP YOUR HOME COMFORTABLE - Control compatible smart home devices. Just ask Alexa to turn on lights or touch the screen to dim. Create routines that use motion detection to turn down the thermostat as you head out or open the blinds when you walk into a room.
Choose policies based on the risks and expected inputs and outputs of your application, then test and validate the behavior. AWS itself advises builders to continue testing and validating guardrails; their presence is not proof that every unsafe or incorrect response has been prevented.
Testing, deployment, and updates
AWS describes a workflow in which you test a working draft, then create a version and alias for deployment. Applications invoke the deployed agent through its alias using InvokeAgent. Because a version is a snapshot, changing a production configuration involves creating a new version and routing an alias as appropriate. Refer to AWS’s documentation for deploying an agent and deploying and using an agent in an application.
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- Your favorite music and content – Play music, audiobooks, and podcasts from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and others or via Bluetooth throughout your home.
- Alexa is happy to help – Ask Alexa for weather updates and to set hands-free timers, get answers to your questions and even hear jokes. Need a few extra minutes in the morning? Just tap your Echo Dot to snooze your alarm.
- Keep your home comfortable – Control compatible smart home devices with your voice and routines triggered by built-in motion or indoor temperature sensors. Create routines to automatically turn on lights when you walk into a room, or start a fan if the inside temperature goes above your comfort zone.
- Do more with device pairing – Fill your home with music using compatible Echo devices in different rooms, or create a home theatre system with Fire TV.
- Say goodbye to drop-offs and buffering - With eero Built-in, Echo Dot doubles as a mesh wifi extender, adding up to 1,000 sq. ft. of wifi coverage to your existing eero network.
Testing should cover more than whether a sample prompt produces a plausible answer. Check action inputs and outcomes, permission boundaries, retrieval behavior, error paths, guardrail policies, and the application’s handling of incomplete or failed requests.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Availability and the AgentCore alternative
AWS’s documentation states that “Amazon Bedrock Agents (now Amazon Bedrock Agents Classic) is no longer open to new customers.” AWS says existing customers may continue using it and directs builders seeking similar capabilities to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. This is AWS’s documented status as of October 4, 2026; confirm current availability, feature support, and regional access before planning a new implementation. The status notice appears in AWS’s agent creation documentation.
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AgentCore is AWS’s named alternative for similar capabilities, but the cited documentation does not establish feature parity between it and Agents Classic. Evaluate the current documentation for the intended workflow rather than assuming that configuration or behavior transfers unchanged.
Quick Recap
How to decide whether the approach fits
| Need | What Agents Classic contributes | What your team supplies |
|---|---|---|
| Answering from a foundation model and instructions | Orchestration that can generate a response from the configured model, instructions, and base prompt templates. | Task definition, model choice, instructions, testing, and the surrounding application. |
| Taking actions in a business system | Selection and orchestration of actions defined in an action group. | Action schema, fulfillment implementation, downstream integration, validation, authorization, and error handling. |
| Answering from private or organization-specific content | Retrieval from an associated, configured knowledge base. | Data source, vector store, permissions, content curation, knowledge-base setup, and maintenance. |
| Launching a new Agents Classic deployment | Not available to new customers according to AWS documentation as observed October 4, 2026. | Check current AWS availability and assess AgentCore or another suitable approach; do not assume feature parity. |
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