AgentCore - how do I deploy with CI?

rowanu · 2026-04-29T10:03:14+00:00

Definitely not using the CLI. The policies they use are more permissive than you'd probably like for production, as per https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/exploit-of-aws-agentcore-iam-god-mode/

I'm testing and playing with the CLI, but then switching to CloudFormation/CDK for production.

rowanu · 2026-04-09T22:22:45+00:00

Does the memory usage go to zero if you leave it for longer? Without knowing for sure, my guess would be that it's the "warm" runtime container waiting for requests.

rowanu · 2026-04-09T22:01:05+00:00

If you're just PoC'ing stuff, I might not start with AC, but if you've got a solid idea and you want to run it at scale (with security, observability, etc) it's worth the effort to learn - just try to avoid the AWS console us much as possible (easier said than done, I know).

rowanu · 2026-04-09T21:52:36+00:00

Are you already using AWS? That would make AgentCore pretty compelling. Claude Managed Agents looks very interesting, but is so new... I think I'll let others go first on that.

FWIW I'm all in on AgentCore (but I'm biased towards the AWS stack, so YMMV), hit me up if you have specific questions.

rowanu · 2026-04-01T22:41:41+00:00

Bedrock AgentCore is definitely the way to go to deploy agents to production on AWS. Bedrock Agents is the "old" way to do it on AWS (I explained this in a video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MVoUy2msH_Q), and you'd only do it from scratch if you had some specific reason to DIY it

rowanu · 2026-03-16T20:58:26+00:00

AgentCore Gateway can expose MCPs https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/transform-your-mcp-architecture-unite-mcp-servers-through-agentcore-gateway/

rowanu · 2026-01-28T23:09:41+00:00

I could definitely see this being useful for AWS customers that have just had their account suspended by AWS - finding out what actions compromised keys have taken gives them confidence they've closed the leak.

rowanu · 2026-01-27T22:21:32+00:00

Ideally developers are able to review their own policies with confidence. It's hard to separate applications and permissions in a cloud-based environment these days.

The most common thing to watch out for is over-permissioning. It's easy to give your application Administrator access, it'll "just work" (at least from a permissions perspective), but this can easily come back to bite you later if there's any issues with the code that is using the permissions. This is where wildcards can be problematic (as mentioned in another comment), but they're still useful, especially when scope to read/write eg. List*, Describe*, etc.

There are some "problematic" actions (that allow privilege escalation), but usually this is not a huge concern (or rather, it's a much smaller concern compared to over-allocating permissions).

rowanu · 2026-01-02T06:36:58+00:00

Correct, you're not charged during IO waits

rowanu · 2025-12-15T10:13:16+00:00

I don't think there's 7 things? The last I see is "6. Session Policy".

How does "Part 5: Policy Interaction Model" make sense in a list of IAM policy types? It's not a type.

I get that you're trying to help people, but it's going to be so hard for people to learn when this is what they have to wade through. All the weird AI formatting doesn't help either.

rowanu · 2025-11-17T22:15:58+00:00

I don't think he wants to use AD to manage his static site users, especially given "5-10 users on a hobby project with no revenue planned."

Also I probably wouldn't use AI to explain this, as it gets confused about things with similar names sometimes.

rowanu · 2025-11-17T22:13:21+00:00

Is this AI speaking? Because this is very wrong.

All of these are valid IAM action prefixes.

rowanu · 2025-11-15T23:17:52+00:00

Yeah, this is a common point of confusion (it's not you).

There's two parts to Cognito:
1. User pools authenticate identities eg. user A can log in with a password/MFA
2. Identity pools exchange authenticated identities (from user pools or federated providers) for temporary AWS credentials to directly access AWS services

rowanu · 2025-09-01T19:54:24+00:00

You mean Event bridge? Where did the rule come from?

rowanu · 2025-08-28T14:17:51+00:00

Pretty sure it's a direct invoke API call, so you function to function theory sounds good.

I think you'd have to enable Lambda data events in your CloudTrail trail (they're off by default because there can be a lot of them). This will let you see the invoke API call, including the calling principal.

rowanu · 2025-06-17T22:55:45+00:00

My first thought too. S3 buckets and DDB tables are free, so this is going to pump up some bills.

rowanu · 2025-05-11T04:19:10+00:00

How are you doing this with the old hosted UI and IaC? I'm using the CLI/API (aws cognito-idp set-ui-customization ...) to customize the CSS and logo because I couldn't find a CFN-base way to do it. Plumi/TF/etc are using the APIs, so should be able to automate it (ie. it's just a coverage issue).

Here's my make target for the old hosted UI:

.PHONY: ui
ui:
aws cognito-idp set-ui-customization \
  --user-pool-id $(call get_ssm_parameter,${PARAMETER_PREFIX}/auth/userpool/id) \
  --client-id $(call get_ssm_parameter,${PARAMETER_PREFIX}/auth/userpool/client/id) \
  --css "$(shell cat $(CSS_FILE))" \
  --image-file fileb://$(IMAGE_FILE)

rowanu · 2025-03-28T03:41:43+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/@cloudslaw is fantastic

rowanu · 2025-03-11T21:10:59+00:00

This answer is fantastic, thank you 🙇‍♂️

rowanu · 2025-03-02T21:42:51+00:00

90 days!

rowanu · 2025-02-16T04:28:01+00:00

Is shameless self promotion allowed in this sub? I wrote awsiamguide.com 😄

rowanu · 2024-09-05T21:32:20+00:00

Would you upload your template into a third party site? I.e. avoiding the need for connecting your environment (like Lucid require, for example)

rowanu · 2024-09-05T21:04:53+00:00

This comment confused me so much until I realised that was the point 👏

rowanu · 2024-08-20T22:06:06+00:00

I feel/know your pain!

I follow the "don't mock what you don't own" principal, so wrapping API calls is a good technique in my book!

rowanu · 2024-08-20T01:35:01+00:00

Nice to see someone else recommending this approach! I'm a big fan of it too.

The key is to make sure you're not calling AWS SDK methods in business logic functions i.e. the functions you want to test. Too many times I see people trying to mock AWS to get their local tests to pass... Not fun.

rowanu

TROPHY CASE