Amazon Bedrock Agent Core: Build a Streaming Agent UI Without Lambda (WebSockets + Memory + Tools)

Johannes is joined by Andres Moreno, a principal software architect and serverless/AI community builder, to build a hands-on demo using Amazon Bedrock Agent Core. They discuss why Agent Core runtime can be more cost-effective than running agents on Lambda (not paying for LLM “thinking” time), and how Agent Core’s modules (especially runtime and memory) can be used independently or together. The episode walks through creating an agent with Strands Agents, adding a system prompt for behavior, deploying via a simple “direct deploy” ZIP-to-S3 approach with SAM, and then enabling native WebSocket streaming directly from the UI to Agent Core to remove API Gateway/Lambda middle layers. They also add short-term memory via Session Manager and demonstrate turning a chatbot into an agent by adding a tool to execute Python code. 00:00 Welcome and Agenda 01:08 Meet Andres Moreno 03:11 Why Agent Core Runtime 05:35 Agent Core Modules Overview 07:22 Skipping the Middleman 10:44 Defining the Agent Code 14:13 System Prompt Guardrails 19:15 Deploying with SAM 24:34 Testing with Simple UI 25:42 Next Up WebSocket Streaming 26:25 Switching to Nova 27:01 WebSocket Streaming Setup 29:09 Presigned URL UI Connect 30:38 Streaming Demo Comparison 33:36 Adding Session Memory 36:16 Deploy Memory and Test 39:35 Chatbot vs Agent Tools 41:01 MCP and Gateway Options 42:12 Run Code Tool Demo 47:15 Wrap Up and Next Steps Reach out to Andres: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andmoredev/ https://www.believeinserverless.com/