Deploy an agent

When you first create an Amazon Bedrock agent, you have a working draft version (DRAFT) and a test alias (TSTALIASID) that points to the working draft version. When you make changes to your agent, the changes apply to the working draft. You iterate on your working draft until you're satisfied with the behavior of your agent. Then, you can set up your agent for deployment and integration into your application by creating aliases of your agent.

Aliases and Versions

To deploy your agent, you must create an alias. During alias creation, Amazon Bedrock creates a version of your agent automatically. The alias points to this newly created version. Alternatively, you can point the alias to a previously created version of your agent. Then, you configure your application to make API calls to that alias.

A version is a snapshot that preserves the resource as it exists at the time it was created. You can continue to modify the working draft and create new aliases (and consequently, versions) of your agent as necessary. In Amazon Bedrock, you create a new version of your agent by creating an alias that points to the new version by default. Amazon Bedrock creates versions in numerical order, starting from 1.

Versions are immutable because they act as a snapshot of your agent at the time you created it. To make updates to an agent in production, you must create a new version and set up your application to make calls to the alias that points to that version.

With aliases, you can switch efficiently between different versions of your agent without requiring the application to keep track of the version. For example, you can change an alias to point to a previous version of your agent if there are changes that you need to revert quickly.

Pausing a deployed agent

You might need to temporarily pause the running of an agent. For example, during maintenance, updates, or when addressing performance issues. To pause an agent, you use the alias for the agent with the UpdateAgentAlias operation. To pause an agent, set the aliasInvocationState field to REJECT_INVOCATIONS. To start the agent running again, set aliasInvocationState to ACCEPT_INVOCATIONS. You don't need to make any IAM policy modifications to pause the agent.

To check if an agent is currently paused, call GetAgentAlias and check the aliasInvocationState field. You can also check the aliasInvocationState field for an alias in the response from ListAgentAliases.