AWS AgentCore Harness vs Runtimes

AWS AgentCore Harness vs Runtimes.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to be brought on to DataCamp’s channel to do a live code-along session about AWS AgentCore.

It was great, but there were a bunch of things that I couldn’t cram into 1 hour.

Things like the difference between AgentCore Harness and Runtime.

Harness is great if you want a no-code solution (not including IaC).

No Python code to manage, just plug and play.

But what happens if you want to control the code that calls out to the model? Then you might want to consider AWS AgentCore Runtimes.

Here you can code up the inner workings of the harness.

Why would you want to do this? Honestly, I don’t have a great use case.

I love the AgentCore Harness because there is nothing to manage/debug.

If I was going to tinker, I would likely just omit AgentCore altogether and use a tool like LangChain and a lambda to be the harness.

It just feels weird to have that much vendor lock-in while only getting part of the benefit.

Do you have a good use case for it? Let me know if you do.