Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime targets

You can add an Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime agent as a gateway target. The gateway sends traffic directly to the runtime agent without aggregation or protocol translation. Unlike MCP targets that combine tool capabilities into a unified virtual MCP server, the AgentCore Runtime target forwards requests and responses between clients and the runtime agent without modification.

Adding an AgentCore Runtime target to your gateway is useful when you want to:

Key considerations and limitations

When working with AgentCore Runtime targets, be aware of the following considerations:

Target configuration

When you create an AgentCore Runtime target, you provide the runtime ARN and an optional qualifier. The gateway resolves the runtime endpoint internally, so you don’t need to construct the runtime URL yourself.

The target configuration for an AgentCore Runtime target uses the following structure:

{
    "http": {
        "agentcoreRuntime": {
            "arn": "arn:aws:bedrock-agentcore:us-west-2:111122223333:runtime/RUNTIME_ID",
            "qualifier": "DEFAULT",
            "schema": {
                "source": {
                    "s3": {
                        "uri": "s3://DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET/agent-schema.yaml"
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Invoking an AgentCore Runtime target

To invoke an AgentCore Runtime target through the gateway, send a POST request to the target’s invocation URL. The URL format is:

https://{gatewayId}.gateway.bedrock-agentcore.{region}.amazonaws.com/{targetName}/invocations

Replace {gatewayId} with your gateway ID, {region} with the AWS Region, and {targetName} with the name of the target.

The following example uses curl to invoke an AgentCore Runtime target:

curl -X POST https://gateway-id.gateway.bedrock-agentcore.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/my-target/invocations \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
    -d '{"input": {"prompt": "Hello"}}'

You can also use the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore SDK with an endpoint URL override:

aws bedrock-agentcore invoke-agent-runtime \
    --endpoint-url https://gateway-id.gateway.bedrock-agentcore.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/my-target \
    --runtimeArn arn:aws:bedrock-agentcore:us-west-2:111122223333:runtime/RUNTIME_ID

Outbound authorization

AgentCore Runtime targets support the following outbound authorization types:

Enforcing traffic through the gateway

You can front your AgentCore Runtime with an AgentCore Gateway so that the gateway becomes the single, governed entry point to the runtime — giving you policy-based authorization, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails, request and response interceptors, and unified observability, all applied outside the agent’s own environment. For the full rationale, see Front your runtime with an AgentCore Gateway. But this is only useful if you can’t bypass the gateway and access the runtime directly. You can now achieve this regardless of whether the runtime uses IAM (SigV4) or OAuth (JWT) inbound authorization.

You configure this restriction on the runtime. The gateway stamps the source of every request it forwards, and the runtime validates that source on the way in. The specific mechanism depends on the runtime’s inbound authorization type:

Capability comparison with MCP targets

You can integrate MCP servers with the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore gateway using two approaches: using the MCP target type in aggregation mode, or using the AgentCore Runtime target type. The following table compares the capabilities of each approach.