AWS Releases Bedrock AgentCore Runtime V2: 4x Compute Limits, Cold Starts Under 2 Seconds
AWS launches AgentCore Runtime V2, increasing per-session limits to 8 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM, supporting local model loading, and reducing cold start times from ~30s to under 2s via snapshot mechanisms.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its managed execution environment for AI agents, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, has been upgraded to version V2, which is now the default configuration for new execution environments across 19 AWS regions globally. The new version increases the virtual CPU and memory limits for a single session by four times compared to the previous generation, reaching up to 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of memory. The container image size limit has also been raised to 10 GB. This expansion allows AI agents to compile large program projects, operate browsers, and load local models within the same execution environment, meeting the growing computational demands of complex agent tasks.
In terms of performance optimization, V2 adopts a snapshot startup mechanism introduced in September this year. The system pre-completes agent initialization and creates a snapshot, allowing new sessions to restore directly from the snapshot, thereby eliminating the time required for repeated program loading and environment initialization. According to AWS test data, when using a 2 GB container image with a simple agent that does not call AI models, 75% of sessions have a startup time of less than 2 seconds, compared to 29.7 seconds for the previous generation. Additionally, each session continues to use an isolated Firecracker microVM to ensure hardware isolation, and the system can scale down computing resources to zero when the agent is idle.
Regarding memory management, V2 reclaims resources within minutes after the agent releases memory, rather than waiting for the entire session to end. AWS states that for AI agents requiring multi-turn interactions, a single session can reduce billed memory usage by up to 68%, though this does not imply that overall costs will decrease by the same proportion. Existing execution environments will not automatically upgrade due to the change in default versions; developers can switch to V2 or continue using V1 by setting the platformVersion parameter.