Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime adds interactive terminal shells
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime now supports interactive shells via a new API, providing a persistent, PTY-backed terminal directly into agent sessions over WebSocket. This feature is crucial for developers hosting coding agents, enabling them to interact, inspect files, and debug within an isolated microVM environment. It offers a full terminal experience, including state persistence, automatic reconnection, and support for up to 10 concurrent shells per runtime.
- →InvokeAgentRuntimeCommandShell API enables interactive terminal access
- →Full terminal experience for coding agents
- →Persistent state and session management for interactive shells
- →Support for multiple concurrent shells
- →AgentCore CLI command for accessing interactive shells
Features (1) ›
- InvokeAgentRuntimeCommandShell API enables interactive terminal access
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime introduces interactive shells through the InvokeAgentRuntimeCommandShell API, providing a persistent, PTY-backed terminal over WebSocket. This allows developers to directly access and interact with running agent sessions.
Enhancements (3) ›
- Full terminal experience for coding agents
The new interactive shell offers a complete terminal experience within an isolated microVM, supporting features like color, tab completion, Ctrl+C, terminal resizing, and automatic reconnection. This is particularly beneficial for developers using coding agents like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Amazon Kiro.
- Persistent state and session management for interactive shells
Interactive shell sessions maintain state across commands, including environment variables and working directory, behaving like a local terminal. Sessions are identified by runtime and shell IDs, enabling automatic reconnection on network drops and manual resumption for longer disconnects.
- Support for multiple concurrent shells
A single agent runtime can now support up to 10 concurrent shells, allowing developers to open multiple terminals against the same or different microVMs for parallel work and debugging.
Notes (1) ›
- AgentCore CLI command for accessing interactive shells
Developers can initiate an interactive shell session using the AgentCore CLI with the command: `agentcore exec --it --runtime <runtime-arn>`. Documentation is available for comparing shell modes.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/06/amazon-bedrock-agentcore-runtime/