đ„AWS Strands and MCP with Simple, Real-World Examplesđ„
aka, robots with tools
This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!
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Hey all!
In previous articles we built generative AI bots that integrate with a RAG knowledge base using the AWS Bedrock backend.
Theyâre awesome, but theyâre not agentic.
"Agentic" describes the ability to act autonomously, make decisions, and achieve goals without constant human intervention, a concept central to agentic AI systems that can plan, execute tasks, and adapt to new information
Basically, agentic bots do 1 step, and then return that information. That generally works really well for chatbots - read this information, return a summary. One step is all you need!
However, if you want a bot to do a multi-step process, thatâs when youâre looking at an âagentic workflowâ. Something like âRead our PagerDuty, isolate any resources with issues, then go look at AWS and see if the resources have an error state you can recommend fixes forâ is multiple step - talk to platformA, analyze the data, then use that data to talk to platformB and analyze the data from there.
Agentic agents can do it!
Strands has emerged as a language that permits building effective and comprehensive bots with little python. It comes out of AWS, but the team there has made sure to open-source it (Apache 2.0 license) and make sure itâs compatible with lots of back-ends like OpenAI/ChatGPT, Anthropic, OLlama, and others.
It support agentic workflows, MCP (tool use to talk to platforms), A2A protocol (to talk to other bots and coordinate work), and will likely be kept up to date with AWS services in AgentCore like Memory and other cool stuff shaking out of that project.
It feels like a great place to start.
Strands, find all the ec2 instances in us-east-1, and give me their IPs and AZs in a table.
Iâm going to be building some enterprise Strands agentic assistants over the next few months, but for now Iâm just proving out really simple workflows, and I wanted to share them. Theyâre all here:
Weâll walk through one by one for how they work.
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