Strands Agents is an open-source SDK created and released by AWS for building agents. The approach is “model-driven”: the model itself decides when and how to call tools, with little structure imposed by code.
What it is for
- Building agents in Python or TypeScript with a few lines of code
- Exposing existing functions as tools, including MCP servers
- Assembling multi-agent systems with swarm, graph or workflow patterns
- Putting agents into production with streaming, sessions and telemetry
How it works
- An agent is created with a model, instructions and a list of tools
- Tools can be annotated functions or existing MCP connections
- The execution loop alternates between model reasoning and tool calls
- Multi-agent patterns coordinate specialised agents, passing context along
- The SDK is the native path to publish agents to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Availability
- Apache-2.0 licence, with official Python and TypeScript packages
- Stable 1.0 releases in both languages
Points to note
- Outside AWS, production features require your own observability setup
- The freedom given to the model demands clear instructions and tool limits
- Compare with more opinionated frameworks if your team needs rigid structure