Extending Agents with AWS Lambda and Step Functions
Learn how to extend AI agents with AWS Lambda and Step Functions to perform real-world actions, integrate external systems, and orchestrate complex workflows.
Welcome to Extending Agents with AWS Lambda and Step Functions, where we explore how AI agents move beyond conversation and interact with real-world systems.
While foundation models excel at reasoning and generating responses, they cannot directly access external applications, databases, or business processes. By extending agents with tools and workflows, we can enable them to retrieve information, execute actions, and orchestrate multi-step processes across cloud environments.
What will you learn?
- Understand why AI agents require external tools and workflows to perform real-world tasks.
- Learn how AWS Lambda enables agents to execute custom business logic and interact with external systems.
- Explore how AWS Step Functions can orchestrate long-running and multi-step agent workflows.
- Identify common tool-calling patterns, including data retrieval, transaction processing, and automation tasks.
- Understand architectural considerations when designing scalable, secure, and reliable agent integrations on AWS.
- Explore real-world examples of agents interacting with APIs, databases, enterprise applications, and automated workflows.
Featured Hands-On Demo
Build a complete agent orchestration workflow using Amazon Bedrock, AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, and Amazon DynamoDB. You’ll learn how to invoke an agent through a workflow, capture trace data, persist execution results, implement error handling, and create an auditable execution history for agent interactions.
Intended Audience
This lesson is recommended for cloud practitioners, AI and ML engineers, application developers, and technical decision-makers who want to understand how AI agents can be extended beyond conversational interfaces to perform meaningful business actions using AWS services.
Feedback
Here at QA, we strive to keep our content up to date in order to provide the best training available. If you have any feedback, positive or negative, please contact platformsupport@qa.com. Thank you!