AgentCore course → Field cards → Whiteboard patterns

Three whiteboard patterns

One pattern per printed page, each held under eight boxes — the test is whether you can redraw it from memory in ninety seconds while someone watches. Reasoning in Lesson 7. Verified 2026-08-05.

All three say one thing: constraints on autonomous systems belong outside the model's reasoning. Session isolation in the platform, not the prompt. Authorization at the Gateway perimeter, not in instructions. Spending limits at the infrastructure layer, not in the agent's logic.

Which one to draw — B is A plus an enforcement perimeter, so learn A first
If the customer…DrawCapabilities
Has working agent code and a small team A, minimum viable Runtime, Gateway, Identity, Memory
Is regulated and needs every action auditable B, auditable + Policy, Observability
Wants agents to transact and be discoverable C, transacting harness, Gateway, Payments, Registry

Pattern A: minimum viable adoption

For: seed to Series A, working agent code, one or two engineers, no platform team. The pitch: four capabilities, no rewrite, and the one thing you cannot cheaply build yourself.

Pattern A. An unchanged LangGraph app deploys onto Runtime. Runtime reaches existing APIs through Gateway, which draws credentials from Identity. Runtime writes to Memory on the overrides tier and emits traces to Observability.
Seven boxes, six arrows. The most common startup conversation.

Open full-size diagram

ElementWhy it is there
App unchangedThe reassurance that does the most work. No rewrite.
RuntimeSession isolation, the hardest thing to retrofit.
Gateway → IdentityPer-user credentials, not one shared key.
Memory, overrides tierCheaper storage and pinnable inference.
ObservabilityOnly if they will actually look at it.

Cost driver: Memory retrieval, and they will not expect it. Separate meter at $0.50 per thousand; in the worked sketch it was 58% of the bill and about three times the entire Runtime cost.3

Do not add: Policy, Evaluations, Optimization, Registry. Two engineers cannot operate them, and offering them makes you sound like you are selling.

Pattern B: the auditable pattern

For: Series B and up, regulated, with a platform team and an existing IdP. The pitch: every action authorised before execution and every decision logged, enforced outside the agent's code.

Pattern B. An agent on Runtime reaches core banking and ledger only through Gateway. Every call passes a Cedar policy check before execution; on allow, Identity supplies a per-user credential. Policy decisions and Gateway traces both land in Observability, producing the audit trail. Memory uses the pinned overrides tier.
Seven boxes, seven arrows. Pattern A plus an enforcement perimeter.

Open full-size diagram

ElementThe sentence that sells it
Gateway as sole path One chokepoint is what makes everything else enforceable rather than requested.
Policy, in Cedar Evaluated at the Gateway perimeter, outside the agent's code, so enforcement holds regardless of the agent's autonomy. This is the prompt-injection answer.
Identity, outbound The agent never acts with more authority than the human it serves. Works with their existing Okta or Entra ID, no user migration.
Observability Every Policy evaluation lands here, so authorization decisions and execution traces share one pipeline. That convergence is the audit trail.

Cost driver: usually still Memory retrieval, but check Policy. It publishes both $0.000025 per authorization request and $0.13 per thousand input tokens processed, and the docs do not make clear which configurations incur the token meter. Do not model Policy at scale without verifying.3

Raise both of these unprompted

  1. Guardrails within Policy is not in ca-central-1 — N. Virginia, London, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo only. No managed prompt-injection or PII screening at the perimeter in-region.1
  2. Policy's inference routes globally from Canada, one of only four such source regions. No opt-out, and CloudTrail does not record where. If that is disqualifying for their compliance framework, Policy is currently not usable for them. Say so plainly.2

Memory and Evaluations are both fine — bounded to Canada plus US, both pinnable. Detail on the Canada card.

Pattern C: the transacting pattern

For: agent-native startups, pre-revenue, technically strong. The pitch: agents that pay for what they use and can be hired by other agents. The caveat: the two most interesting pieces are outside Canada and one is preview.

Pattern C. An agent on harness, declared in configuration, reaches paid MCP servers including the x402 Bazaar through Gateway. A 402 response triggers Payments to negotiate x402 under a per-session spending limit enforced at the infrastructure layer. Registry publishes the startup's agents for discovery.
Six boxes, five arrows. The simplest to draw, the most caveated to explain.

Open full-size diagram

ElementWhat to say
harness No orchestration code. Free. Exports to Strands code with one CLI command, so the choice is reversible.
Gateway → paid MCP The Coinbase x402 Bazaar is reachable through Gateway, with over 10,000 endpoints an agent can search and pay for autonomously.
402 → Payments Agent hits a paid resource, receives HTTP 402, and AgentCore handles x402 negotiation, wallet auth, stablecoin payment, and proof delivery without interrupting the reasoning loop.
Spending limit Enforced deterministically at the infrastructure layer, not in the prompt. For a founder letting an agent spend real money, that is the whole argument.
Registry Publish their agent as an A2A card so others can discover and call it.

Volunteer this before they ask

  • Payments: preview, no announced GA date. N. Virginia, Oregon, Frankfurt, Sydney. Not Canada.1
  • Registry: GA 6 Aug 2026, but N. Virginia, Oregon, Ireland, Sydney, Tokyo. Not Canada. Anyone on the preview has a 17 September 2026 migration deadline with breaking schema changes.1

Recommend piloting in us-west-2 and treating the payments layer as something to experiment with rather than plan around.

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