Bedrock Studio is Amazon’s attempt to simplify generative AI app development

Amazon is launching a new tool, Bedrock Studio, designed to let organizations experiment with generative AI models, collaborate on those models, and ultimately build generative AI-powered apps.

Available in public preview starting today, the web-based Bedrock Studio — a part of Bedrock, Amazon’s generative AI tooling and hosting platform — provides what Amazon describes in a blog post as a “rapid prototyping environment” for generative AI.

Bedrock Studio guides developers through the steps to evaluate, analyze, fine-tune and share generative AI models from Anthropic, Cohere, Mistral, Meta and other Bedrock partners, as well as test different model settings and guardrails and integrate outside data sources and APIs. Bedrock Studio also offers tools to support collaboration with team members to create and refine generative AI apps, including single sign-on credentials for enterprises using them.

Bedrock Studio automatically deploys the relevant Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources as developers request them, Amazon says, and — in the interest of security — apps and data never leave the signed-in AWS account.

“When you create applications in Amazon Bedrock Studio, the corresponding managed resources such as knowledge bases, agents and [more] are automatically deployed in your AWS account,” Amazon principal developer advocate Antje Barth explains in the blog post. “You can use the Amazon Bedrock API to access those resources in downstream applications.”

Less an attempt to reinvent the wheel than streamline existing products and services, Bedrock Studio appears to be a stringing-together of AWS tools that have been around for some time, topped with a sprinkle of corporate governance and compliance capabilities. One imagines it’s all in service of Amazon’s bid to make Bedrock the go-to platform for generative AI app development.

It’s a steep road ahead for Bedrock, which is up against generative AI development platforms from Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and others. But Amazon telegraphed in a recent earnings report that Bedrock — along with AWS’ other generative AI-related services — are holding their own, with AWS’ generative AI businesses hitting a combined “multi-billion dollar run rate,” according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.