Five Ways to Call Bedrock: Converse, Invoke, Messages, Responses, Chat Completions — Inference APIs

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1. InvokeModel and Streaming Basics2. Converse API Patterns3. Five Ways to Call Bedrock: Converse, Invoke, Messages, Responses, Chat Completions

Five Ways to Call Bedrock: Converse, Invoke, Messages, Responses, Chat Completions

📚 Inference APIs⏱ 11 min⭐ 75 XP⌨ Hands-on lab

Bedrock Now Speaks Every Provider's Native API

Beyond Converse and InvokeModel, Amazon Bedrock exposes provider-native API surfaces so you can point existing SDKs at Bedrock with minimal rewrites:

  • Converse API - AWS-native, model-agnostic, unified message schema across every supported provider.
  • InvokeModel / InvokeModelWithResponseStream - Lowest-level access with per-provider request/response bodies.
  • Messages API - Anthropic's native schema, callable via the standard anthropic SDK pointed at Bedrock.
  • Responses API - OpenAI's native schema for models like openai.gpt-oss-120b and the newer GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, Luna), callable via the standard openai SDK.
  • Chat Completions API - OpenAI-compatible schema for teams migrating existing Chat Completions integrations.

Bedrock Mantle: The Engine Behind Responses and Chat Completions

Amazon Bedrock Mantle is Bedrock's latest inference engine, built for price-performance, and it serves the Responses and Chat Completions API surfaces. As new non-Anthropic, non-Amazon model families arrive on Bedrock they increasingly launch on Mantle - for example xAI Grok 4.3 and Google DeepMind's Gemma 4, alongside OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family - with support for tool calling, structured output, and response streaming.

Key idea: Choose Converse for portability across model families, or a provider-native API when you want zero-friction reuse of an existing Anthropic/OpenAI SDK integration.
⌨ HANDS-ON LABStream Tokens with ConverseStream API
⭐ +150 XP

Consume chunked server-sent token events from the Amazon Bedrock ConverseStream API.

1Execute streaming invocation to receive real-time delta tokens.
lab-sandbox — simulated environment
INFINITY LAB SANDBOX v2.6 — simulated shell
Type the command for the current objective. Helpers: "hint", "solution", "clear".
$
OBJECTIVE 1 / 1 — type "hint" if stuck
🧪 Knowledge Check
Press 1-4 to select1 of 3
Why would a team use the Messages or Responses API on Bedrock instead of Converse?
They perform better on all models
To reuse an existing Anthropic/OpenAI SDK integration with minimal code changes
Converse is deprecated
They are the only APIs with streaming