What is bedrock-gateway
bedrock-gateway lets software written for the OpenAI API use the models in Amazon Bedrock. It is one program that you run in your own environment. Clients send it OpenAI requests; it calls Bedrock with your AWS account and answers in the OpenAI format.
What it is for
Many tools and libraries speak the OpenAI API and nothing else: the OpenAI SDKs, Codex CLI, editors with edit prediction, and agents that let you set a base URL. bedrock-gateway gives them an OpenAI endpoint whose models are Claude, OpenAI's GPT models on Bedrock, Amazon Nova, DeepSeek and the other models in your Bedrock catalog.
A client changes two settings, the base URL and the API key, and keeps the rest of its code.
How a request travels
- A client sends an OpenAI request, such as a Chat Completions or Responses request, to the gateway with the key you chose for your clients.
- The gateway checks the key, translates the request into the form the model needs on Bedrock and sends it with your AWS credentials.
- Bedrock answers. The gateway turns the answer, or the stream of events, back into the OpenAI shape the client asked for.
Two credentials are involved, and they go in opposite directions:
| Credential | Who sends it | To whom |
|---|---|---|
API_KEY | your clients | the gateway |
| a Bedrock API key or AWS credentials | the gateway | Bedrock |
What it supports
- The OpenAI routes
/chat/completions,/responses,/completions,/embeddingsand/models, streaming and non-streaming. The API reference lists each one. - Tools, images, JSON output and reasoning effort, on the models that support them.
- Automatic prompt caching on the models that support it, without a change in the client.
- Bedrock's cross-region inference profiles, such as
global.anthropic.claude-sonnet-5-5. - A model registry in a configuration file. A model that needs special handling gets an entry there, without a new release of the gateway.
Where it runs
bedrock-gateway is a single binary with no runtime dependencies. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows, and the same binary ships as a small container image. The deployment guide covers running it on your own machine, on Amazon ECS with Fargate and on AWS Lambda.
What it is not
- It is not a hosted service. You run it, and it uses your AWS account and your Bedrock quotas.
- It does not keep conversations. The Responses API is served without state.
- It is not an AWS product.
Next: Quick start.