Sunday, January 11, 2026

Exploring the zero operator entry design of Mantle


At Amazon, our tradition, constructed on trustworthy and clear dialogue of our progress alternatives, permits us to concentrate on investing and innovating to repeatedly increase the usual on our capacity to ship worth for our prospects. Earlier this month, we had the chance to share an instance of this course of at work in Mantle, our next-generation inference engine for Amazon Bedrock. As generative AI inferencing and fine-tuning workloads proceed to evolve, we have to evolve how we serve inferencing to our prospects in an optimized means, which ends up in the event of Mantle.

As we got down to reimagine the structure of our subsequent era inferencing engine, we made elevating the bar on safety our prime precedence. AWS shares our prospects’ unwavering concentrate on safety and knowledge privateness. This has been central to our enterprise from the beginning, and it was significantly in focus from the earliest days of Amazon Bedrock. We’ve understood from the beginning that generative AI inference workloads current an unprecedented alternative for patrons to harness the latent worth of their knowledge, however with that chance comes the necessity to guarantee the best requirements in safety, privateness, and compliance as our prospects construct generative AI methods that course of their most delicate knowledge and work together with their most crucial methods.

As a baseline, Amazon Bedrock is designed with the identical operational safety requirements that you simply see throughout AWS. AWS has all the time used a least privilege mannequin for operations, the place every AWS operator has entry to solely the minimal set of methods required to do their assigned job, restricted to the time when that privilege is required. Any entry to methods that retailer or course of buyer knowledge or metadata is logged, monitored for anomalies, and audited. AWS guards in opposition to any actions that may disable or bypass these controls. Moreover, on Amazon Bedrock your knowledge isn’t used to coach any fashions. Mannequin suppliers haven’t any mechanism to entry buyer knowledge, as a result of inferencing is completed solely inside the Amazon Bedrock-owned account that mannequin suppliers don’t have entry to. This robust safety posture has been a key enabler for our prospects to unlock the potential of generative AI purposes for his or her delicate knowledge.

With Mantle, we raised the bar even additional. Following the strategy of the AWS Nitro System, we have now designed Mantle from the bottom as much as be zero operator entry (ZOA), the place we have now deliberately excluded any technical means for AWS operators to entry buyer knowledge. As a substitute, methods and companies are administered utilizing automation and safe APIs that defend buyer knowledge. With Mantle, there isn’t a mechanism for any AWS operator to sign up to underlying compute methods or entry any buyer knowledge, resembling inference prompts or completions. Interactive communication instruments like Safe Shell (SSH), AWS Techniques Supervisor Session Supervisor, and serial consoles aren’t put in anyplace in Mantle. Moreover, all inference software program updates have to be signed and verified earlier than they are often deployed into the service, guaranteeing that solely authorized code runs on Mantle.

Mantle makes use of the lately launched EC2 occasion attestation functionality to configure a hardened, constrained, and immutable compute setting for buyer knowledge processing. The companies in Mantle which can be answerable for dealing with mannequin weights and conducting inference operations on buyer prompts are additional backed by the excessive assurance of cryptographically signed attestation measurements from the Nitro Trusted Platform Module (NitroTPM).

When a buyer calls a Mantle endpoint (for instance, bedrock-mantle.[regions].api.aws) resembling those who serve the Responses API on Amazon Bedrock, buyer knowledge (prompts) leaves the shopper’s setting by means of TLS, and is encrypted all the way in which to the Mantle service, which operates with ZOA. All through the whole circulation and in Mantle, no operator, whether or not from AWS, the shopper, or a mannequin supplier can entry the shopper knowledge.

Trying ahead

Mantle’s ZOA design exemplifies the long-term dedication of AWS to the safety and privateness of our prospects’ knowledge. It’s this focus that has enabled groups throughout AWS to spend money on additional elevating the bar for safety. On the similar time, we’ve made the foundational confidential computing capabilities that we internally use at Amazon, resembling NitroTPM Attestation, accessible to all prospects to make use of on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

We’re not stopping right here; we’re dedicated to persevering with to spend money on enhancing the safety of your knowledge and to offering you with extra transparency and assurance on how we obtain this.


In regards to the authors

Anthony Liguori is an AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer for Amazon Bedrock, and the lead engineer for Mantle.

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