When are you forced to use sagemaker

 When Would You Actually Be Forced to Use SageMaker?

​You only need to bring SageMaker back into the equation if your long-running task falls into one of these specific infrastructure buckets:

​Unrestricted Execution Time (Hours-long Loops): If you are running an autonomous Agentic AI loop where an agent needs to reason, write code, execute that code, check for errors, and repeat that cycle for 30 minutes straight to solve a complex problem. Managing that complex state machine is easier on dedicated compute.

​True Custom Hardware/Containers: If you need to run specialized Python scripts, custom heuristics, or proprietary embedding models alongside the LLM inference that Bedrock’s serverless API doesn't support.