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What is Pika?

Pika is an AWS-native agentic framework designed to close the gap between impressive AI demos and production-ready chat applications that your customers can actually use.

Building an AI agent that impresses in a demo is straightforward with modern AI tools. The real challenge begins when you try to deploy that agent for actual users:

  • How do you handle authentication and multi-tenancy?
  • Where do you store conversation history securely?
  • How do you prevent agents from returning wrong answers?
  • How do you know when your agent isn't working well?
  • How do you iterate and improve based on real usage?
  • How do you deploy and scale the infrastructure?

Pika addresses all of these challenges with a complete, production-ready platform.

Pika is not just an agent framework - it's a complete platform for hosting multiple chat applications:

  • Production-ready chat UI with file upload, session management, and rich rendering
  • Multi-tenancy support with entity-based isolation
  • User memory that persists preferences across all sessions
  • Admin interface for managing chat apps, users, and access control
  • Analytics and insights to understand usage and improve quality

Unlike frameworks that require coding agents into your codebase, Pika takes a configuration-first approach:

  • Define agents declaratively using Infrastructure as Code
  • Deploy agents independently without touching core platform code
  • Version control your agents with full audit trails
  • A/B test agent variations through configuration
  • Keep your codebase clean - agents live alongside your existing microservices

Pika is built exclusively on AWS services, giving you:

  • Automatic scaling through serverless architecture
  • Enterprise security via AWS Bedrock, IAM, and VPC
  • Production observability with CloudWatch and X-Ray
  • Cost efficiency with pay-per-use pricing
  • Compliance inheritance from AWS certifications

Pika includes advanced capabilities to improve agent quality:

  • Self-correcting responses with independent verification
  • Answer reasoning to understand agent decision-making
  • LLM-generated feedback on conversation quality
  • Instruction assistance to refine agent prompts
  • Insights generation for continuous improvement

To set clear expectations:

Pika is opinionated and AWS-specific:

  • It only runs on AWS (not Azure, GCP, or other clouds)
  • It uses AWS Bedrock for LLM capabilities
  • It follows serverless architecture patterns
  • It assumes you want a chat interface (not voice, not embedded SDK)

While agents are configured declaratively, you still write code:

  • Tools are Lambda functions you implement
  • Authentication is a pluggable provider you implement
  • Custom UI components are Svelte components you build
  • Infrastructure customization uses AWS CDK

Pika provides the structure and plumbing, but you provide the business logic.

Pika supports both internal and external use cases:

  • Build customer-facing chat applications
  • Build internal tools for employees
  • Build support applications for your support team
  • Host multiple chat apps for different audiences on one platform

Building an AI chat app from scratch requires solving many hard problems:

  • Authentication and authorization
  • Multi-tenancy and data isolation
  • Session storage and retrieval
  • File upload and processing
  • Streaming responses
  • Tool invocation patterns
  • Infrastructure deployment
  • Security and compliance

Pika solves all of these out of the box.

These are excellent agent frameworks, but they're building blocks, not solutions:

  • You still need to build the UI
  • You still need to handle authentication
  • You still need to manage sessions and memory
  • You still need to deploy infrastructure
  • You still need to build admin tools

Pika includes all of this.

Commercial platforms often provide similar capabilities, but:

  • They're closed-source and proprietary
  • They charge per-agent or per-message fees
  • Your data goes through their infrastructure
  • You have less control over customization
  • Vendor lock-in is a real risk

Pika is open-source, runs in your AWS account, and you control the infrastructure.

AWS Bedrock Agents provide the core agent capabilities, but:

  • You still need to build the chat interface
  • You still need to handle authentication and multi-tenancy
  • You still need session management
  • You still need admin and monitoring tools

Pika wraps Bedrock Agents with a complete application layer.

  • Faster time to production: Weeks instead of months
  • Focus on business logic: Not infrastructure and plumbing
  • Clean architecture: Agents as config, tools in your codebase
  • Production-ready: Security, scaling, and monitoring included
  • Complete chat applications: Not just backend APIs
  • Multi-tenancy built-in: Serve many customers/organizations
  • Rapid iteration: Change agents through configuration
  • Quality tools: Self-correction, feedback, and insights
  • AWS foundation: Inherits AWS security and compliance
  • Data control: Everything runs in your AWS account
  • Open source: No vendor lock-in or per-message fees
  • Enterprise features: SSO, audit logs, access control

Pika is built on:

  • AWS Bedrock: LLM execution and agent orchestration
  • AWS Lambda: Serverless compute for tools and APIs
  • Amazon DynamoDB: Scalable session and configuration storage
  • Amazon OpenSearch: Search and analytics
  • SvelteKit: Modern, fast frontend framework
  • AWS CDK: Infrastructure as code

At a high level, Pika's architecture consists of:

  1. Frontend Layer: SvelteKit chat application with pluggable authentication
  2. API Layer: API Gateway + Lambda for REST APIs
  3. Agent Layer: AWS Bedrock Agents with inline tools
  4. Tool Layer: Lambda functions implementing business logic
  5. Storage Layer: DynamoDB for sessions, S3 for files, OpenSearch for search
  6. Intelligence Layer: Self-correction, feedback generation, and insights

For a detailed breakdown, see System Architecture.

Now that you understand what Pika is, you can: