Cross-posted with permission from iqraa.tech — the full guide has the complete IAM policy, SCP examples, and a 300-engineer rollout case study.

Claude Code has a Bedrock mode. Most people find out about it from a single environment variable — CLAUDE_CODE_USE_BEDROCK=1 — and assume that's the whole story. It isn't. The env var is the on-switch; the IAM policy, region strategy, and governance layer around it are where almost every enterprise rollout actually gets stuck.

I run through the deployment end to end below — the parts that matter for a platform team, not just "here's a flag."

Why route through Bedrock at all

The models are identical either way. What changes is procurement, governance, and audit: