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Operating Agents in Production

This guide provides best practices for deploying Strands agents in production environments, focusing on security, stability, and performance optimization.

Production Configuration

When transitioning from development to production, it's essential to configure your agents for optimal performance, security, and reliability. The following sections outline key considerations and recommended settings.

Agent Initialization

For production deployments, initialize your agents with explicit configurations tailored to your production requirements rather than relying on defaults.

Model configuration

For example, passing in models with specific configuration properties:

agent_model = BedrockModel(
    model_id="us.amazon.nova-premier-v1:0",
    temperature=0.3,
    max_tokens=2000,
    top_p=0.8,
)

agent = Agent(model=agent_model)

See:

Tool Management

In production environments, it's critical to control which tools are available to your agent. You should:

  • Explicitly Specify Tools: Always provide an explicit list of tools rather than loading all available tools
  • Disable Automatic Tool Loading: For stability in production, disable automatic loading and reloading of tools
  • Audit Tool Usage: Regularly review which tools are being used and remove any that aren't necessary for your use case
agent = Agent(
    ...,
    # Explicitly specify tools
    tools=[weather_research, weather_analysis, summarizer],
    # Disable automatic tool loading in production
    load_tools_from_directory=False,
)

See Adding Tools to Agents and Auto reloading tools for more information.

Security Considerations

For production environments:

  1. Tool Permissions: Review and restrict the permissions of each tool to follow the principle of least privilege
  2. Input Validation: Always validate user inputs before passing to Strands Agents
  3. Output Sanitization: Sanitize outputs for sensitive information. Consider leveraging guardrails as an automated mechanism.

Performance Optimization

Conversation Management

Optimize memory usage and context window management in production:

from strands import Agent
from strands.agent.conversation_manager import SlidingWindowConversationManager

# Configure conversation management for production
conversation_manager = SlidingWindowConversationManager(
    window_size=10,  # Limit history size
)

agent = Agent(
    ...,
    conversation_manager=conversation_manager
)

The SlidingWindowConversationManager helps prevent context window overflow exceptions by maintaining a reasonable conversation history size.

Streaming for Responsiveness

For improved user experience in production applications, leverage streaming via stream_async() to deliver content to the caller as it's received, resulting in a lower-latency experience:

# For web applications
async def stream_agent_response(prompt):
    agent = Agent(...)

    ...

    async for event in agent.stream_async(prompt):
        if "data" in event:
            yield event["data"]

See Async Iterators for more information.

Parallelism Settings

Control parallelism for optimal resource utilization:

# Limit parallel tool execution based on your infrastructure capacity
agent = Agent(
    max_parallel_tools=4  # Adjust based on available resources
)

Error Handling

Implement robust error handling in production:

try:
    result = agent("Execute this task")
except Exception as e:
    # Log the error
    logger.error(f"Agent error: {str(e)}")
    # Implement appropriate fallback
    handle_agent_error(e)

Deployment Patterns

Strands agents can be deployed using various options from serverless to dedicated server machines.

Built-in guides are available for several AWS services:

  • AWS Lambda - Serverless option for short-lived agent interactions and batch processing with minimal infrastructure management. Learn more

  • AWS Fargate - Containerized deployment with streaming support, ideal for interactive applications requiring real-time responses or high concurrency. Learn more

  • Amazon EC2 - Maximum control and flexibility for high-volume applications or specialized infrastructure requirements. Learn more

Monitoring and Observability

For production deployments, implement comprehensive monitoring:

  1. Tool Execution Metrics: Monitor execution time and error rates for each tool
  2. Token Usage: Track token consumption for cost optimization
  3. Response Times: Monitor end-to-end response times
  4. Error Rates: Track and alert on agent errors

Consider integrating with AWS CloudWatch for metrics collection and alerting.

See Observability for more information.

Summary

Operating Strands agents in production requires careful consideration of configuration, security, and performance optimization. By following the best practices outlined in this guide you can ensure your agents operate reliably and efficiently at scale. Choose the deployment pattern that best suits your application requirements, and implement appropriate error handling and observability measures to maintain operational excellence in your production environment.