8 Deploying agents and agentic systems
This chapter covers
- Strategies for consuming and deploying agents
- Dockerizing agent systems
- Considering advanced deployment strategies
- Security, safety & governance in production
At some point in your agent journey, you will find the need to deploy and perhaps productize your agents. This could be as simple as embedding an agent within an existing application or something more scalable and controlled, like containers. There are numerous strategies, practices, and implementations for building AI agent systems.
In this chapter, we will look at how agents built with OpenAI Agents SDK may be deployed and productized. Keep in mind that there are numerous agent frameworks and platforms you can develop and deploy your agents with, and the skills covered in this book will apply to all of them. By the end you should be able to choose an appropriate deployment strategy for your agent, containerize it, orchestrate multiple agents, and understand the basics of securing and operating them in production.
8.1 Strategies for consuming agents
For much of this book, we have looked at simple toy examples that put into practice agent concepts. However, most of these examples omitted how such agents could be consumed or deployed. How we consume agents may often dictate how we deploy those agents, be they embedded in an application or deployed as a separate microservice.