#production

2 resources and 35 guides tagged #production on ChangeGamer.

Shipping AI Agents to Production: A Production-Readiness Checklist · Guide
End-to-end checklist for productionizing an AI agent — evaluation gates, observability, guardrails, cost controls, resilience, durability, HITL approvals, secrets, rollback, and incident response.
Prompt Management and Versioning: The Ops of Prompts in Production · Guide
Treating prompts as deployable artifacts: versioning, external registries, A/B and canary testing, eval-gated promotion, rollback, and the composite-version problem.

Guides

MCP Authentication and the Production MCP Server Playbook · pillar guide
MCP authentication with OAuth 2.1, plus transport, tool design, versioning, testing, distribution and observability for a production MCP server.
stdio vs. Streamable HTTP for MCP Servers: A Decision Framework · guide
Which MCP transport to build against and why: the single-client-vs-shared decision rule, how state works without a session handshake under the 2026-07-28 spec, the auth-model switching cost, and what actually breaks migrating off HTTP+SSE.
How to Implement OAuth 2.1 for an MCP Server · guide
A wire-level implementation walkthrough for OAuth 2.1 on a remote MCP server: what the discovery documents actually contain, CIMD vs. Dynamic Client Registration in your server code, per-SEP detail from the 2026-07-28 hardening set, and token-validation mechanics.
MCP Server Versioning and Spec Migration: An Operator Playbook · guide
A migration runbook for MCP server operators: feature-detecting via capabilities instead of hard protocolVersion branching, a dual-version fleet rollout with rollback triggers, a compatibility shim for legacy clients still sending initialize, and a deprecation calendar built off the 12-month SEP-2577 floor.
MCP Server Observability with OpenTelemetry: Spans, Metrics, and Trace Correlation · guide
Instrumenting an MCP server past the pillar's baseline: what to put on a tool-call span beyond gen_ai.tool.name, what replaces the deprecated Logging primitive in practice, per-tool-name latency and error-rate metrics, and how a trace ID actually survives the agent-to-upstream-API hop.
How to Publish an MCP Server to the Official Registry · guide
A step-by-step walkthrough of the mcp-publisher CLI and the server.json manifest for publishing an MCP server to registry.modelcontextprotocol.io, how to republish after a version bump, and how the registry relates to aggregators, marketplaces, and direct distribution.
MCP Server Cost Optimization: Toolset Size, Caching Hints, and Fan-Out · guide
How the token cost of an MCP server's tool list, the 2026-07-28 spec's ttlMs/cacheScope caching hints, fan-out from callers you do not control, and per-tool-name cost visibility each shape what a production MCP server actually costs to run.
Common MCP Server Failure Modes and How to Fix Them · guide
A runtime playbook for the two MCP server failure modes with no dedicated deep-dive elsewhere: unrecoverable state after a mid-call crash, and malformed or hallucinated tool calls that reach the handler despite upstream validation.
The MCP Server Production Launch Checklist · guide
A phase-by-phase go/no-go checklist for launching an MCP server: checkable gate conditions for transport and auth, tool design, cross-client testing, publish readiness, observability, and ongoing operation — with links to the mechanics each gate depends on.
Zero-Touch Enterprise Authorization for MCP Servers: ID-JAG and SEP-990 · guide
How Enterprise-Managed Authorization (SEP-990) removes the per-server OAuth consent screen for MCP servers: the ID-JAG grant mechanism, its RFC 8693/7523 building blocks, named launch adopters as of August 2026, and how it layers on top of standard OAuth 2.1 rather than replacing it.
Agentic RAG in Production: The Complete Operator Guide · pillar guide
The operator playbook for agentic RAG in production: ingestion, chunking, hybrid retrieval, reranking, evaluation, freshness and cost.
How to Build a RAG Ingestion Pipeline That Survives Production · guide
The six properties that separate a production RAG ingestion pipeline from a demo script: tested extraction, idempotent writes, incremental updates, deletion propagation, durable execution, and metadata captured at ingest time.
How to Chunk Documents for RAG (Strategy Beats Size) · guide
Chunking decisions that actually move retrieval quality: structural boundaries before fixed windows, parent-document expansion, special handling for tables and code, overlap trade-offs, and tuning against recall@k instead of blog defaults.
When and How to Rerank Retrieved Documents in RAG · guide
Reranking as a budget decision: why first-stage ranking misorders good evidence, when cross-encoder reranking pays for itself, how to pick candidate depth at the knee, gating by query difficulty, and deduplicating after fusion.
How to Keep a RAG Index Fresh (Staleness Bounds, Not Vibes) · guide
Freshness as an engineered property: per-source staleness contracts, document versioning and tombstones, effective-date filtering, deletion propagation with reconciliation backstops, and the sync-lag metrics that predict stale answers before users report them.
Permission-Aware Retrieval: Multi-Tenant RAG Without Leaks · guide
How to enforce access control inside retrieval for multi-tenant RAG: authorization as mandatory pre-filters derived from the authenticated principal, tenant isolation mechanics, permission-negative testing, and the post-filter trap that produces empty answers.
Retrieval as a Tool: Agentic RAG Patterns That Survive Production · guide
When AI agents consume retrieval as a tool rather than a pipeline stage: narrow tool contracts, hard budgets on iterative retrieval, query decomposition, provenance-carrying results, and keeping trust boundaries inside the retrieval path.
How to Cut RAG Cost and Latency Without Cutting Quality · guide
RAG cost and latency as engineered budgets: where the money actually goes, caching layers and their hit-rate economics, routing queries to right-sized models, bounding retrieval fan-out, the hidden lines (reindex migrations, eval compute), and p95 discipline.
Common RAG Failure Modes and How to Fix Them · guide
An operator runbook for the four RAG failure classes with no dedicated deep-dive elsewhere: retrieval miss, context overload, injection via content at ingestion time, and silent quality degradation — symptom, first diagnostic, and fix for each.
GraphRAG vs Vector RAG: When to Use a Knowledge Graph Instead · guide
A decision framework for choosing graph-structured retrieval over standard vector RAG: which query types GraphRAG actually wins, what building a knowledge graph costs, named implementations, and hybrid vector-plus-graph patterns.
When Is RAG the Wrong Answer? A Decision Guide · guide
A worked decision guide for the four real alternatives to retrieval-augmented generation: including knowledge directly, querying structured data with text-to-SQL, fine-tuning for behavior change, and graph-based retrieval for entity relationships.
Agent Guardrails and the AI Agent Reliability Playbook · pillar guide
Agent guardrails plus the eleven other disciplines that make an AI agent reliable in production: tool calling, retries, durable execution and rollout.
How to Make AI Agent Tool Calling Reliable · guide
An operator playbook for tool-calling contracts: per-provider strict-mode config (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, self-hosted grammars), the full failure-mode-to-fix table, what BFCL actually measures, and how to stop parallel tool calls from breaking a dependency chain.
Structured Outputs vs Tool Calling: When to Use Each · guide
A decision framework for structured outputs versus tool calling in AI agents, with runnable JSON Schema examples for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, vLLM/SGLang, and llama.cpp, plus mitigation code for truncation, refusal, and grammar-compilation latency.
How to Make AI Agent Retries Idempotent · guide
A deep-dive on retrying agent tool calls safely: the transient-vs-terminal decision, why an agent side effect can fire before a failure signal reaches the caller, idempotency-key mechanics (run ID + step index), the unknown-outcome edge case, and where idempotency keys do not reach.
When Do AI Agents Need Durable Execution? · guide
A deep-dive on durable execution for AI agents: the persisted event log, the replay-determinism constraint, the four architectural shapes mapped across ten engines and frameworks, and a decision framework for when a durable execution engine is worth adding at all.
How to Design Guardrails for AI Agent Reliability · guide
An operator playbook for reliability guardrails: the three checkpoints (input, output, action), layering cheap checks under slow ones with a fail-closed default, the two-of-three-properties rule for when a tool call needs human approval, and logging every verdict against the run trace ID.
How to Evaluate AI Agents in CI · guide
An operator playbook for gating an AI agent release in CI: why agent eval needs trajectory-level scoring across the tasks it actually runs, how public benchmarks diverge as proxies, ground-truth vs LLM-as-judge tool-call scoring, and the three-layer test pyramid that keeps CI fast and non-flaky.
How to Roll Out a New AI Agent Version Safely · guide
An operator playbook for shipping a new agent version without breaking production: in-repo vs. registry prompt storage, a version-numbering comparison, the six-step promotion flow, A/B-test mechanics, the composite-version trace fields, and a rollback drill.
How to Build an Incident Response Runbook for AI Agent Failures · guide
An operator playbook for the moment an AI agent fails in production: a triage step to classify the failure fast, trace freezing before rollback destroys the evidence, first-response depth on the four failure classes, and a blameless post-mortem that feeds back into guardrails and eval.
How to Set Timeouts for AI Agent Tool Calls · guide
A deep-dive on timeout and deadline design for AI agents: sizing LLM-call, tool-call, and sub-agent-hop timeouts differently, allocating a wall-clock budget across a multi-step chain, and propagating a remaining-deadline value from parent to child calls.
How to Design a Circuit Breaker for AI Agents · guide
A deep-dive on the circuit breaker pattern for AI agents: the Closed/Open/Half-Open state machine with a worked open-source example, where to place a breaker in an agent's call path, and degraded-mode fallback design as its own discipline per dependency type.
What Should an AI Agent's Observability System Capture? · guide
An operator playbook for instrumenting an AI agent: the trace/span model behind a run, the OpenTelemetry GenAI attributes that name each field, the fields worth capturing per span, and what to redact before any of it gets logged.
The AI Agent Production Reliability Checklist · guide
A go/no-go checklist that turns the agent reliability pillar's twelve-discipline closing list into checkable gates — the specific artifact, header, or trace field that proves each one holds, with a link to whichever sibling article owns its mechanics.
How to Secure AI Agents in Production · pillar guide
Credential hygiene, prompt-injection defense in depth, sandboxing choices for code execution, supply-chain provenance, least privilege, audit trails, incident response, and rate/abuse controls — eight operator-side defenses against an adversarial actor or a compromised dependency, not against ordinary load or failure.