Agent Engineering 101: Software, systems, and security in practice (www.ashpreetbedi.com)

Agent Engineering is framed as the practice of building, running and securing agentic systems—covering runtime architecture, memory/knowledge, tooling integration, safety, evaluation and observability. The article introduces Agno, a multi-agent framework plus a pre-built FastAPI runtime (AgentOS) and a browser-connected control plane that together aim to close the gap between prototyping agents and running them in production. Agno emphasizes practical concerns every engineering team faces: serving agents as APIs, concurrency and session isolation, request timeouts, persistent state, secure MCP-based tool access, RBAC, audit/event logging, and human-in-the-loop controls. Technically, Agno is model-agnostic and type-safe (input/output schemas), supports persistent user and collective memory, agentic RAG with 20+ vector stores, and first-class MCP tool integration. The runtime exposes SSE-compatible endpoints for production, the control plane connects directly to your cloud-hosted runtime to avoid external egress, and the stack includes builtin evals, guardrails, lifecycle hooks, and 100+ toolkits. The result is a packaged build/run/manage platform that accelerates moving agents into production while preserving privacy, observability and security—turning agent research into deployable, auditable AI products.