Take your AI projects from prototype to enterprise reality with Microsoft’s most powerful agent framework. In this comprehensive, code-driven guide, Andrew Ming shows developers, data engineers, and architects exactly how to build autonomous AI agents that don’t just respond — they reason, plan, retrieve context, call tools, and act securely across your entire Azure ecosystem. Written for real-world production use, this book skips the hype and delivers complete, runnable examples you can deploy today using the Azure AI Foundry SDK. You’ll master every stage of the agent lifecycle: Secure authentication with managed identities, Entra ID, and Key Vault - Structured prompting, tool calling, and multi-step planning patterns - Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with Azure AI Search and vector stores - Long-term and short-term memory management for stateful agents - Integration with Azure Functions, Blob Storage, Cosmos DB, and Logic Apps - Full-stack observability using OpenTelemetry, Application Insights, and structured logging - Performance monitoring, tracing, evaluation, and automated testing of agent runs - Containerized deployment with Docker, Azure Container Apps, and AKS - Infrastructure-as-code with Bicep and GitHub Actions - Canary releases, traffic shifting, and zero-downtime updates - Enterprise governance: content safety, PII redaction, RBAC, encryption-at-rest, and audit trails Every chapter includes ready-to-run code samples, architecture diagrams, cost-optimization tips, and battle-tested patterns used by Microsoft’s own enterprise customers. Whether you’re a software engineer embedding agents into existing applications, a data engineer building retrieval pipelines, or a technical leader responsible for production AI systems, this is the definitive playbook for shipping reliable, observable, and governable AI agents at scale. Stop experimenting. Start shipping production-grade AI agents with confidence. If you work with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry SDK, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or autonomous agents — this book will become your go-to reference.