ADE 301: Production
This course covers what happens after the pilot — operating agentic data engineering systems reliably at production scale. You will work through the readiness criteria that govern when an agent is ready to ship, the patterns for scaling from one agent to a fleet, the orchestration and observability disciplines that keep multi-agent systems honest, and the adoption roadmap for expanding agentic coverage across your organization.
The tone is direct and grounded in what production systems actually require. No promises about what agents can do eventually — only frameworks for what they need to do reliably now.
Shipping an agent is not the end of the engineering problem. It's the beginning of a different one.
What's in this course
| # | Module | Time | What you'll learn |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Production Readiness | 25 min | The checklist that governs promotion from dev to production: token budgets, circuit breakers, version control, and failure mode inventory |
| 2 | Scaling: From Pilot to Fleet | 25 min | Specialist agent architecture, context management at scale, agent registries, and multi-tenancy patterns |
| 3 | Multi-Agent Orchestration | 30 min | Coordination patterns (sequential, fan-out, hierarchical, event-driven), compound reliability math, and defenses against partial failure |
| 4 | Observability | 25 min | Reasoning quality monitoring, drift detection, alerting strategy, and how to debug agentic failures |
| 5 | Adoption Roadmap | 25 min | Ring-based expansion from pilot to org-wide, pipeline prioritization, stakeholder communication |
| 6 | The Agentic Future | 15 min | Where the industry is on the adoption curve, what the role transition means for data engineers, and how to build institutional knowledge that compounds |
Total estimated time: ~2.5 hours (self-paced)
What you'll be able to do
- Apply a production readiness checklist to determine when an agentic pipeline is ready to ship
- Design a specialist agent architecture that scales from one agent to a fleet without coordination complexity
- Select the right multi-agent coordination pattern for a given task type
- Build a four-pillar observability system that catches reasoning degradation, not just pipeline failures
- Create a ring-based adoption roadmap for expanding agentic coverage across your organization
Prerequisites
Recommended: ADE Systems Design (201) or equivalent experience designing and building agentic systems. ADE 301 assumes you've built at least one production or near-production agentic pipeline and are ready to think about reliability, scale, and organizational rollout.
If you're still in the "how does this work" phase, ADE Foundations (101) and ADE Systems Design (201) are the right starting points.
Pass the knowledge checks on all six modules to unlock the ADE Production certificate at the bottom of this page. Quizzes are 2–4 questions per module. Retries are allowed.
Start here: Production Readiness →
Additional Reading
- ADE Foundations (101) — First principles: how agents work, the CTT framework, and your first agentic pipeline.
- ADE Systems Design (201) — Architecture, context engineering, governance, and the trust-and-verify discipline.