Deploying Scalable Agents with Microsoft Foundry

Companion skill for Lesson 16 – Deploying Scalable Agents. Use it to help a learner move an agent from prototype to a scalable, observable production deployment. Ground every recommendation in the lesson content and the runnable notebook; do not invent Foundry APIs.

Triggers

Activate this skill when a learner wants to:

• Deploy an agent to Microsoft Foundry as a hosted agent and make it versioned/observable.
• Choose between client-hosted, hosted-agent, and agent-workflow deployment patterns.
• Add model routing, response caching, or bounded concurrency to control latency and cost.
• Add an evaluation gate so a bad agent version cannot ship.
• Add a human-in-the-loop approval step for high-risk actions.
• Instrument an agent with OpenTelemetry tracing for production observability.
• Smoke-test a deployed agent as a fast post-deploy gate.

Core mental model