Course Companion - akash-coded/aws-bedrock-agentcore-strands GitHub Wiki

The course companion

Sixteen modules, five tracks, one rule: every abstraction is preceded by the thing it abstracts.

The course lives in the repository, under modules/: slides, notebooks, exercises, workbooks and solutions, reviewed and versioned. These pages are the companion: one page per module with its reading order, the tutorial lesson that frames it, the workbench tool that exercises the same decision, and where its errors and questions are collected. Read the module README first, always; this page tells you what to read around it.

Where to start: START-HERE in the repository picks a path for you. Not sure? Module 00 needs no AWS account and no code.

The five tracks

Track Modules
Think 00โ€“01
Invoke 02โ€“04
Build 05โ€“09
Ground 10
Ship 11โ€“14
Product ยท parallel 15

You write the agent loop by hand before meeting a framework (05 โ†’ 06), build retrieval by hand before a managed knowledge base (10), and test before you deploy (13 โ†’ 14).

All 16 modules

# Track Module Time Read first
00 Think Agentic Foundations
Decide what deserves to be an agent before you build one.
4โ€“5 hours P0 ยท Frame
01 Think LLM Intuition and the AWS Bridge
Build a working mental model of LLMs, then map it onto AWS.
3โ€“4 hours What is the agentic PDLC?
02 Invoke Amazon Bedrock Essentials
Your first real calls: Converse API, tokens, tool use, knowledge bases, guardrails.
6โ€“8 hours Why the AI bill is 4ร— the estimate
03 Invoke Amazon Bedrock Agents
Console to code: action groups, orchestration, and controlling behaviour.
6โ€“7 hours P1 ยท Design & Spec
04 Invoke Agent Builder, Knowledge Bases and Guardrails
The low-code surface, and how to wire knowledge and safety into it.
4โ€“5 hours Guardrails that hold
05 Build The Agent Loop: No Framework to Strands
Write the loop by hand, feel the pain, then let Strands remove it.
5โ€“6 hours P2 ยท Build & Prove
06 Build Strands Foundations: Tools, Memory and MCP
Agents with hands, memory, and a standard way to reach the outside world.
5โ€“6 hours For engineers
07 Build Multi-Agent Patterns with Strands
Swarm, graph, delegation, critique โ€” and when each one is wrong.
6โ€“7 hours For solution architects
08 Build LangChain and LangGraph
The other ecosystem โ€” and an honest side-by-side with Strands.
7โ€“8 hours One lifecycle for every method
09 Build LLM Memory Mechanics
What models forget, why, and what you can do about it.
3โ€“4 hours Why the AI bill is 4ร— the estimate
10 Ground RAG, OpenSearch and LiteLLM
Retrieval done properly โ€” chunking, hybrid search, reranking, and an evaluation gate.
8โ€“10 hours Prove the agent meets its bar
11 Ship Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
Runtime, memory, identity, gateway, observability โ€” agents as deployed services.
8โ€“10 hours P3 ยท Run & Learn
12 Ship A2A and A2UI: Agent Interoperability
Agents talking to agents, and agents talking to users.
4โ€“5 hours P1 ยท Design & Spec
13 Ship Agentic QA and Evaluation
How you prove an agent works โ€” and block the ones that do not.
5โ€“6 hours For QA
14 Ship End-to-End Production Pipeline
The capstone: build, validate, deploy, fail over, and gate a release.
8โ€“10 hours Shadow mode and cut-over
15 Product ยท parallel Agentic Product Lifecycle
For the people who decide what gets built, and have to defend it.
4โ€“5 hours For product managers

Pick a path

Nobody needs all sixteen in the same order. Each path is a subset, in a sequence, with a finish line:

Path For Time Finish line
๐Ÿš€ Weekend Sprint "Show me it works, this weekend" ~12 h A working Bedrock agent with tools
๐Ÿ› ๏ธ Agent Engineer Building and shipping agents ~70 h A deployed, evaluated, gated agent
๐Ÿ›๏ธ Solutions Architect Designing and reviewing agent systems ~45 h A defensible architecture with a cost model
๐Ÿ“‹ Product Manager Deciding what to build and defending it ~25 h A PRD and a gate review you can run
๐Ÿ”ฌ RAG Specialist Retrieval quality as the job ~35 h A measured, gated RAG pipeline
  1. Attempt exercises closed-book. Solutions are written to be read after you have a wrong answer to compare against. Reading them first converts an hour of learning into five minutes of nodding.
  2. Fill in the workbooks. The .xlsx activities are where a decision gets written down and costed. Skipping them is how you end up unable to defend the design later.
  3. Do not skip Module 05. Writing the agent loop by hand is what stops every later framework from being magic.
  4. Watch the bill. Set a budget alarm before Module 02. See cost controls.

Prove it, then teach it

  • The labs companion: auto-graded labs that try to break your solution, and which module teaches each one.
  • The cohort kit: ninety-minute sessions that turn the tutorial and this course into a programme for a team.
  • Study plans: the same material fitted to a week, a weekend, four weeks of evenings or twelve weeks of reading group.

โœ๏ธ This page is generated from modules/README.md, the module READMEs and docs/learning-paths/README.md: an edit made here is replaced at the next sync.

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