Course Companion - akash-coded/aws-bedrock-agentcore-strands GitHub Wiki
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.
| Track | Modules |
|---|---|
| Think | 00โ01 |
| Invoke | 02โ04 |
| Build | 05โ09 |
| Ground | 10 |
| Ship | 11โ14 |
| 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).
| # | Track | Module | Time | Read first |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 00 | Think |
Agentic Foundations Decide what deserves to be an agent before you build one. |
4โ5 hours | P0 ยท Frame |
| 01 | Think |
LLM Intuition and the AWS Bridge Build a working mental model of LLMs, then map it onto AWS. |
3โ4 hours | What is the agentic PDLC? |
| 02 | Invoke |
Amazon Bedrock Essentials Your first real calls: Converse API, tokens, tool use, knowledge bases, guardrails. |
6โ8 hours | Why the AI bill is 4ร the estimate |
| 03 | Invoke |
Amazon Bedrock Agents Console to code: action groups, orchestration, and controlling behaviour. |
6โ7 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. |
4โ5 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. |
5โ6 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. |
5โ6 hours | For engineers |
| 07 | Build |
Multi-Agent Patterns with Strands Swarm, graph, delegation, critique โ and when each one is wrong. |
6โ7 hours | For solution architects |
| 08 | Build |
LangChain and LangGraph The other ecosystem โ and an honest side-by-side with Strands. |
7โ8 hours | One lifecycle for every method |
| 09 | Build |
LLM Memory Mechanics What models forget, why, and what you can do about it. |
3โ4 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. |
8โ10 hours | Prove the agent meets its bar |
| 11 | Ship |
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, memory, identity, gateway, observability โ agents as deployed services. |
8โ10 hours | P3 ยท Run & Learn |
| 12 | Ship |
A2A and A2UI: Agent Interoperability Agents talking to agents, and agents talking to users. |
4โ5 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. |
5โ6 hours | For QA |
| 14 | Ship |
End-to-End Production Pipeline The capstone: build, validate, deploy, fail over, and gate a release. |
8โ10 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. |
4โ5 hours | For product managers |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ๐ Weekend Sprint | "Show me it works, this weekend" | ~12 h | A working Bedrock agent with tools |
| ๐ ๏ธ Agent Engineer | Building and shipping agents | ~70 h | A deployed, evaluated, gated agent |
| ๐๏ธ Solutions Architect | Designing and reviewing agent systems | ~45 h | A defensible architecture with a cost model |
| ๐ Product Manager | Deciding what to build and defending it | ~25 h | A PRD and a gate review you can run |
| ๐ฌ RAG Specialist | Retrieval quality as the job | ~35 h | A measured, gated RAG pipeline |
- 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.
-
Fill in the workbooks. The
.xlsxactivities are where a decision gets written down and costed. Skipping them is how you end up unable to defend the design later. - Do not skip Module 05. Writing the agent loop by hand is what stops every later framework from being magic.
- Watch the bill. Set a budget alarm before Module 02. See cost controls.
- 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.
โ๏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.