December 2027
Intermediate
350 pages
1h 20m
English
Overview
AI agents are already in production, accessing your systems and data with little human oversight. Built by developers, spun up by business teams, and embedded in enterprise platforms, agents are everywhere, and most organizations operate without governance models designed for autonomous, tool-connected systems.
In AI Agent Governance, enterprise architect Kesha Williams gives AI engineers and platform engineers practical patterns to close that gap. Through a realistic scenario, you'll follow a Model Context Protocol (MCP)-connected agent from its first deployment through its evolution into a multi-agent system coordinated through Agent-to-Agent (A2A). Governance challenges emerge at every stage: behavioral drift, unauthorized tool access, unsafe delegation, and cascading failures. You'll design governance architectures, enforce boundaries, protect sensitive systems and data, and recover from failures, with the operational patterns to run agents safely in production. A GitHub repository and the Agent Governance Console sandbox let you build alongside every chapter.
- Design governance architectures for agents in production
- Monitor behavior across single-agent and multi-agent systems
- Enforce execution constraints and access control
- Secure MCP tool connections, A2A communication, and sensitive systems
- Interrupt unsafe behavior and recover safely from failures
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.