5 production challenges in multi-agent systems and how Deep Insight solved them

Building a multi-agent system is now pretty straightforward. Taking it to production is where the real challenges begin. Thanks to open source frameworks and cloud services, you can set up an agent in a matter of days. A few tool calls, a few lines of prompt, and you have something that looks impressive. But the moment teams try to move beyond a pilot and into real business applications, they hit a familiar wall. If you’ve ever tried to put an agent into production, these frustrations will sound familiar: Why doesn’t the agent follow our business logic, skip validation steps, or catch edge cases? You tweak the prompt, add more examples, swap out the model. The same problems keep coming back. That’s because agents don’t follow a fixed sequence of instructions. They make their own judgments based on context. Instructions alone aren’t enough. You need to design how the agent thinks, when it verifies, and what it does when things go wrong. This is exactly why it’s become critical to go beyond prompt engineering alone and design the agent’s entire cognitive architecture and execution flow. To tackle these challenges head-on, the AWS Solutions Architecture team built Deep Insight , a production-grade multi-agent system. In this post series, we share what the team learned firsthand while building Deep Insight across three posts. We will walk through how we applied Context Engineering techniques proposed by Anthropic (multi-agent architecture, structured note-taking, human-in-the-loop, and more) in a real production environment. We also cover the trade-offs we encountered along the way (with code) and the operational insights we gained from deploying and running this agent on AWS. Blog series overview Part 1: 5 production challenges in multi-agent systems and how Deep Insight solved them. Part 2: Beyond the context window: Context Engineering techniques and how Deep Insight applied them. Part 3: Harness engineering in practice: moving Deep Insight from dev to production. This is Part 1 of a three-part series. It defines the five core challenges any production multi-agent system must solve and shows how each layer of the stack addresses them, from Strands Agents SDK and Amazon Bedrock to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore , Application Load Balancer , and AWS Fargate . Parts 2 and 3 cover Context Engineering and production deployment. Introducing Deep Insight Deep Insight is a multi-agent system that turns complex data analysis into automated insights. Given a CSV file and a natural-language prompt, a hierarchy of specialized agents (Coordinator, Planner, Supervisor, Coder, Validator, Reporter, and Tracker) collaborates on the analysis. Together they load the data, run analyses, generate charts, validate calculations, and produce a professional report (.docx) with citations. We will explore the architecture in detail later. First, let’s see it in action. For the demo, we feed advertising data from a fictional food company, Yummy Food ( yummy-food-market.csv ) with a column definitions file ( column_definitions.json ), and provide the prompt: Analyze this from a sales and marketing perspective, generate charts and insights, and produce a .docx report. Deep Insight generates an analysis plan, presents it to the user for approval, and, once approved, executes the analysis. Content Input CSV data file ( yummy-food-market.csv ) + Column definitions file ( column_definitions.json ) Example prompt “Analyze this from a sales and marketing perspective, generate charts and insights, and produce a .docx report.” Output DOCX report (two versions, one with citations and one without) plus chart graphics (PNG) The Deep Insight web demo video that follows shows the full workflow, from uploading data and reviewing the analysis plan to real-time streaming and downloading the finished report. How can I try it? Deep Insight is open sourced on GitHub with a full setup guide, and offers three deployment options spanning development to production. The first is the Self-Hosted version , which runs locally through the CLI. It’s optimized for rapid iteration with full code-level access to every agent, prompt, and workflow. It sets up in about 10 minutes, which makes it well suited to development. (A Self-Hosted demo video is available on YouTube .) The second is the Web version , a browser-based UI for uploading data, reviewing analysis plans (Human-in-the-Loop, or HITL), and downloading reports, all without writing code, making it accessible for non-developers. (The preceding demo video shows the Web version in action.) The third is the Managed AgentCore version , a production deployment option powered by Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a platform to build, connect, and optimize agents at scale, with any framework or model. This version deploys the agents on AgentCore runtime, a capability of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The system runs entirely within a private virtual private cloud (VPC), with a custom Code Interpreter hosted separately on AWS Fargate, and agents run concurrently in isolated per-user environments. It’s the right choice when you need session isolation and private VPC deployment. Part 3 covers its deployment and operations in detail. All three share the same multi-agent architecture, so an agent validated in development deploys to production as-is. Solution overview Building a production multi-agent system takes more than good prompts. You need the right technology stack and infrastructure to address how agents collaborate, how they reason, how you deploy them, where they safely execute code, and how you monitor operational health. Deep Insight solves problems across these five key areas. Because the agents generate both code and report content, we also cover responsible AI controls for production in Solution detail 2. Challenge Technology Approach “How do we control execution flow across multiple agents?” Strands Agents SDK Use Strands’ Graph pattern to define execution order between agents and implement human-in-the-loop branching. Use Strands’ Agents as Tools pattern so the Supervisor can invoke specialized agents (Coder, Validator, Reporter, Tracker) as tools on demand. “Which large language model (LLM) should each agent use?” Amazon Bedrock Select the right Claude model for each role: Haiku for basic routing, Opus for planning, Sonnet for execution. “How do we reliably operate a finished agent in production?” Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Managed runtime with monitoring, session isolation, and private VPC deployment. “How do we mitigate the security issues of executing AI-generated code?” AWS Fargate + Application Load Balancer (ALB) Per-session ephemeral sandbox containers for isolated code execution through a custom Code Interpreter. “How do we monitor and manage the system?” Amazon DynamoDB + Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) + Amazon Cognito Admin dashboard and failure alerting system. The following architecture diagram (Figure 1) illustrates this at a glance. The green boxes represent the Strands Agents multi-agent structure, which addresses challenges 1 and 2 from the preceding table. We will cover this in detail in the upcoming Solution detail 1: Multi-agent system design section. The remaining infrastructure components shown in the diagram address challenges 3, 4, and 5, which we will walk through in Solution detail 2: Production deployment and operations. Figure 1: Solution architecture Solution detail 1: Multi-agent system design Deep Insight uses a multi-agent architecture in which eight agents collaborate to produce one high-quality deliverable. Each agent works in its own independent context, performs only its specialized tasks, and passes only compressed results onward. Figure 2: Multi-agent structure The Coordinator routes user requests, the Planner breaks tasks into discrete steps, the Plan Reviewer collects user feedback, and the Supervisor invokes the appropriate specialized agents according to the plan. The Coder writes and executes data analysis code