Agentic AI & Platform Engineering — Field Notes by Ashutosh Upadhyay

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Agentic AI &
Platform Engineering

Production notes from the intersection of drug discovery, cloud infrastructure, and autonomous AI — what actually ships.


Ashutosh Upadhyay

Ashutosh Upadhyay

Principal Engineer — Agentic AI & Cloud Platform Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine Antwerpen, Belgium

I build the platforms that let scientists focus on curing disease instead of fighting infrastructure. 12 years in enterprise cloud, specializing in Agentic AI and production-grade platform engineering for pharmaceutical R&D on AWS — embedding AI agents and LLM-assisted workflows into drug discovery pipelines.

My edge: I don't just build platforms. I make them disappear so the science can move faster.

AWS Kubernetes / EKS GitOps Agentic AI Bioinformatics / Omics Imaging Multi-LLM Systems
Connect on LinkedIn View Full Resume
12+
Years in Enterprise Cloud
23
Published Technical Posts
35+
Tools Built for AI Agents
All AI Dev Agentic AI Multi-Agent FinOps LLM Eval Security Platform Data Eng Release Domain AI Observability Memory Learning MLOps Architecture GitOps
Posts 23 entries
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01

Building AI With AI on Claude Code

How I use Claude Code's agent system to build AI systems — with a mandatory Advisor that catches production bugs, persistent memory that compounds across sessions, and a full EKS deployment architecture.

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02

From Chatbot to Autonomous Research System

How I built a 35-tool AI agent that autonomously queries databases, builds knowledge graphs, and generates research reports — running on Kubernetes.

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03

Multi-Agent AI Collaboration

Why one agent isn't enough — and how to build a team of AI specialists that research, analyze, synthesize, and critique each other's work, with full observability via Langfuse.

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04

What Your AI Agent Actually Costs

Your invoice tells you the total. It never tells you who spent it, which tokens were wasted, or whether the last model upgrade paid for itself.

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05

Every Public Benchmark Is Useless to You

Building a standing internal evaluation suite — and the four ways my harness broke before it produced a single trustworthy number.

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06

Your Agent Is a Confused Deputy

Security lessons from putting an autonomous, tool-calling agent in front of regulated enterprise data — including a cross-tenant vulnerability I shipped, found, and closed.

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07

Managed Agent Runtimes: Read the Fine Print

I run agents on Kubernetes and evaluated moving them to a managed agent platform. Here's what genuinely improves, what quietly becomes your problem, and why a hybrid split was the honest answer.

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08

Your Agent Is Only As Good As Its Data Pipeline

The agent gets the credit. The data pipeline does the work. Here's the production ingestion architecture that keeps a 19-source research agent reliable.

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09

Releasing an AI System Is Not Like Releasing Software

A tag-only image bump left the UI, presentation, and diagrams five versions stale. None of it errored. Here's what a real AI system release checklist looks like.

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10

Teaching an Agent to Think Like a Domain Expert — Without Fine-Tuning

Not fine-tuning. Not prompt-stuffing. A skills system that retrieves domain heuristics at query time — and the failure modes that shaped it.

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11

Observability for AI Agents: Beyond Langfuse Traces

Langfuse catches bad tool data. Prometheus catches the stuck pod. CloudWatch catches the $12 session. Here's how three layers work together — and where each one falls short alone.

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12

Cross-Session Agent Memory: What Persists, What Shouldn't, and Why It's Hard

Every session starts cold. Users re-teach the same preferences. Here's how to give your agent real memory without creating a privacy disaster.

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13

Closing the Feedback Loop: How User Corrections Become Domain Knowledge

The agent was wrong. The user corrected it. The next user got the same wrong answer. Here's how to close the loop — without fine-tuning.

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14

Ingesting 129 GB for an AI Agent: Five Design Mistakes Caught Before Build

We had a design. The advisor caught five blockers before a single line was written. Here's what changed and why it mattered.

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15

GPU Digital Pathology AI on Kubernetes: What KEDA ScaledJobs Actually Do Under Load

Burst GPU workloads, silent Karpenter version traps, and why a draining SQS consumer will break your ScaledJob scaling.

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16

Multi-Tenant FinOps: The Three Silent Bugs That Made Our AWS Cost Data Untrustworthy

We built the join, ran it, got 1.8% coverage. It looked like a data problem. It was a .lower() call — and two more silent bugs followed.

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17

EKS or Managed Agent Runtime? A Framework for the Decision You'll Face Twice

The migration looked straightforward. Then we found five categories of blockers. Here's the framework we wish we'd had before we started.

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18

AWS DataSync for S3: Same-Account and Cross-Account Transfer Without the Surprises

The console can't see the bucket. The role goes in the destination account. KMS is always the first thing that breaks. Here's the complete playbook.

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19

The Two-Hop IAM Pattern: IRSA + Cross-Account AssumeRole on EKS

Hop 1: EKS pod gets IRSA credentials. Hop 2: assumes a role in a different account. Here's how to wire both hops without creating a credential management nightmare.

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20

ArgoCD Multi-Source Helm: Decoupling Chart Versions from Configuration

One source for the chart in your registry. One source for the values in Git. They version independently — and that changes everything about how you manage environments.

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21

Cross-Account CloudWatch: The Silent Zero and How to Prevent It

You query CloudWatch. You get zero results. No error. The logs are there — in a different region. Here's how to build multi-account extraction that doesn't silently fail.

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22

Data Infrastructure Quality for AI Readiness: Lessons from Production Pipelines

AI systems are only as good as the data pipelines that feed them. Here's how to build infrastructure that produces genuinely AI-ready data — and the silent failures that break it before training starts.

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23

Langfuse in Production: LLM Observability Beyond Console Logs

Your agent answered a question. Was it correct? How long did it take? What did it cost? Did it use the right prompt version? Langfuse answers all of those — and makes the answers actionable.

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