agent-substrate/substrate

NOTE: This is not an officially supported Google product. This project is not eligible for the Google Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program.

Agent Substrate is a system built on top of Kubernetes which manages agent-like workloads to achieve higher scale and efficiency than Kubernetes alone can offer, with lower latency. It builds on top of Kubernetes features like Pods and Pod autoscaling, but takes the Kubernetes control-plane out of the critical path to achieve lower latency.

It can run on any Kubernetes cluster and does not inhibit “regular” use of Kubernetes in any way. Kubernetes provides the infrastructure provisioning and management for all types of workloads, while Agent Substrate provides agent-specific scheduling and control.

At its core, Agent Substrate maps a larger set of “actors” (applications such as agents) onto a smaller set of ready “workers” (Kubernetes Pods), relying on the fact that agent-like applications tend to be idle most of the time to achieve heavy multiplexing. It provides functionality to manage an actor’s lifecycle (e.g. create/destroy, suspend/resume), to assign actors to workers in real time, and to route incoming traffic to them.

Agent Substrate is intended to be a low-opinion system. The workloads it manages don't have to be literal AI agents, but those are the best example of the kind of applications it is designed for. It is not an SDK for building agents, but rather a system for running them at scale.