Concepts in 2 minutes
Six ideas. Hold these and the rest of the docs will make sense.
1. An agent is a custom resource
Section titled “1. An agent is a custom resource”You don’t wire up a deployment, a service, autoscaling, tracing, and model access by hand. You
write one AgentDeployment and the controller reconciles all of
that into a running, autoscaled, observable service.
2. The launcher is the platform contract
Section titled “2. The launcher is the platform contract”Every agent pod runs a launcher (PID 1, from the base image). It exposes a language-agnostic localhost plane — memory, tools, feedback, telemetry — and enforces guardrails on the request/response path. Because the contract is the launcher, agents get the full platform (deep traces, memory, guardrails) whether or not they use an SDK. The SDK is optional typed sugar.
3. Everything talks to models through the gateway
Section titled “3. Everything talks to models through the gateway”Agents never call providers directly and never hold provider keys. The controller injects a
MODEL_GATEWAY_URL; the agent calls it with model="<alias>". A ModelRoute
(whose name is the alias) maps that alias to a provider + fallback + rate budget, pulling the
key from a SecretBinding. Swap providers by editing the route — no
agent change.
4. Governance is by reference, and fails closed
Section titled “4. Governance is by reference, and fails closed”Content rules, human approvals, feedback, and eval gates are separate resources an agent opts
into by reference (guardrailPolicyRef, approvalPolicyRef, …). Author a policy once, reuse it. A
dangling or invalid reference holds the agent (Ready=False) rather than serving it ungoverned.
5. Runs are first-class
Section titled “5. Runs are first-class”Every invocation is a durable run with a state machine, streamed events, and a full trace: the step → tool → model causal tree, cost, and any guardrail/approval decisions. You inspect runs in the console; nothing is a black box.
6. Releases are eval-gated
Section titled “6. Releases are eval-gated”A new prompt, model, or image becomes an immutable AgentVersion. An
EvalSuite can gate promotion; a canary serves a candidate on a
traffic split and can auto-progress (or roll back) on the online score. You ship changes the way you
ship any production software.
Ready to see it run? → Quickstart. Want the full picture? → Architecture.