Solo.io, the leading cloud native application networking company, is debuting kagent, an open source, cloud-native framework that enables DevOps and platform engineers to build and run AI agents in Kubernetes environments. Capable of instilling cloud connectivity, security, and infrastructure expertise that accelerates Kubernetes workflows, kagent unlocks a myriad of efficiencies through the power of advanced reasoning and automation.
Kagent serves as the foundation for AI-driven solutions in cloud-native environments, empowering teams with agentic infrastructure that automates tasks such as configuration, troubleshooting, observability, and network security. By offloading these processes to agentic AI, kagent empowers developers and engineers to focus on more strategic, value-driven tasks, according to Solo.io.
“As enterprises embrace AI to automate and optimize cloud native operations, the emergence of agentic AI frameworks represent a significant step forward in simplifying how AI agents are built, deployed, and scaled on Kubernetes and across multi-cloud environments," said Paul Nicholson, research VP, cloud and datacenter networks, IDC. "By offering an open source foundation for running AI-driven agents with accelerated integration into the cloud-native ecosystem, Solo.io’s kagent helps cloud and platform teams unlock efficiencies and controls, accelerating the adoption of AI in modern application delivery.”
“Kubernetes is already the go-to platform for predictive analytics, MLOps, and inferencing, and now it provides the modern architecture to deploy AI agents dynamically,” said Keith Babo, chief product officer, Solo.io. “Kagent will enable Kubernetes users to run agentic AI without the huge learning curve and operational challenges of building an agentic AI infrastructure stack from scratch.”
Kagent is divided into three layers, each required for deploying agentic architectures on cloud-native infrastructures:
- Tools: Pre-defined functions that agents can use to perform various tasks. These can include a curated expert knowledge base; availability and performance metrics for services; application deployment and lifecycle controls; platform administration and debugging utilities; and more.
- Agents: Intelligent, autonomous systems designed to plan and execute tasks, analyze results, and continuously improve. These agents can perform complex, multi-step activities, including canary deployments for new versions of applications, establishing a zero trust security policy for all services in a cluster, and more.
- Declarative framework: A simple declarative API and controller for building and running agents via UI, CLI, and declarative configuration.
Part of kagent’s value lies within its capacity for seamless integration and extensibility, according to Solo.io. Accompanied by a flexible plugin architecture built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), kagent seamlessly integrates with existing cloud-native tools without the need for extensive expertise in the cloud-native ecosystem. As part of its investment in the open source community, key to kagent is the ability for DevOps engineers, platform teams, and developers to create and share their own tools and AI agents, building out a robust landscape of cloud-enabling tools.
“Our framework is really focused on building the ecosystem for cloud native,” said Lin Sun, director of open source at Solo.io. “Our vision is really to have the community jump onto this bandwagon with us to enrich the ecosystem, so that we can have an agent for every single cloud-native project out there, so that…[it] would not feel so daunting when…[people] started looking at the cloud-native landscape… they can have an agent to teach them—to be on their side, next to them—to help them solve their learning curve, and also [their] operational challenges.”
Sun further emphasized the importance of the open source ecosystem in regards to kagent, adding that, “this project would not be successful without the ecosystem. So we would love folks to join us on the journey of the project, whether they’re target audience, platform engineer, developer, engineer, using cloud native projects today, or the project maintainers who have the expertise of the projects; we would love them to be able to come in, join us on the journey, so we can build on this mission, together.”
To learn more, please visit https://www.solo.io/.