Flyte agents¶
Flyte agents are long-running, stateless services that receive execution requests via gRPC and initiate jobs with appropriate external or internal services. They enable two key workflows: asynchronously launching jobs on hosted platforms (e.g. Databricks or Snowflake) and calling external synchronous services, such as access control, data retrieval, and model inferencing.
Each agent service is a Kubernetes deployment that receives gRPC requests from FlytePropeller when users trigger a particular type of task (for example, the BigQuery agent handles BigQuery tasks). The agent service then initiates a job with the appropriate service. Since agents can be spawned in process, they allow for running all services locally as long as the connection secrets are available. Moreover, agents use a protobuf interface, thus can be implemented in any language, enabling flexibility, reuse of existing libraries, and simpler testing.
You can create different agent services that host different agents, e.g., a production and a development agent service:
Table of contents¶
Whether using an existing agent or developing a new one, you can quickly test the agent in local Python environment without needing to configure your Flyte deployment. |
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After you have tested an existing agent in a local Python environment, you must configure your Flyte deployment for the agent to use it in production. |
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If the agent you need doesn’t exist, follow these steps to create a new agent. |
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After developing your new agent and testing it in a local Python environment, you can test it in a local development cluster to ensure it works well remotely. |
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Once you have tested your new agent in a local development cluster and want to use it in production, you should test it in the Flyte sandbox. |
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If you want to develop an agent server in a language other than Python (e.g., Rust or Java), you must implement the agent metadata service in your agent server. |