6 ms·
Google open-sources experimental agent orchestration testbed Scion
https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/scion/overview/ https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/scion/overview/
- _2fnr 6mo ago[flagged]
- popalchemist 6mo ago100%. Great assessment.
- repelsteeltje 6mo agoLike Kubernetes?
- conception 6mo agoAnd angular.
- sieabahlpark 6mo ago[dead]
- otabdeveloper4 6mo agoYes, and unironically.
- hhh 6mo agokubernetes isnt difficult
- Mond_ 6mo agoreally?
- scottyah 6mo agoThe same way linux isn't. It's easy to start, all the base modifications/configurations are fairly simple, and if you find yourself deep into custom ways of using it, it's open source and fairly well documented with a large community.
- hujun 6mo agok8s is simple because it offload some key tasks to 3rd party like network and storage; it is not easy to: a) setup and maintain a k8s cluster with all necessary components from at least a dozen different sources b) design your application to be k8s native
- stego-tech 6mo agoThis. K8s is easy to consume, and a real PITA to actually setup and support from an IT perspective. If someone wants production K8s, I'm steering them (and their budget) to a managed control plane from one of the major cloud providers. Trying to prop it up locally when it really hates having to work directly with bare metal does not spark joy.
- jjmarr 6mo agoI think most of the legacy companies that can benefit from Kubernetes don't use it, while most of the companies that are using it are startups doing it for the résumé.
- manojlds 6mo agoThis is not 2015.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6mo agoThis is the exact opposite of my experience. Maybe it was true 10 years ago when K8s was new and trendy so many engineers wanted to try it out. Now it's just boring tech at large orgs.
- permalac 6mo agoI'm proud to say I retired more k8s clusters than I created. And I've created 5 production ones, still in production. One that I retired was used for serving ftp(among other transfer stuff), ftp of all things, it needs to have ports open and routed back from the client. And for extra points they had the pods capped at 1 cpu. And I had to explain the thing to the perpetrator and their boss, madness.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6mo ago> One that I retired was used for serving ftp It must have been a while ago - FTP was practically killed the moment browsers stopped supporting it.
- verdverm 6mo agoIt's also much easier to bring online these days with managed offerings like GKE, EKS, and AKS. I have no love for the original bash scripts that booted the cluster from your dev machine. Now we also have k3s that is a easy option for self hosting something simple (like homelab).
- verdverm 6mo agoSlightly trailing off from your focus, but hopefully within the same sentiment (that k8s was good, albeit an exception) I would place Google ADK in alignment with Kubernetes more than this project, for the well designed abstractions, the controlplane, and handling the boring parts that every alternative will at maturity. I can see the agent framework ignorance to the container analogy about what's running inside. ADK lacks the ability to run any agent tool, but you can build most of this projects controlplane on top of it with minimal effort, most of the bookkeeping is there already. It's more about what experience you want to have.
- stego-tech 6mo agoIt's super neat! Just like Kubernetes is also super neat at what it can do. It's super neat primarily because consuming it is so easy, provided you already have all the same abstraction layers in place in your infra. You...do have all the same abstraction layers, right? No? Oh. Well, don't worry, Google/Amazon/Microsoft can sell you those if you don't want to pay your IT staff to prop it up for you. --- Look, snark aside, yours is the correct take. Google's solutions are amazing, but they're also built for an organization as large and complex as Google. Time will tell if this is an industry-standard abstraction (a la S3 APIs) or just a Google product for Google-like orgs/functions (a la K8s).
- ptone 6mo ago[primary author and architect of scion here] Part of this will be pushing that cognitive overhead increasingly onto agents. By how much and when is what Scion is here to explore.
- verdverm 6mo agoTheir agent tooling is shaping up to be the well known issue of product cancellation. They have how many different takes on this now? (gemini-cli, antigravity, AI studio, this, Gemini app) I've not been impressed with any of them. I do use their ADK in my custom agent stack for the core runtime. That one I think is good and has legs for longevity. The main enterprise problem here is getting the various agent frameworks to play nice. How should one have shared runtimes, session clones, sandboxes, memory, etc between the tooling and/or employees?
- otabdeveloper4 6mo agoIt's all just system prompts under the hood and nothing more.
- IncreasePosts 6mo agoDon't forget a while loop and a TODO.md
- verdverm 6mo agoNot if you go custom, you have unlimited latitude, examples... I modified file_read/write/edit to put the contents in the system prompt. This saves context space, i.e. when it rereads a file after failed edit, even though it has the most recent contents. It also does not need to infer modified content from read+edits. It still sees the edits as messages, but the current actual contents are always there. My AGENTS.md loader. The agent does not decide, it's deterministic based on what other files/dirs it has interacted with. It can still ask to read them, but it rarely does this now. I've also backed the agents environment or sandbox with Dagger, which brings a number of capabilities like being able to drop into a shell in the same environment, make changes, and have those propagate back to the session. Time travel, clone/fork, and a VS Code virtual FS are some others. I can go into a shell at any point in the session history. If my agent deletes a file it shouldn't, I can undo it with the click of a button. I can also interact with the same session, at the same time, from VS Code, the TUI, or the API. Different modalities are ideal for different tasks (e.g. VS Code multi-diff for code review / edits; TUI for session management / cleanup).
- 6mo ago
- simple10 6mo agoThey kinda buried the code deep in their docs: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/scion https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/scion
- hatmanstack 6mo agoExactly, I actually starred this in late March and hadn't made my way back to it yet. Glad somebody posted, looks very interesting.
- tornikeo 6mo agoI swore to not be burned by google ever again after TensorFlow. This looks cool, and I will give this to my Codex to chew on and explain if it fits (or could fit what I am building right now -- the msx.dev) and then move on. I don't trust Google with maintaining the tools I rely on.
- forsalebypwner 6mo agonice plug
- cedws 6mo agoI want to experiment more with agents but my employer only pays for Claude Code, and TOS disallows using the subscription API for other purposes. Anyone else in the same boat? Token based pricing also gets expensive fast.
- ptone 6mo agoThis runs stock Claude Code in containers, should be completely fine for TOS
- aplomb1026 6mo ago[dead]
- kumardeepanshu 6mo ago[dead]
- aleph_minus_one 6mo agoReading this headline, I rather thought of a different SCION: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCION_(Internet_architecture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCION_(Internet_architecture)
- sowbug 6mo agoI'm looking forward to trying this. I've had a positive but high-variance experience with Gastown[1], which is in the same genre. I hope that Scion does better. My main complaints with Gastown are that (1) it's expensive, partly because (2) it refuses to use anything but Claude models, in spite of my configuration attempts, (3) I can't figure out how to back up or add a remote to its beads/dolt bug database, which makes me afraid to touch the installation, and (4) upgrading it often causes yak shaving and lost context. These might all be my own skill issues, but I do RTFM. But wow, Gastown gets results. There's something magic about the dialogue and coordination between the mayor and the polecats that leads to an even better experience than Claude Code alone. 1. https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/ https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bormaj 6mo agoAs someone who hasn't yet jumped into working with multiple agents simultaneously, where does a tool like gastown help you the most?
- jaggederest 6mo agoI'm trialing it on very silly things, like a economic simulator game in Rust/Bevy. I put in an entire road map document with inline specs and goals, wild milestones, with tasks like "working bid/ask spread when factories buy or sell on the market to make pricing dynamic and realistic", "political entities can set work conditions", "international trade has pricing dynamics that take into account currency interchange and tariff rates", "infrastructure for trade improves as trade volumes increase across given tiles". Out the other end over about 3-4 five-hour-sessions comes about 85% functional code for every single listed thing. I'd guess you'd be looking at a team for months, give or take, without the automation. Total cost was around $50 in VM time (not counting claude since I would be subscribed anyway) I'm not letting that thing anywhere near a computer I care about and rust compiles are resource intensive, so I paid for a nice VM that I could smash the abort button on if it started looking at me funny. So I liken it to buying an enormous bulldozer. If you're a skilled operator you can move mountains, but there'll still be a lot of manual work and planning involved. It's very clearly directionally where the industry will go once the models are improved and the harnesses and orchestration are more mature than "30% of the development effort is fixing the harness and orchestration itself", plus an additional "20% of your personal time will be knocking two robots heads together and getting them to actually do work" Edit: some more details of other knock on work - I asked for a complexity metadata field to automatically dispatch work to cheaper/faster models, set up harnesses to make opencode and codex work similarly to how claude works, troubleshot some bugs in the underlying gastown system. Gastown fork is public if you'd like to have a look.
- armanj 6mo ago> This project is early and experimental. Core concepts are settled, but expect rough edges. Local mode: relatively stable - Hub-based workflows: ~80% verified - Kubernetes runtime: early with known rough edges i guess gastown is a better choice for now? idk i don't feel good about "relatively stable"
- carverauto 6mo agoimagine thinking gas town is a better choice over _literally anything else_
- kvanbeek 6mo agoThis seems to be in the direction of Gas Town but missing some of the core features. Having formulas has been game changing.
- ptone 6mo ago[primary author and architect of scion here] The missing features are mostly by design - this is closer to what the gastown plans as "gascity" - bring your own orchestration characters and definition. If you look at this orchestration example https://github.com/ptone/scion-athenaeum https://github.com/ptone/scion-athenaeum its just markdown - Scion is the game engine (a port of gastown to run on scion is in progress)
- kvanbeek 6mo agoI'm glad to see other projects like this. I did switch over to using Gascity, but it does still seem to have quite a few troubles. Does scion have a beads like concept using formulas for work?
- Sattyamjjain 6mo ago[flagged]
- ninjahawk1 6mo ago[dead]
- meidad_g 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- infiniteregrets 6mo agothis is very cool! i recently hacked on something similar https://github.com/s2-streamstore/parallax https://github.com/s2-streamstore/parallax and also wrote about it https://s2.dev/blog/distributed-ai-agents https://s2.dev/blog/distributed-ai-agents
- minutesmith 6mo ago[flagged]
- jawiggins 6mo agoReally interesting to see Google's approach to this. Recently I shared my approach, Optio, which is also an Agent Orchestration platform: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520220 I was much more focused on integrating with ticketing systems (Notion, Github Issues, Jira, Linear), and then having coding agents specifically work towards merging a PR. Scion's support for long running agents and inter-container communication looks really interesting though. I think I'll have to go plan some features around that. Some of their concepts, make less sense to me, I chose to build on top of k8s whereas they seem to be trying to make something that recreates the control plane. Somewhat skeptical that the recreation and grove/hub are needed, but maybe they'll make more sense once I see them in action the first time.
- jFriedensreich 6mo agoDisapointing google of all places uses git worktrees instead of jj workspaces.
- verdverm 6mo agojj will not achieve meaningful adoption until git interop is improved and there is a big enough win to change a core work tool. Lack of git-lfs is a blocker where I work and asking all the devs to change their git habits for a shop that doesn't use rebase (as I understand the main issue jj aims to make better)... the ROI just doesn't appear to be there.
- pjmlp 6mo agoIs anyone that matters actually using jj?
- jFriedensreich 6mo agoAnyone at the frontier is switching to jj. Btw your question is kind of offensive, as if there is a universal truth "who matters" and everyone else can be dismissed. Companies do not matter for sure, if that was your premise.
- BlueRock-Jake 6mo agoIsolation over constraints sounds like the right philosophy. Containers give you a boundary but not vis into what ran inside them. Curious how much execution context Scion surfaces, w/o that you're still in a position similar to the LiteLLM attack where something can run and cause damage before you know it happened.
- ptone 6mo ago[primary author and architect of scion here] There are several layers of state and telemetry - first is provided by the hook system available in most harnesses, then for those that provide OpenTelemetry -that is normalized and forwarded raw (preserving both) to a cloud collector. Finally - some activities are "self reported" by agents using a built-in toolset that can be reflected in the control plane
- BlueRock-Jake 6mo ago[dead]
- studio-m-dev 6mo ago[flagged]
- bambushu 6mo ago[flagged]
- ptone 6mo ago[primary author and architect of scion here] The reason this is a testbed is because this is a new and emerging area of replacing things like codified graphs in tools like langraph with pure agent instruction where agents manage agents with a lot more autonomy. These patterns are not well explored, and are not ready for production in most cases. The goal of a testbed is to have an easy and quick way to try out N of these patterns.
- mahadillah-ai 6mo agoAgent orchestration is one side of the problem. The other side is: where does the data go? When agents process EU user data (names, emails, IBANs) and route it to US model providers, that's a GDPR violation. I open sourced a routing layer that detects PII in prompts and forces EU-only inference when personal data is found: https://github.com/mahadillahm4di-cyber/mh-gdpr-ai.eu
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bitwize 6mo agoMy brain keeps wanting to pronounce it Tomb Raider style, like /ˈskiː ɒn/.
- jhavera 6mo agoThe "isolation over constraints" framing is interesting. Scion enforces safety at the infrastructure layer, letting agents operate freely inside containers while controlling what they can reach on the outside. That is a runtime approach. We have been exploring a different layer for the same problem. ARIA (aria-ir.org) is an intermediate representation designed for AI-authored code. Instead of constraining the agent at runtime, it constrains what the agent produces at the representation level. Functions must declare effects, intent annotations are mandatory and verifiable, and the compiler enforces memory safety at compile time before anything executes. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Scion handles what the agent can reach. ARIA handles what the agent generates. A system that uses both would have safety at the output layer and safety at the execution layer. Curious whether the Scion team has thought about what properties the code an agent produces should have, independent of how that agent is isolated.
- zavec 6mo agoThis looks really promising, I am curious about the choice to use containers as the isolation layer though. If the goal is to treat agents as untrusted and isolate them fully I feel like microVMs would be a better option. If it supports OCI runtimes though then maybe kata containers can be plugged in, I'll have to dig in after work and see.
- jeremie_strand 6mo ago[dead]
- harlequinetcie 6mo agoOh Google, I love you guys, but it seems they alway launch these half baked things without the support they deserve behind it. ADK was (and is) exceptional, but nobody is actually making noise and pushing for it as they should. It feels like Microsoft .net back in the day. Let's see how it goes. I'm rooting for y'all
- pjmlp 6mo agoLook, a Google project that is actually using Go, although compiling everything from source all the time isn't really appealing.
- yencabulator 6mo agoThat is a lot of vibecoded slop with unclear purpose.
- chirdeeps 6mo agoThe failure mode most underrepresented in agent testbeds is cascading failure, what happens when individually correct agents interact in ways that produce collectively incorrect outcomes. Most testing focuses on individual agent behaviour. Does the testbed have a model for multi-agent state conflicts, can you simulate two agents concurrently modifying the same resource and observe the resolution behaviour?
- an_eng_44 5mo agoThe documentation mentions OAuth configuration, but doesn't list Claude Code as a harness that supports this. Just to confirm my understanding, does this mean that the only authentication and therefore billing method for Claude is API key, which means you get billed at the API rate, not toward your subscription usage?