The industry's first open source agentic AI framework for Kubernetes provides a catalog of agents, enabling anyone to run, build, and share AI-driven cloud native solutions

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 17, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Solo.io, the leading cloud native application networking company, today announced the release of kagent, an open source framework that provides tools, AI agents, and resources to build and run agents to accelerate workflows in Kubernetes environments.

Kagent is a first-of-its-kind cloud native framework that helps DevOps and platform engineers build and run AI agents in Kubernetes. It provides a foundation for AI-driven solutions in cloud native environments, enabling teams to build powerful internal platforms by automating tasks such as configuration, troubleshooting, observability, and network security. It seamlessly integrates with existing cloud native tools through a flexible plugin architecture built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which provides a standard for agent-to-tool integration, enabling teams to run these tools at scale without needing to develop expertise in each area of the vast cloud native ecosystem. With kagent, teams can offload undifferentiated heavy lifting to agentic infrastructure and concentrate on higher-value tasks.

Agentic AI is powerful artificial intelligence tooling that uses advanced reasoning and iterative planning to solve complex, multi-step problems by turning insights into strategic actions.

"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 multicloud 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.”

Get the latest news
delivered to your inbox
Sign up for The Manila Times newsletters
By signing up with an email address, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

"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 consists of three layers required for implementing agentic architectures on cloud native infrastructure:

  • Tools - Pre-defined functions that AI agents can use, such as a curated expert knowledge base, availability and performance metrics for services, application deployment and lifecycle controls, platform administration and debugging utilities, and application security guardrails.
  • Agents - Autonomous systems capable of planning and executing tasks, analyzing results, and continuously improving outcomes utilizing one or more tools. Agents can be used to perform complex, multi-stage activities such as canary deployments for new versions of applications, establishing a zero trust security policy for all services in a cluster, and debugging service availability issues.
  • Declarative framework - A simple declarative API and controller for building and running agents via UI, CLI, and declarative configuration.

Kagent is built from the ground up with extensibility in mind, allowing DevOps engineers, platform teams, and developers to create and share their own tools and AI agents. The project is launching with tools for Argo, Helm, Istio, Kubernetes, Prometheus, and a cloud native expert knowledge base that can extend with any MCP-compatible tool server. The built-in tools and agents are based on Solo.io's expertise in platform engineering and the need to encode security, observability, and other features into cloud native platforms. The framework layer in kagent is built on Microsoft's AutoGen open source framework, providing a strong foundation and additional point of extensibility. As an open source project, kagent can be widely adopted within other projects in the cloud native ecosystem to allow everyone to run, build, and share AI-driven solutions.

Resources

About Solo.io

Solo.io is a trusted partner to hundreds of companies around the world, providing industry-leading cloud native API gateway, management, and service mesh. Solo.io provides solutions helping companies to secure, scale, and simplify their application networking. Companies use Solo.io to deliver modern applications faster, and across any cloud infrastructure. Solo.io is shaping the future of cloud native computing. To learn more and see the solutions in action, visit www.solo.io.

Media Contact

Kristi Piechnik

Speakeasy Strategies for Solo.io

SoloPR@speakeasystrategies.com