AX

Overview

AX is Google's open agentic orchestration runtime for running autonomous agent workloads in a cluster. It uses declarative Task, Workspace, Gateway, and Model primitives to sandbox tasks, prepare workspaces, manage network policies and model configuration, and scale execution on Agent Substrate.

Key Features

• Declarative Task, Workspace, Gateway, and Model primitives expressed as ax.io/v1alpha1 manifests and applied with one command
• Isolated task execution in a sandbox with CPU and memory limits; sandboxes are cheap to create, suspend, and throw away
• Workspace setup that can list Git repos, MCP servers, and skills or use a plain-English goal to prepare the environment before the task starts
• Gateway network policies that lock traffic down to an explicit allowlist of hosts and ports and inject credentials into incoming requests
• Centralized model configuration for models, model parameters, and secrets, including key rotation or model version pinning with one apply
• Scaling on Agent Substrate with lightweight actors, sub-second resumption, and dense multiplexing of tasks across worker resources

Use Cases

• Running interactive coding agents, long-running agent servers, Jupyter notebooks, headless browser testing, and custom tool runtimes
• Spinning up reproducible sandboxes for trajectory collection, reinforcement learning loops, and agent evaluation at scale
• Operating large fleets of isolated agent workloads per Kubernetes cluster with explicit network policies
• Using a single task per agent or composing as many tasks as an agent needs

Getting Started

• Install Agent Substrate in the Kubernetes cluster and verify its Control API service is reachable.
• Install the AX CLI with go install github.com/google/ax/cmd/ax@latest and ensure the Go bin directory is on PATH.
• Set AX_IMAGE_REPO to your registry, then run make images to build and push the ax-server and ax-task-runner images.
• Run make deploy to deploy the AX control plane.
• Apply an example task with ax apply -f examples/task.yaml, inspect it with ax get tasks, and use ax ssh, ax suspend, and ax resume for lifecycle operations.

Deployment & Requirements

• A Kubernetes cluster with Agent Substrate installed; Substrate must be running and expose its Control API at api.ate-system.svc.cluster.local:443 before AX is deployed.
• Go and kubectl.
• Podman or Docker authenticated to a container registry your cluster can pull from.

Before You Adopt

• License: Apache-2.0. Review its terms before using, modifying, or distributing the project.
• AX and several of its features are in heavy development, which is a maturity caution for adopters.