Understanding Agent Runner

Learn the basics of Agent Runner, including core concepts and essential terminology

Overview

Agent Runner is an automation solution that allows you to develop agentic workflows. It allows you to automate activities with large language models (LLMs), content resources, or external systems. You can develop custom logic to fit your business processes or organizational requirements.

Using Agent Runner takes your workflows to the next level with our suite of AI tools, such as Vertesia Studio and Vetesia Zeno, to interact with LLMs and your content. It lets you run workflows when other events happen in your content repository. You can develop workflows in Typescript with our Agent Runner SDK. Then, you can package the agent into a Docker image to run it on your desktop or our cloud infrastructure.

Architecture Overview

Components

An agent is built on top of Temporal Workflows. It consists of a runner, a workflow bundle, and other cloud-native resources.

Agent Runner

Agent Runner is your agent's runtime, written in Typescript. It is a node.js application responsible for communicating with the workflow engine and handling custom activities and workflows. Each agent contains a workflow bundle, a list of activities, and a specific domain representing its functions. Agent runners are deployed in Kubernetes in our cloud infrastructure.

Workflow Bundle

A workflow bundle is a self-contained file for your workflows and the underlying dependencies. The execution is run inside a V8 JavaScript Engine. This is an agentic system, which can be implemented as workflows or agents. In other words, you can decide whether the logic should be orchestrated through predefined code paths or let the LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage.

Temporal Server

Temporal is a durable execution platform that enables developers to build scalable applications without sacrificing productivity or reliability. The Temporal server executes units of application logic called Workflows in a resilient manner that automatically handles intermittent failures and retries failed operations.