Agent Development Kit (ADK) is a flexible and modular open-source framework for developing and deploying AI agents. While optimized for Gemini and the Google ecosystem, ADK is model-agnostic, deployment-agnostic, and is built for compatibility with other frameworks. ADK was designed to make agent development feel more like software development, to help developers create, deploy, and orchestrate agentic architectures.
We recommend deploying your ADK agent to Vertex AI Agent Engine Runtime, a fully managed Google Cloud service specifically designed for deploying, managing, and scaling AI agents built with frameworks such as ADK.
You can use the following resources to get started with ADK:
Quickstart with Vertex AI Agent Engine: This quickstart guides you through setting up your Google Cloud project and Vertex AI SDK for Python, developing your ADK agent, deploying the agent to Vertex AI Agent Engine Runtime, and testing the deployed agent.
ADK quickstart (open source documentation): This quickstart guides you through installing the Agent Development Kit (ADK), setting up a basic agent with multiple tools, and running the agent locally either in the terminal or in the interactive, browser-based dev UI.
Agent Starter Pack: a collection of production-ready generative AI agent templates built for Vertex AI Agent Engine.
What's next
Learn about Agents