Vertex AI Agents
Most agent frameworks leave you holding the operational problems: where the agent runs, how sessions persist, who is allowed to call which tool. Vertex AI Agents is Google Cloud's answer to that — the managed layer in Vertex AI for building, deploying and running agents, pairing the open-source Agent Development Kit with a hosted runtime called Agent Engine.
What the platform provides
- The Agent Development Kit — a code-first Python and Java framework for defining an agent, its tools and its control flow, including delegation across several agents.
- Agent Engine — the managed runtime: deployment, scaling, session and memory persistence, and tracing, so the loop is not running on a server you maintain.
- Grounding and tools — Gemini models, Google Search grounding, Vertex AI Search over your own documents, and Model Context Protocol tool servers.
- Governance inherited from the cloud account: identity and access control, network perimeters, quotas, audit logging.
Why the managed shape matters
The choice here is the one AWS Bedrock Agents and Azure AI Foundry also present: give up some control over the loop in exchange for not building session storage, identity, scaling and observability yourself. That trade pays off when an agent has to reach governed enterprise data and survive an audit. It costs portability — the kit's code runs anywhere, but Agent Engine's session, memory and tracing surfaces are Google's, and an agent written against them does not lift cleanly onto another cloud.
Vertex AI Agents is Google Cloud's managed stack for building and running agents: the open-source Agent Development Kit defines the agent, its tools and its control flow in code, while the hosted Agent Engine runtime handles deployment, scaling, session and memory persistence, and tracing. It brings Gemini models, Google Search grounding and enterprise data sources inside the cloud account's identity and audit controls, trading portability for operational and governance coverage.
You can build a kitchen from scratch, or rent one that is already plumbed, wired and inspected. Vertex AI Agents is the rented kitchen for AI assistants that work on their own.
It is Google's service for building this kind of software and then actually running it. You describe what the assistant should do and which tools it may use; Google looks after the rest — keeping it running, remembering past conversations, and recording what it did. Companies like it because it plugs straight into the data and the security rules they already have in place. The trade-off is familiar from any rented space: quicker to move in, harder to move out.