It's an agent development platform. It needs MicroShift, which is notoriously not easy to run locally -- ADK makes it simple by using a prebuilt Lima VM for CLI deploy, but that doesn't work well in development.
Noice! Agent deployment infra is exactly the layer that's missing right now. Everyone's building agents but nobody's solving the "get it into production reliably" problem.
The MCP connector support is interesting to me, I'm working on an MCP server that handles payment injection for agents (card number never enters LLM context, injected via CDP at the browser layer). Biggest pain point is testing against real deployment setups vs my janky local Chrome + CDP dev loop.
Curious: when you add an MCP server to an ADK agent, does the agent discover tools at startup or can you reconfigure at runtime? Thinking about cases where you'd want to swap a mock payment tool for a live one during staging → prod promotion.
Going to try ADK this week — been needing something exactly like this for integration testing.
To complicate it further, ADK is quite "early" in development, but it's a fusion-fork of two more mature projects: Red Hat's Kagenti, and Linux Foundation's (orig. IBM) Agent Stack (https://github.com/i-am-bee/agentstack/). ADK is basically Agent Stack but with the custom backend replaced by Kagenti.
Regarding MCP: the current idea is dependency injection using A2A extensions: agent says what it wants (LLM endpoint, MCP server, vector database, etc.) and the caller provides. Works great for direct communication, gets weird with subagents -- we may iterate on it a bit more.
