Google Opensources Agent Development Kit: Build Powerful Multi-Agent System

calendar Apr 10, 2025 · 2 min read · release google adk featured  ·
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At Google Cloud NEXT 2025, Google introduced the Agent Development Kit (ADK), a new open-source framework designed to simplify the complex process of building, evaluating, and deploying AI agents and multi-agent systems. ADK originates from the same framework powering agent applications within Google products like Agentspace.

By open-sourcing ADK, Google aims to provide developers with robust tools to create production-ready agentic applications in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Simplifying Multi-Agent Development

ADK offers comprehensive capabilities across the entire agent development lifecycle, focusing on flexibility and control:

  • Multi-Agent Design & Orchestration: Easily build modular applications by composing specialized agents in hierarchies. Supports delegation, predefined workflows (sequential, parallel, loop), and LLM-driven dynamic routing.
  • Broad Model & Tool Support: Choose your preferred model (Gemini, Vertex AI Model Garden models) or integrate via LiteLLM to access models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, and more. Equip agents with pre-built tools (Search, Code Exec), Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, third-party libraries (LangChain, LlamaIndex), or even use other agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI) as tools.
  • Rich Interaction: Features built-in bidirectional audio and video streaming capabilities, enabling more natural, human-like conversations beyond text.
  • Full Lifecycle Support: Includes an integrated developer experience with a CLI and visual Web UI for local development, testing, and debugging. Provides built-in evaluation tools to assess agent performance systematically. Offers streamlined deployment via containerization or integration with Vertex AI Agent Engine.

Flexibility and Integration

ADK emphasizes a Pythonic approach to defining agent logic. It allows interaction via CLI, Web UI, API Server, or directly through its Python API. The framework is positioned as being optimized for complex, collaborative agent systems, distinguishing it from Google's other GenAI tool, Genkit, which focuses on more fundamental building blocks for a broader range of AI experiences.

Availability

The Agent Development Kit (ADK) is available as an open-source framework, empowering developers globally to build sophisticated, production-ready multi-agent applications with greater ease and control.

Explore the framework in the ADK Documentation.