Overview of Agent Development Kit | Vertex AI Agent Builder | Google Cloud Documentation

Overview of Agent Development Kit  |  Vertex AI Agent Builder  |  Google Cloud Documentation

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Overview of Agent Development Kit

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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

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

Deploy to Agent Engine

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License , and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License . For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies . Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2026-04-17 UTC.

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