Running AI Agent Swarms on Kubernetes

Fazm Team··2 min read

Running AI Agent Swarms on Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the obvious choice for running multiple AI agents at scale. But obvious does not mean easy. GKE has defaults that will break your agent setup in ways that are hard to debug.

The Websocket Problem

Most AI agents communicate over long-lived websocket connections. GKE's default ingress controller has a 30-second timeout for idle connections. Your agent connects, starts a task, goes quiet for 40 seconds while thinking, and the connection drops.

The fix is setting spec.template.metadata.annotations on your backend service config:

cloud.google.com/backend-config: '{"default": "agent-backend"}'

Then in your BackendConfig, set timeoutSec to something reasonable - 3600 for hour-long agent sessions. Without this, you will spend days debugging intermittent connection failures.

Scaling Agent Swarms

Running a single agent on Kubernetes is straightforward. Running 50 agents that share context and coordinate tasks is where things get interesting.

The pattern that works: one coordinator pod manages task distribution, individual agent pods pull tasks from a shared queue (Redis or NATS), and results flow back through a shared state store. Do not try to have agents talk directly to each other through the cluster network - the complexity explodes.

State Management

Agents need memory. Kubernetes pods are ephemeral. These two facts fight each other constantly. Use persistent volume claims for agent memory stores, and design your agents to checkpoint their state frequently. When a pod gets rescheduled - and it will - the agent should resume from its last checkpoint rather than starting over.

When Local Beats Cloud

For personal productivity agents, Kubernetes is overkill. A single agent running natively on your Mac has lower latency, full system access, and zero infrastructure costs. Cloud orchestration makes sense for multi-agent pipelines serving teams. For individual use, local wins.

Fazm is an open source macOS AI agent. Open source on GitHub.

More on This Topic

Related Posts