The world is buzzing about Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically, AI Agents. It’s not just hype. We’re witnessing the dawn of a new industrial age. An age of agentic computing.
Much of this excitement stems from their profound potential to revolutionize how we interact with technology, moving from direct command to collaborative dialogue, and to automate complex, multi-faceted tasks that go far beyond simple scripts. The allure of agents that can learn, reason, and act with greater autonomy is driving this interest. However, harnessing this sophisticated potential isn’t straightforward and demands more than just clever algorithms; it requires a robust and novel approach to the underlying systems that support them. At VAST, we’re investing in that future today by focusing on these critical underpinnings.
AI Agents aren’t your traditional cloud-native programs. The vanguards of this new era come with a unique set of infrastructure demands that current systems are ill-equipped to handle. Today, teams striving to build sophisticated AI agents find themselves at a crossroads, facing a significant chasm between the requirements for prototyping an agent and the necessities for running it reliably and efficiently at scale in a production environment.
At VAST Data, we are bridging that critical gap. The VAST AI Operating System has already been providing the data platform services that deliver the foundational elements essential for intelligent systems: high-performance I/O, multi-protocol data access, and a global namespace. Unlike traditional REST-based services, AI agents typically search for data via a semantic understanding stored in vectors, rather than sequentially reading a filesystem by file or object names. That’s why the VAST DataBase was built to support large-scale workloads with trillions of embedded vectors, accessible in real-time.
Now, we are thrilled to introduce the pivotal addition that completes this vision: the VAST AgentEngine.
AgentEngine is the AI agent deployment and orchestration system, running natively within the VAST DataEngine. It delivers the crucial orchestration, tooling, runtime environment, and observability needed to build, deploy, and manage AI agents at any scale. Consider AgentEngine the application management layer of the VAST AI Operating System, designed specifically for the Agentic AI Era. This is the final piece of the puzzle, rounding out the core services needed to run agentic applications comprehensively on AI hardware.
AgentEngine is built upon four robust pillars, each engineered to address the unique challenges and unlock the immense opportunities presented by AI agents:
1. A Dedicated Deployment & Runtime Platform for Agents
AgentEngine provides the essential operational framework to instantiate agents. This is more involved than typical application deployment. It often encompasses spinning up containers like usual, but then also includes loading models into GPU memory and verifying the array of accompanying tools that an agent requires to function effectively.
While core production necessities such as HTTP access (complete with firewall, DNS, and load balancing), autoscaling, lifecycle managing, robust identity management, and runtime isolation are all integral components, AgentEngine introduces critical AI-native capabilities. These include ensuring agent resiliency and high availability through checkpointing for long-running tasks. When agents are designed to operate for hours or even days, the prospect of restarting from scratch after an unexpected failure is simply untenable. AgentEngine addresses this head-on by allowing agents to checkpoint their memory and reasoning state. This enables seamless recovery and continuity, ensuring that progress isn’t lost and operations can resume without regression.
2. The Studio: Your Hub for Building, Connecting, and Governing Agents
At the heart of AgentEngine lies the Studio, an intuitive environment where developers can meticulously define how their agents interact with a universe of tools and data. Within this integrated workspace:
Agents are connected to their necessary tools and diverse data sources.
Functions can be readily transformed into ModelContextProtocol (MCP) tools, a new standard for model-tool or agent-tool interaction.
Critical parameters such as identity, access rules, audit logging levels, and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements are configured with clarity and precision.
The Studio is designed to abstract away the underlying infrastructure complexities, empowering developers to focus on agent logic and behavior while maintaining complete observability and granular control. It also forges the vital relationships that power the third pillar: the Toolbox.
3. The Toolbox: A Curated Registry of Intelligent Tools
The Toolbox serves as a central repository for reusable, production-ready tools that are vital for agent operation. These tools expose their functions through MCP, a widely adopted standard protocol engineered specifically to allow models to access capabilities with inherent semantic awareness and contextual understanding.
VAST provides a comprehensive suite of curated tools designed for all Data Platform operations. These range from simple object reads to complex data transformations, such as document chunking for sophisticated RAG pipelines. Furthermore, organizations possess the flexibility to extend the Toolbox with their own custom tools, including connectors to external systems or bespoke internal workflows. Tools can be shared across multiple agents or kept private as needed. Once registered, these tools are meticulously monitored, versioned, and made easily discoverable through the Studio, fostering an ecosystem of shared capabilities and accelerated development.
4. Unprecedented Observability: Tracking Agent Actions and Reasoning Action Paths
AgentEngine offers developers and operators a new dimension of visibility – one that extends beyond mere system performance metrics to encompass the intricate reasoning behavior of the agents themselves. Agents require the supporting infrastructure and environment to log:
Detailed access and identity logs.
Comprehensive tool usage metrics.
A complete history of prompts and responses.
In-depth chain-of-thought tracing.
This level of transparency is paramount in environments where AI-driven decisions demand explainability – whether for ensuring compliance, streamlining debugging processes, or building and maintaining user trust. The logs provide a clear audit trail, showing precisely which data was accessed, the identity that performed the operation, and the specific reasoning path the agent followed to arrive at its conclusions.
AgentEngine provides the environment and tools to record and retrieve this information as easy as doing a stack trace is today in traditional program debugging.
Also unique to AI agents in comparison to traditional cloud native microservices, is the concept of Feedback Loops. In a production setting, it’s crucial for agents to continuously learn and improve based on user signals – whether explicit, like thumbs-up/down ratings and prompt selections, or implicit reward cues. In complex agentic workflows, supervising agents can generate this feedback or relay feedback from the end user back up the chain of models. AgentEngine is engineered to capture this invaluable feedback, making it immediately available for dynamic memory updates and for future model tuning and refinement. So with no further adieu, let's see the agent engine in action:
Powering the Real-World Application of AI
AgentEngine is a cornerstone component in VAST’s vision for an Operating System tailored for the AI era. It provides the comprehensive suite of capabilities necessary to transform agentic prototypes from experimental concepts into scalable, observable, recoverable, and continuously improving applications - fully prepared to tackle real-world challenges and unlock new frontiers of innovation.
And we’re not stopping there. To accelerate the shift to agentic computing, we’ll be releasing one open-source example Agent every month for the next 12 months. These agents will span video editing, sales strategy, scientific research, data engineering, financial analysis, and more, helping you build the future.
The VAST AgentEngine will be available in the second half of 2025.
With AgentEngine, the future of AI applications is not just imaginable, it’s buildable.
To learn more, join a live demo or join your fellow AI practitioners in the Cosmos Community.
