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Posted by timbilt 6 hours ago

Google open-sources experimental agent orchestration testbed Scion(www.infoq.com)
https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/scion/overview/
99 points | 30 comments
hackerman70000 3 hours ago|
Six months from now half of these abstractions will have been renamed or removed once real users push back on the cognitive overhead. Google has a pattern of releasing infrastructure that's perfectly shaped for Googles problems and awkward for everyone else's
stego-tech 21 minutes ago||
It's super neat! Just like Kubernetes is also super neat at what it can do. It's super neat primarily because consuming it is so easy, provided you already have all the same abstraction layers in place in your infra.

You...do have all the same abstraction layers, right? No? Oh. Well, don't worry, Google/Amazon/Microsoft can sell you those if you don't want to pay your IT staff to prop it up for you.

---

Look, snark aside, yours is the correct take. Google's solutions are amazing, but they're also built for an organization as large and complex as Google. Time will tell if this is an industry-standard abstraction (a la S3 APIs) or just a Google product for Google-like orgs/functions (a la K8s).

repelsteeltje 2 hours ago|||
Like Kubernetes?
jjmarr 2 hours ago|||
I think most of the legacy companies that can benefit from Kubernetes don't use it, while most of the companies that are using it are startups doing it for the résumé.
dvfjsdhgfv 42 minutes ago|||
This is the exact opposite of my experience. Maybe it was true 10 years ago when K8s was new and trendy so many engineers wanted to try it out. Now it's just boring tech at large orgs.
permalac 33 minutes ago||
I'm proud to say I retired more k8s clusters than I created. And I've created 5 production ones, still in production.

One that I retired was used for serving ftp(among other transfer stuff), ftp of all things, it needs to have ports open and routed back from the client. And for extra points they had the pods capped at 1 cpu. And I had to explain the thing to the perpetrator and their boss, madness.

manojlds 1 hour ago|||
This is not 2015.
otabdeveloper4 2 hours ago||||
Yes, and unironically.
conception 2 hours ago||||
And angular.
sieabahlpark 1 hour ago||
[dead]
hhh 2 hours ago|||
kubernetes isnt difficult
hujun 1 hour ago|||
k8s is simple because it offload some key tasks to 3rd party like network and storage; it is not easy to: a) setup and maintain a k8s cluster with all necessary components from at least a dozen different sources b) design your application to be k8s native
stego-tech 26 minutes ago||
This. K8s is easy to consume, and a real PITA to actually setup and support from an IT perspective.

If someone wants production K8s, I'm steering them (and their budget) to a managed control plane from one of the major cloud providers. Trying to prop it up locally when it really hates having to work directly with bare metal does not spark joy.

Mond_ 2 hours ago|||
really?
scottyah 1 hour ago||
The same way linux isn't. It's easy to start, all the base modifications/configurations are fairly simple, and if you find yourself deep into custom ways of using it, it's open source and fairly well documented with a large community.
popalchemist 3 hours ago||
100%. Great assessment.
jawiggins 31 minutes ago||
Really interesting to see Google's approach to this. Recently I shared my approach, Optio, which is also an Agent Orchestration platform: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520220

I was much more focused on integrating with ticketing systems (Notion, Github Issues, Jira, Linear), and then having coding agents specifically work towards merging a PR. Scion's support for long running agents and inter-container communication looks really interesting though. I think I'll have to go plan some features around that. Some of their concepts, make less sense to me, I chose to build on top of k8s whereas they seem to be trying to make something that recreates the control plane. Somewhat skeptical that the recreation and grove/hub are needed, but maybe they'll make more sense once I see them in action the first time.

sowbug 2 hours ago||
I'm looking forward to trying this. I've had a positive but high-variance experience with Gastown[1], which is in the same genre. I hope that Scion does better.

My main complaints with Gastown are that (1) it's expensive, partly because (2) it refuses to use anything but Claude models, in spite of my configuration attempts, (3) I can't figure out how to back up or add a remote to its beads/dolt bug database, which makes me afraid to touch the installation, and (4) upgrading it often causes yak shaving and lost context. These might all be my own skill issues, but I do RTFM.

But wow, Gastown gets results. There's something magic about the dialogue and coordination between the mayor and the polecats that leads to an even better experience than Claude Code alone.

1. https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/

simple10 3 hours ago||
They kinda buried the code deep in their docs:

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/scion

infiniteregrets 1 hour ago||
this is very cool! i recently hacked on something similar https://github.com/s2-streamstore/parallax

and also wrote about it https://s2.dev/blog/distributed-ai-agents

kvanbeek 2 hours ago||
This seems to be in the direction of Gas Town but missing some of the core features. Having formulas has been game changing.
armanj 2 hours ago||
> This project is early and experimental. Core concepts are settled, but expect rough edges. Local mode: relatively stable - Hub-based workflows: ~80% verified - Kubernetes runtime: early with known rough edges

i guess gastown is a better choice for now? idk i don't feel good about "relatively stable"

jFriedensreich 22 minutes ago||
Disapointing google of all places uses git worktrees instead of jj workspaces.
aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago||
Reading this headline, I rather thought of a different SCION:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCION_(Internet_architecture)

tornikeo 2 hours ago|
I swore to not be burned by google ever again after TensorFlow. This looks cool, and I will give this to my Codex to chew on and explain if it fits (or could fit what I am building right now -- the msx.dev) and then move on. I don't trust Google with maintaining the tools I rely on.
forsalebypwner 2 hours ago|
nice plug
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