Scion Documentation#
Summary#
Scion is an experimental multi-agent orchestration testbed by google-cloud-platform, designed to manage concurrent LLM-based agents running in containers across local machines and remote kubernetes clusters. It acts as a “hypervisor for agents” — not a full multi-agent framework, but an infrastructure layer for running, isolating, and managing agent processes.
Key Takeaways#
- Manager-Worker architecture: A host-side CLI (
scion) orchestrates agent containers. Each agent runs an LLM + harness loop in isolation. - Harness-agnostic: Supports gemini-cli, claude-code, opencode, and codex through a common adapter interface. New harnesses can be added via a plugin-system.
- Two operating modes: Solo mode (local Docker/Podman, zero-config) and Hosted mode (centralized hub dispatching to runtime-brokers).
- Strict isolation: Each agent gets its own filesystem, credentials, environment variables, and git workspace. Shadow mounts (tmpfs) prevent cross-agent access.
- Git-native workspaces: Local mode uses git worktrees; hosted mode uses git init + fetch. Each agent works on its own branch.
- templates as blueprints: Agents are created from templates that define system prompts, tools, images, and configuration. Templates support inheritance.
- agent-state-model: Three-dimensional state tracking — Phase (lifecycle), Activity (cognitive state), Detail (freeform context).
- Philosophy: Favors isolation over constraints, interaction over autonomy, diversity of models/harnesses, and action over planning. Runs agents in
--yolomode with infrastructure-level guardrails.
Scope#
The documentation covers: architecture, core concepts, all four supported harnesses, configuration system, Hub/Broker distributed architecture, workspace strategies, security model, plugin system, and the Go package structure.