Agents don't need better prompts. They need shared situational awareness.
Sympozium is a coordination layer for multi-agent AI systems on Kubernetes —
selective permeability, structured handoffs, and shared memory.
Every agent is a Pod. Every policy is a CRD. Every execution is a Job.
From the creator of k8sgpt and llmfit
This project is under active development. API's will change, things will break. Be brave.
Full documentation: deploy.sympozium.ai/docs
The problem this solves: The Sticky-Note Problem — why message-passing between agents breaks down, and what to build instead.
Most multi-agent systems communicate through messages — strings of tokens that one agent serialises and another deserialises. A detection agent spots a threat while a containment agent takes the server offline for maintenance. Neither knows what the other is doing. The breach is missed.
This is the sticky-note problem: agents passing notes instead of sharing a situational board. Kubernetes solved this for containers with a shared control plane. Agents need the same thing — not better message-passing, but shared coordination infrastructure.
Sympozium provides that infrastructure: a synthetic membrane that wraps agent teams with selective permeability, shared memory, structured handoffs, and circuit breakers — all expressed as Kubernetes-native CRDs.
Homebrew:
brew tap sympozium-ai/sympozium
brew install sympoziumShell installer:
curl -fsSL https://deploy.sympozium.ai/install.sh | shThen deploy to your cluster and activate your first agents:
sympozium install # deploys CRDs, controllers, and built-in Ensembles
sympozium # launch the TUI — go to Personas tab, press Enter to onboard
sympozium serve # open the web dashboard (port-forwards to the in-cluster UI)Prerequisites: cert-manager (for webhook TLS):
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.17.1/cert-manager.yamlSympozium can be installed as two charts: sympozium-crds (the CRDs, so they can be upgraded) and sympozium (the control plane). Install the CRDs first, then the control plane:
helm repo add sympozium https://deploy.sympozium.ai/charts
helm repo update
helm upgrade --install sympozium-crds sympozium/sympozium-crds \
--namespace sympozium-system --create-namespace
helm upgrade --install sympozium sympozium/sympozium \
--namespace sympozium-system \
--skip-crds --set createNamespace=false
--skip-crdson the second command assumes you installedsympozium-crdsfirst. If you skip the CRDs chart, drop--skip-crdsso the bundled CRDs in thesympoziumchart are applied instead.
See charts/sympozium/values.yaml for configuration options, or the Helm Chart docs for the full guide.
Containers needed orchestration. Agents need coordination.
Sympozium is a Kubernetes-native coordination layer for multi-agent AI systems. It solves the same problem Kubernetes solved for containers — but for agents that need to share context, hand off tasks, and maintain shared situational awareness.
| Synthetic Membrane | Selective permeability for agent teams — control what agents share via trust groups, visibility tags, and field-level gating. Read the paper |
| Agent Workflows | Delegation, sequential pipelines, supervision, and stimulus triggers between personas — visualised on an interactive canvas |
| Shared Workflow Memory | Pack-level SQLite memory pool for cross-persona knowledge sharing with per-persona access control and time decay |
| Ensembles | Helm-like bundles for AI agent teams — activate a pack and the controller stamps out instances, schedules, and memory |
| Local Model Inference | Declare GGUF models as CRDs — weights are downloaded, llama-server deployed, and OpenAI-compatible endpoints exposed. No API keys required |
| Skill Sidecars | Every skill runs in its own sidecar with ephemeral least-privilege RBAC, garbage-collected on completion |
| Multi-Channel | Telegram, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp — each channel is a dedicated Deployment backed by NATS JetStream |
| Persistent Memory | SQLite + FTS5 on a PersistentVolume — memories survive across ephemeral pod runs |
| Scheduled Tasks | Cron-based recurring agent runs for periodic workflows, data syncs, and automated checks |
| Agent Sandbox | Kernel-level isolation via kubernetes-sigs/agent-sandbox — gVisor or Kata with warm pools for instant starts |
| MCP Servers | External tool providers via Model Context Protocol with auto-discovery and allow/deny filtering |
| TUI & Web UI | Terminal and browser dashboards with live workflow canvas, or skip the UI entirely with Helm and kubectl |
| Any AI Provider | OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Ollama, or any compatible endpoint — no vendor lock-in |
make test # run tests
make test-system # run envtest system tests (no cluster needed)
make lint # run linter
make manifests # generate CRD manifests
make run # run controller locally (needs kubeconfig)Apache License 2.0