We are exploring AutoGen (Microsoft Agent Framework) to build a multi-agent system where agents reside on different servers. Does the new actor-based model in v0.4 support seamless message passing across distributed runtimes, or do we still need to build a custom API layer to facilitate the conversation between a Python-based researcher and a .NET-based analyst?
3 answers
The v0.4 update of AutoGen (Microsoft Agent Framework) specifically addresses this by moving to an asynchronous, event-driven actor model. This architecture allows agents to function as independent computational units that communicate via messages, regardless of their physical location. For a cross-platform setup involving Python and .NET, you can utilize the underlying communication protocol to pass messages between the environments without a heavy custom wrapper. This makes it significantly easier to scale enterprise-grade agentic workflows where different teams might be using different tech stacks but need their agents to collaborate in a single group chat or sequence.
Does the message serialization in this distributed setup handle complex Pydantic objects natively, or should we strictly stick to JSON strings for the agent handoffs?
You essentially just need to define the endpoint for each agent and the core runtime handles the delivery of the messages between the different actors.
Exactly, it abstracts away the networking logic so you can focus on the agent roles and the conversation flow rather than the infrastructure.
While the framework is getting better with serialization, sticking to JSON or base types for the actual message payload is safer for cross-language interoperability. You can still use Pydantic for internal validation within your Python nodes before the message is sent over the wire to the .NET side.