Astra¶

Astra is an operating system for autonomous agents: a microkernel (actors, task graph, scheduler, messaging, state), sixteen microservices, sandboxed tools, layered memory, and LLM routing as infrastructure — not a single-model chat wrapper or a UI product.

Executive summary: Persistent agents submit goals; the planner materialises DAGs of tasks; the scheduler dispatches work via Redis Streams; workers run tasks inside sandboxes; Postgres is the source of truth and Redis/Memcached enforce the ≤10ms read path. Everything external talks through JWT; services talk over mTLS; dangerous work passes policy and approval gates.

flowchart LR
  U[Client] --> GW[API gateway]
  GW --> GS[goal-service]
  GS --> PL[planner]
  PL --> TS[task-service]
  TS --> SCH[scheduler]
  SCH --> R[(Redis)]
  R --> EW[execution-worker]
  EW --> TR[tool-runtime]

Goals¶

Non-goals¶

• Not building foundation models — Astra integrates providers.
• Not replacing every data platform — it composes Postgres, Redis, object storage, etc.
• Not embedding app logic in the kernel — strict kernel/SDK/app boundary (PRD §2).
• Not only a chat product — chat is one surface on the gateway; core is the task graph and actor runtime.

Who should read what¶

Reading order¶

1. This page → Glossary if terms are unfamiliar.
2. Architecture overview — layers and goal→task flow.
3. Services — all sixteen services.
4. Reference — contracts, schema, Redis, APIs.
5. Operations when you’re on call.

At a glance¶

Sections¶