Hi everyone,
I’m thrilled to see the work done so far on integrating Agent SDKs like ADK or Langraph into Temporal, but one giant piece of the puzzle that I find missing is an A2A integration for Temporal.
It feels like a very obvious immediate next thing to have. Once a handful of agents have been developed, they ought to be able to communicate. It’s not sufficient - for the use cases the company I work for needs to deal with - to be constrained to an intra-Temporal communication.
Larger corporations have a need for inventory management and as such, agents, tools, LLMs, prompts etc. all need to go into an AI registry such as IBM Context Forge, TrueFroundry or other.
A standardized API/protocol is needed for discovery & inventory management of agents and a standardized communication protocol and communication patterns along with a data model is needed for agents to interact. The a2a (agent to agent protocol standard) addresses all of these needs.
Integrating in-process agent frameworks with a2a is a breeze, but I really want agents to execute WITHIN Temporal. This however makes an a2a integration non-trivial because the a2a communication patterns (sync, async, streaming, SSE, bi-directional comm. via webhook callbacks) cannot easily be hooked up to Temporal, because AI agents based on Temporal would execute inside of Temporal worker nodes which do not have a defined and steady network identity.
It seems that a proxy service of some kind is needed. From early solution architecting, it seems that one might either try to have an agent registry such as IBM Context Forge act as an a2a proxy and integrate Temporal agent calling directly, or one could work on a standalone deployment unit that acts as an a2a proxy, sitting “in front of” Temporal and translating a2a interactions into Termporal workflow calls. For that variant, one might take the a2a python SDK as a basis and hook it up to Temporal agents via a message queue service like NATS or possibly Temporal Workflow Streams.
I can and will go ahead and have an a2a temporal integration be developed inhouse at the company I work for, but meant to ask if there are already plans by the Temporal community to do the same and/or whether this is by any chance on the Temporal roadmap even.
Not sure whether this is the right channel for this, but the company I work for would also be interested in partnering with Temporal on the development of such an integration and I meant to ask whether there was any interest on your end to do so.
Maybe we can join forces and get this done extra fast and share the results back to the community. In my humble opinion, an a2a integration is the missing piece that would accelerate Temporal’s adoption for agentic usecases a LOT.
I attached an architectural draft which goes a bit beyond a mere a2a integration, but hoping that it paints a picture.. The a2a integration could be just a modular piece that might not even require a message broker. I don’t know enough about Nexus to know whether one might even be able to implement an a2a integration with Temporal even entirely “within” Temporal itself.
Curious to get feedback and get to know your thoughts.
Thanks!
