While building AI agents locally using Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) is an excellent way to prototype, production-ready agents require a robust, scalable infrastructure. For developers looking to move beyond simple instances and into the world of managed container orchestration, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Autopilot offers the perfect balance of flexibility and ease of use.

In this hands-on, we will walk you through building a technical agent with ADK and deploying it to GKE Autopilot. We will focus on utilizing Gemini on Vertex AI as the core model and ensure highest security standards by implementing Workload Identity for permission management.