[HN Gopher] Show HN: Orloj - agent infrastructure as code (YAML ...
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Show HN: Orloj - agent infrastructure as code (YAML and GitOps)
Hey HN, we're Jon and Kristiane, and we're building Orloj
(https://orloj.dev), an open-source orchestration runtime for
multi-agent AI systems. You define agents, tools, policies, and
workflows in declarative YAML manifests, and Orloj handles
scheduling, execution, governance, and reliability. Over the past
year we tried to use many different platforms/frameworks to build
out agent systems and while building we hit some sort of problem
with all of them, so we decided to have a go at it. Jon has worked
with kubernettes and terraform for years and always liked the
declarative nature so took patterns and concepts from both to build
out Orloj. Orloj treats agents the way infrastructure-as-code
treats cloud resources. You write a manifest that declares an
agent's model, tools, permissions, and execution limits. You
compose agents into directed graphs (pipelines, hierarchies, or
swarm loops). Governance has been overlooked so we made resource
policies (AgentPolicy, AgentRole, and ToolPermission) that are
evaluated inline during execution, before every agent turn and tool
call. Instead of prompt instructions that the model might ignore,
these policies are a runtime gate. Unauthorized actions fail closed
with structured errors and full audit trails. You can set token
budgets per run, whitelist models, block specific tools, and scope
policies to individual agent systems. For reliability, we built
lease-based task ownership (so crashed workers don't leave orphan
tasks), which allows you to run workers on different machines with
whatever compute that's needed. It helps when we need a GPU for
certain tasks (like we did). The scheduler also supports cron
triggers and webhook-driven task creation. The architecture is a
server/worker split like kubernettes. orlojd hosts the API,
resource store (in-memory for dev, Postgres for production), and
task scheduler. orlojworker instances claim and execute tasks,
route model requests through a gateway (OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama,
etc.), and run tools in configurable isolation (direct, sandboxed,
container, or WASM). We work with a lot of MCP servers so wanted
to make MCP integration as easy as possible. You register an MCP
server (stdio or HTTP), Orloj auto-discovers its tools, and they
become first-class resources with governance applied. So you can
connect something like the GitHub MCP server and still have policy
enforcement over what agents are allowed to do with it. It comes
shipped with a built in UI to manage all your workflows and
topology to see everything working in real time. There are a few
examples and starter templates in the repo to start playing around
with to get a feel for what's possible. More info in the docs:
https://docs.orloj.dev We're a small team and this is v0.1.0, so
there's a lot still on the roadmap, but the full runtime is open
source today and we'd love feedback on what we've built so far.
What would you use this for? What's missing?
Author : An0n_Jon
Score : 18 points
Date : 2026-03-26 05:07 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Orloj, btw, is Czech for "Astronomical Clock".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_astronomical_clock
|
| And it comes from mutated Latin word "Horologium".
| An0n_Jon wrote:
| Yes! We visited The Prague Orloj 2 years ago and it's amazing
| engineering. That's why we named it after it, for how it's
| coordinating and orchestrating so many complex mechanisms. (for
| anyone wondering it's pronounced Or-Loy)
| hackyhacky wrote:
| You should check out the Olomouc orloj [1]. Equally
| technically interesting as the Prague one, but with the added
| "benefit" of having been adjusted for political correctness
| under the Communist regime.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olomouc_astronomical_clock
| An0n_Jon wrote:
| Didn't realize the Czechs had so many...The story about the
| clockmaker on the Prague one was interesting. The king
| trying to blind him so he could never make another for
| anyone else...
| graphememes wrote:
| Feels like I would be taking on a lot of debt and maintainability
| I may not need
| An0n_Jon wrote:
| It depends on what you're trying to build to be honest. For
| simple tasks Orloj can be a little overkill but it really
| starts shining when you are trying to setup large task flows
| that need many agents/tools/policies. Working with
| Terraform/Kubernettes for years gave a lot of the inspiration
| for the gitops side of things which we think fits naturally
| with how agent systems work.
| ColinEberhardt wrote:
| Looks interesting. Quick question - one of the biggest challenges
| with agentic systems in non-deterministic behaviour. Does this
| framework do anything to address this? Does it help test and
| validate agent behaviour?
| An0n_Jon wrote:
| This is where the governance layer of Orloj fits in. You create
| policies and attach them to agents/tools which are all governed
| at runtime. These policies could be token guardrails, tool
| authority, etc. You can then check all of the traces of a task
| to have an audit trail for debugging (cli or UI). There are
| also human in the loop approval features that can be applied to
| make sure things are working correctly before proceeding on
| tasks.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| Nice design and license, probably some good idea in there
| somewhere! My main beef with all these projects is the monolith
| ambition. Every single one of these uncountable projects is
| trying to solve everything and feels like buying into Kubernetes.
| Even if open source, thats just too much and too heavy. Postgres,
| nats, workflow engine what the hell are you building here? Half
| of this will be obsolete when the next agent architectures come
| out and then? Solve a few core problems properly and in a modular
| way dont model agent systems after k8s.
| An0n_Jon wrote:
| Definitely understand the perspective. I think with all
| software in general there will be a time where you need to
| adapt to changing technologies/architectures which is why we
| open sourced the core so we can have contributors build off it.
| And k8s is loved/hated but it does solve a lot of problems
| depending on the circumstance.
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