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Overview

The Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) is designed with production-grade environments in mind, prioritizing security, scalability, and observability to ensure reliable performance at scale. It leverages the simplicity and robustness of HTTP standards for seamless integration with your existing tools and infrastructure.

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Core values

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Security

ACP aligns with modern security practices through familiar, HTTP-native mechanisms:

  • Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption for secure, end-to-end communication
  • Support for common authentication methods such as Basic Auth, Bearer tokens, and JWTs
  • Reverse proxy integration to enforce access controls and security policies

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Scalability

ACP is a stateless protocol by design, just like HTTP. It supports session management, enabling developers to easily implement stateful agents when required.

This flexibility ensures ACP is highly scalable and reliable in high-demand environments:

  • Deploy behind standard HTTP load balancers; route requests for stateful agents based on session
  • Fully compatible with Kubernetes and other orchestration platforms
  • Seamlessly integrates with cloud-native infrastructure

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Observability

Built around the HTTP request-response model, ACP is inherently easy to monitor using any standard HTTP monitoring tools, allowing you to:

  • Track system health with standard metrics
  • Monitor performance across agent interactions
  • Quickly diagnose issues at scale
  • Implement detailed audit logging

As an HTTP-based protocol, ACP integrates with existing OpenTelemetry instrumentation, enabling request/response tracing and context propagation across networks. This makes it easy to monitor agent workflows across distributed systems.

Dive deeper into tracing and diagnostics with the ACP Debug Guide — your go-to resource for setting up instrumentation and making the most of your telemetry data.

The ACP SDK enhances observability with improved traces and default exporters for all telemetry signals, ensuring seamless integration with OpenTelemetry-driven standards such as OpenInference and OpenLLMetry.

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Identity Federation

ACP is developing support for User and Client Identity Federation to enable smooth integration with your existing identity management infrastructure. This feature will allow agents to:

  • Authenticate users across multiple identity providers
  • Maintain consistent authorization between systems
  • Simplify organization-wide access control
  • Enhance security management

This functionality is under active development. We welcome your input to help shape the future of identity federation in ACP.

Visit our Contribute page to join the discussion.