---
title: "Runtime Assembly and Deployment | Agent Barn"
canonical: "https://agentbarn.dev/guides/runtime-and-deployment"
pubDate: "2026-08-25T00:00:00.000Z"
updatedDate: "2026-08-29T16:41:32.000Z"
author: Agent Barn
description: "Trace Agent startup, runtime builders, Kubernetes resources, environment isolation, deployments, and monitoring."
tags: [Engineering guide, Runtime and platform engineers, Agent Barn]
categories: [Guides]
---

# Runtime Assembly and Deployment

Starting an Agent renders configuration, resolves credentials and Skills, creates a fresh Ingest identity, builds Kubernetes resources for Hermes or OpenClaw, and applies them before the Agent is marked running.

## Guide details

- Reference: GD-12
- Type: Engineering guide
- Audience: Runtime and platform engineers

## Startup assembly

Start loads the Agent and exact Template version, renders Markdown, decrypts credentials, selects runtime-specific builders, combines explicit and eligible built-in Skills, appends runtime policy, generates Ingest configuration, and builds `ConfigMap`, `Secret`, `PVC`, `Service`, and `Deployment` resources.

## Runtime-specific behavior

Hermes and OpenClaw receive equivalent concepts in different filesystem and configuration shapes. Platform support stays explicit and typed across models, services, builders, Secrets, onboarding, and tests. Kubernetes streaming and port-forwarding use a dedicated API client because those calls temporarily patch request behavior.

## Deployment and environments

`Helmfile` orders PostgreSQL, LiteLLM, API, UI, and monitoring. The staging branch deploys a separate `agent-farm-staging` namespace with staging-suffixed images; main deploys production. Every release namespace, dependency, and the API `K8S_NAMESPACE` setting must remain aligned.

## Workers and monitoring

The API image also runs `Dramatiq` delivery workers and a scheduled reconciler. Namespace-scoped Prometheus scrapes Product API, Ingest, LiteLLM, and Agent health endpoints; Alertmanager routes configured alerts to Slack and Grafana provides dashboards.

## Change checklist

Check both Runtimes, every supported Platform, builders, base images, lifecycle tests, Telemetry, persisted contracts, charts, and environment-derived tags. Chart versions change only when chart templates or values change.