Introduction
Orchestrator Zero is a self-hosted orchestration engine for AI agents, built on Temporal. You build agents, tools and skills as plugins. The platform runs them on any machine you join to it, keeps every run durable, routes work to the right machine, meters every token and keeps agents inside the limits you set.
The problem it solves
Teams want agents in production, and that usually means building a platform first:
- Scattered machines. GPU boxes, laptops, VMs and clouds, wired together with scripts.
- Fragile runs. A crash or a restart throws away hours of agent work and the money spent on it.
- No control. Nobody can say which agent runs where, with which tools, or at what cost.
Orchestrator Zero is that platform, as two binaries.
How it fits together
Nodes run the work
Any machine becomes a node with orchestrator-zero-node. A node dials out to the edge and never opens a port of its own. It runs the agents and tools from the plugins you install.
The edge is the only door in
The edge is the part of the server that nodes and apps talk to. It proxies Temporal, serves the runtime API and the LLM gateway, and checks every call against the node registry.
Temporal keeps runs durable
Every job is a Temporal workflow. If a node dies halfway, another node with the same agent carries on from the last finished step. Temporal runs inside the server by default.
Management keeps track
Management holds the registry, the certificate authority, tenants, secrets, plugins and usage. It can go down without stopping a single running job.
All of these run in one orchestrator-zero process by default. A cluster is several of those processes sharing a PostgreSQL database. See Architecture for the full picture.
What you build, and what the platform does
| You write | The platform handles |
|---|---|
| Tools: MCP servers in any language, or an existing MCP package | Environments, installation on every node, routing, restarts |
| Agents: a YAML file with instructions, model, tools and limits | Placement, durability, delegation, contracts, limits, metering |
Skills: folders with a SKILL.md | Making them available to agents |
| Your apps: anything on top | Jobs, results and cost through the runtime API |
Everything specific to a vendor or a use case is a plugin. The core stays neutral: no models, tools or services are built in. Claude is the first model provider the gateway supports, and others go through the same gateway.
Where things stand
Orchestrator Zero is pre-release. Clusters, nodes, plugins, agents, delegation, hooks, flows, evals, the LLM gateway, cost metering, the web UI, health scores, tracing, rollouts of runtimes and plugins, node self-update, backups and purge work today. Pages that describe planned features say so at the top. See What works today for the details.