Google's play for agentic software

“This time we won’t be late to the party,” I imagine Google execs were told by the teams that put A2A and ADK together.

Just like Docker captured the developer audience and made it easy to run containers in development (and painfully hard to do so in production), so did Anthropic’s MCP make it easy (ish) to run agentic workflows locally.

But this time, Google was ready and quickly launched both ADK (the orchestration framework, kind of like Kubernetes for agents) and A2A (the inter-agent communication protocol). Both are a lot easier to use than MCP, take a more holistic approach and have production in mind from day 1.