Asgard

An open-source control plane for AI & agent development inside a company.

Backstage answers “what exists and who owns it.” For non-deterministic agent systems that isn’t enough, you also need to know is it safe, is it working, what is it costing, and what did it just do. Asgard adds that governance overlay, gateway, evals, audit, cost, policy, kill switches, as the spine, not a plugin.

The six load-bearing components

1. Catalog, a typed entity graph (Agent, Prompt, Tool/MCPServer, Model, Dataset, Eval, Project, plus Backstage-compatible kinds). Source of truth is YAML in Git, reconciled into the store. Pull-based, so deletes propagate.
2. Gateway, every model call routes through it: per-project virtual keys, budgets, model allowlists per data-classification, PII/secret/prompt-injection guardrails, full audit with a propagated x-asgard-trace-id, and a kill switch.
3. Policy, one Cedar engine queried by gateway, catalog, workflow, and runtime: can this principal do this, against this data class, with this model, and does it need approval?
4. Workflow + approvals, request → approve → fulfill state machine.
5. Evals, eval suites that gate PR merges. CI for non-determinism.
6. Runtime / sandbox, ephemeral isolated execution with per-invocation budget/step/wall-time caps enforced at the runtime (gVisor / container / local backends behind one trait).

Around these sits the registry gate (no provisioning or spend until a project is registered), a manifest-driven service catalog an agent provisions through, and a knowledge platform, versioned, searchable standards, guidance, and recipes, served to humans in the UI and to agents over MCP.

Design principles

• One static binary. Rust, embedded UI. docker run asgard with a Git token.
• SQLite by default, Postgres opt-in. Identical behavior on both; the same binary scales out by switching --database-url and adding stateless replicas.
• Kubernetes supported, never required. Headline paths are docker run and systemd; a Helm chart and Terraform module ship too.
• Open core with honest seams. The governance core is OSS; enterprise features (SAML/SCIM, multi-tenant, SIEM streaming) sit behind clear trait seams.