> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.orkestration.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Introduction

> Orkestra: the Agent Platform (SDK → Orchestrator → Runtime → Tools)

## Orkestra at a glance

* **SDK**: Write small agents with typed I/O (Pydantic), retries, and tool access.
* **Orchestrator**: Chain agents into playbooks/workflows (sequential/parallel/fallback) with shared state and policies (timeouts, retries, budgets).
* **Runtime**: One command to expose agents/workflows as REST APIs for integration and testing.
* **Tools**: Traces, logs, metrics, eval/replay, versioning, secrets, governance, and a no‑code builder.

You focus on agent logic. Orkestra handles deployment, wiring, reliability, and visibility.

## Core concepts

* **Project**: Namespace for agents, playbooks, policies, secrets, metrics.
* **Agent / AgentService**: Stateless function `handle(input) -> output` packaged as a microservice.
* **Playbook (Workflow)**: Spec describing how steps execute (fan‑out/in, parallelism, timeouts, retries).
* **Invocation**: One execution; produces a Trace (steps, inputs/outputs with redactions, latency, tokens, cost).
* **Policy**: Versioned constraints (timeouts, retries, budgets, allowed tools/models).
* **Secret**: Encrypted values injected at runtime.
* **Artifact**: Files/blobs produced/consumed by steps, linkable from traces.

## Get started

```bash theme={null}
pip install orkestra-sdk
```

<Columns cols={2}>
  <Card title="Quickstart" icon="rocket" href="/quickstart">
    Install and run your first agent/workflow in minutes.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Overview" icon="book-open-cover" href="/orkestra/overview">
    The Orkestra SDK, workflows, structured outputs, and deployment.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Agents" icon="user-robot" href="/orkestra/agent">
    Define agents with typed inputs/outputs and generate responses.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Workflows" icon="sitemap" href="/orkestra/workflow">
    Chain agents with optional conditional logic (STOP/CONTINUE).
  </Card>

  <Card title="Structured outputs" icon="brackets-curly" href="/orkestra/structured-outputs">
    Parse and validate model responses with Pydantic.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Server / APIs" icon="server" href="/orkestra/server">
    Expose workflows as REST endpoints with Swagger and ReDoc.
  </Card>
</Columns>