What is the difference between a worker and an agent? From the docs

Workers are lightweight polling services that retrieve scheduled runs from a work pool and execute them.

Agent processes are lightweight polling services that get scheduled work from a work pool and deploy the corresponding flow runs.

I have a work-pool defined as

process

, and i see the same behavior via

prefect agent start --pool default-process-1

and

prefect worker start --pool default-process-1

I'm similarly confused by work-pool types

local

and

prefect-agent

-- Is the difference simply that a

prefect-agent

work-pool can only be picked up by agents, whereas a

local

workpool can picked up by either? Thanks!

hey, Workers are the preferred way to retrieve and deploy work. Agents would be considered the "legacy" version of Workers. Workers are typed such that they can only pull work from a Work Pool of the same type. • A local process Worker gets work from a local process work pool. • An ECS Worker gets work from an ECS work pool • etc. You're almost correct! A

prefect-agent

work pool is a special backwards compatible work pool that is meant to be used by agents only (see above) but a local process work pool can only be picked up by local process workers