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Hi team, are prefect agents deployed as part of prefect server itself? Would it be okay to run the agent on the same box as prefect server? Are there any advantages of running the agent on a separate box?

Hi <@U0193D2NES2> - they are not, unless you're using the <https://github.com/PrefectHQ/server/tree/master/helm/prefect-server|Prefect Helm char>t; it's certainly fine to run the agent on the same machine as Prefect Server (I do this frequently myself) with the caveat that if you're running a <https://docs.prefect.io/api/latest/agent/local.html#localagent|LocalAgent> or without any external infrastructure like a managed <https://docs.prefect.io/core/advanced_tutorials/dask-cluster.html#the-dask-executor|Dask> cluster you run the risk of using up all the resources on that machine, which could be troublesome for both your flows and your Server installation.

The advantages to separating those pieces of infrastructure, whether in a K8s cluster or something else, are that you can individually scale them as needed, both as you write and run more flows and as the resource needs of your flows increase.

This is one of the large benefits of using Cloud - that (large) piece of infrastructure is completely removed; you only need to worry about your agent(s) and the infrastructure needed to run your flows, and not about the database, scheduling, API, UI etc to orchestrate them.

yep. got it. thanks!. Currently doing a  cost estimation of using Prefect server vs cloud as well.

Let us know if we can help with any other questions you have around that or if you'd like to chat with someone in sales to help you navigate what your Cloud costs would look like!