Hi everyone, I’ve just started using Prefect at my company. First of all, thank you for a great product. I am trying to deploy Prefect on GCP and find the documentation very good except for GCP deployment, so I’m struggling a bit. I understand that the VertexAgent is a quite new addition. I have so far successfully registered a Vertex agent on Prefect Cloud but I don’t quite manage to deploy the agent to Vertex. Is the intention to start a Custom Vertex job in addition to

prefect agent vertex start

? Or would you recommend deploying Prefect on in another way on GCP instead?

We appreciate your positive feedback! 🙏 Many users deploy Kubernetes Agent with GKE - e.g. here is a great tutorial by Ben Welsh Regarding the Vertex agent, check this tutorial - but you're right that running this command is everything you need (you can run it from any terminal authenticated with GCP service account):

prefect agent vertex start --label yourlabel

more details: • https://docs.prefect.io/orchestration/agents/vertex.html#requirements • https://docs.prefect.io/orchestration/flow_config/run_configs.html#vertexrun

Thank you for your generous reply! 😄 I’ve re-read those documents and I finally think I grasp the overlaying architecture. Just to confirm, so the

prefect agent vertex start

does not start an agent on Vertex but rather starts an agent where the command is run from? In that case, a small GCE or Cloud run should be enough for hosting the actual VertexAgent that will then spin up Vertex machines for the flow runs?

#1 Exactly! #2 Yes!

Awesome, thank you for the clarification! 😄

Thanks a lot, and great to hear you got it all working! 🙌

Hi again, ran into another problem with storage. I got the classic

ModuleNotFoundError("No module named 'src'

, as mentioned in several previous slack threads and on discourse. I understand this is because storage pulls only the flow file. The ideal case for us would be to only redeploy the Docker image when updating dependencies and pull the src code from Github, much like they are doing in the tutorial that you linked earlier; only rebuild the docker image when the dependencies change, and not the src code. I understood that we could package our src code and install into the image. But is there a way around having to rebuild the docker image and rather mount the src code when deploy flow runs?

certainly not on Vertex since it's serverless (stateless) - mounting volumes is stateful

Yea makes sense, will try your proposal of packaging the source code!

awesome, thanks a lot! 🙌