Glossary

Short definitions of terms used throughout the Cosmos documentation. Follow the links for details.

A

• ADK (Agent Development Kit) — the Cosmos service that runs agents, built on Google ADK and FastAPI. See ADK.
• Agent — an AI assistant configured with a prompt, a model, and tools. See Core Concepts.
• Alembic — the SQLAlchemy migration tool used by Storage and RAGflow.
• App — a deployed agent published on a chat, voice, email, or WhatsApp channel. See Core Concepts.
• Auto-sync — MCP fetching a missing tool from Configurator on a cache miss.

B

• Bootstrap — ./scripts/bootstrap.sh, which prepares a local workspace: service checkouts, git hooks, and frontend dependencies.
• Bridge — the service that tunnels requests to on-premises systems behind corporate firewalls over WebSocket. See Bridge.
• BYOT (Bring Your Own Token) — an organization's own credentials for model, speech, and other providers. See BYOT.

C

• Collection — a vector index of documents used for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
• Configurator — the central configuration service for tools, agents, apps, skills, guardrails, and organization settings. See Configurator.
• Connector — an external MCP-compatible server whose tools are made available to an organization.

D

• DRF (Django REST Framework) — the REST framework used by Configurator and the User Service.

E

• Eval agent — an agent that scores another agent's responses. See Evals.

F

• FastMCP — the MCP framework used by the Tools Server.

G

• Google ADK — Google's Agent Development Kit, the agent framework under the ADK service.
• Graph — a knowledge graph of entities and relationships that agents can search.
• Guardrails — PII masking and content filtering applied to apps and agents. See PII Masking & Guardrails.

H

• Helm — the Kubernetes package manager; Cosmos uses one parameterized chart for all services.
• Hyperscaler — the HYPERSCALER setting (local, azure, gcp) that selects cloud-specific behavior.

I

• ICE (Interactive Connectivity Establishment) — the WebRTC connection negotiation used by Voice.

J

• JumpStart — a family of consumer applications built on Cosmos. See Consumer Applications.
• JWKS (JSON Web Key Set) — the User Service's public keys at /.well-known/jwks.json, used to verify tokens.
• JWT (JSON Web Token) — the token format for user and service access across Cosmos.

K

• Kafka — the event broker; topics are configurator and observer. See Kafka Topics.

L

• Library — Configurator's catalog of reusable agent, tool, and prompt templates.
• LiteLLM — the model-provider abstraction ADK uses to call many LLM providers.

M

• manage.sh — the CLI for local orchestration; always use it instead of calling Docker Compose directly. See manage.sh Reference.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) — the open protocol for connecting models to tools, implemented by the Tools Server. See MCP.
• MCPToolset — Google ADK's MCP client, used by ADK to load tools.

O

• OAuth2 / OIDC — the authentication protocols the User Service supports, including service-to-service client_credentials.
• Org Settings — organization-level defaults such as BYOT credentials, chat settings, and guardrails.
• Organization — the top-level tenant boundary; every resource belongs to one. See Core Concepts.

P

• pgvector — the PostgreSQL extension RAGflow uses for vector search.
• Pipecat — the voice pipeline framework used by Voice.
• PKCE (Proof Key for Code Exchange) — the OAuth2 extension used in browser-based sign-in flows for external tools.
• Presidio — Microsoft's PII detection library, used for PII masking.
• Project — a group of resources and members inside an organization, with its own roles.

R

• RAGflow — the document indexing and retrieval service. See RAGflow.
• Redis — the cache: DB 0 for ADK, DB 11 for MCP tools, DB 15 for ADK Kafka events. See Redis Databases.
• RLS (Row-Level Security) — database-level isolation of rows by tenant.
• RTVI (Real-Time Voice and Video Inference) — the protocol for structured voice events between the voice client and server.

S

• Skill — reusable instructions, optionally with tools and knowledge bases, that can be attached to agents. See Skills & Prompts.
• Stunner — the Kubernetes TURN gateway used by Voice for WebRTC in the cloud.

T

• Template — a reusable configuration pattern for agents, tools, or prompts, stored in the Library.
• Tool — an action an agent can invoke: API, DB, custom, or connector. See Core Concepts.

U

• uv — the Python package manager used by MCP, Voice, RAGflow, and PII Redactor.

W

• WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) — the browser protocol used for voice calls.
• Workflow agent — an agent that coordinates other agents in a graph or another workflow kind. See Building & Testing Agents.

X

• X-Org-Id — the HTTP header that names the target organization on every API request except health checks.