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Durable Execution with Prefect

Prefect is a workflow orchestration framework for building resilient data pipelines in Python, natively integrated with Pydantic AI.

Durable Execution

Prefect 3.0 brings transactional semantics to your Python workflows, allowing you to group tasks into atomic units and define failure modes. If any part of a transaction fails, the entire transaction can be rolled back to a clean state.

  • Flows are the top-level entry points for your workflow. They can contain tasks and other flows.
  • Tasks are individual units of work that can be retried, cached, and monitored independently.

Prefect 3.0's approach to transactional orchestration makes your workflows automatically idempotent: rerunnable without duplication or inconsistency across any environment. Every task is executed within a transaction that governs when and where the task's result record is persisted. If the task runs again under an identical context, it will not re-execute but instead load its previous result.

The diagram below shows the overall architecture of an agentic application with Prefect. Prefect uses client-side task orchestration by default, with optional server connectivity for advanced features like scheduling and monitoring.

            +---------------------+
            |   Prefect Server    |      (Monitoring,
            |      or Cloud       |       scheduling, UI,
            +---------------------+       orchestration)
                     ^
                     |
        Flow state,  |   Schedule flows,
        metadata,    |   track execution
        logs         |
                     |
+------------------------------------------------------+
|               Application Process                    |
|   +----------------------------------------------+   |
|   |              Flow (Agent.run)                |   |
|   +----------------------------------------------+   |
|          |          |                |               |
|          v          v                v               |
|   +-----------+ +------------+ +-------------+       |
|   |   Task    | |    Task    | |    Task     |       |
|   |  (Tool)   | | (MCP Tool) | | (Model API) |       |
|   +-----------+ +------------+ +-------------+       |
|         |           |                |               |
|       Cache &     Cache &          Cache &           |
|       persist     persist          persist           |
|         to           to               to             |
|         v            v                v              |
|   +----------------------------------------------+   |
|   |     Result Storage (Local FS, S3, etc.)     |    |
|   +----------------------------------------------+   |
+------------------------------------------------------+
          |           |                |
          v           v                v
      [External APIs, services, databases, etc.]

See the Prefect documentation for more information.

Durable Agent

Any agent can be wrapped in a PrefectAgent to get durable execution. PrefectAgent automatically:

Event stream handlers are automatically wrapped by Prefect when running inside a Prefect flow. Each event from the stream is processed in a separate Prefect task for durability. You can customize the task behavior using the event_stream_handler_task_config parameter when creating the PrefectAgent. Do not manually decorate event stream handlers with @task. For examples, see the streaming docs

The original agent, model, and MCP server can still be used as normal outside the Prefect flow.

Here is a simple but complete example of wrapping an agent for durable execution. All it requires is to install Pydantic AI with Prefect:

pip install pydantic-ai[prefect]

uv add pydantic-ai[prefect]

Or if you're using the slim package, you can install it with the prefect optional group:

pip install pydantic-ai-slim[prefect]

uv add pydantic-ai-slim[prefect]
prefect_agent.py
from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.durable_exec.prefect import PrefectAgent

agent = Agent(
    'gpt-4o',
    instructions="You're an expert in geography.",
    name='geography',  # (1)!
)

prefect_agent = PrefectAgent(agent)  # (2)!

async def main():
    result = await prefect_agent.run('What is the capital of Mexico?')  # (3)!
    print(result.output)
    #> Mexico City (Ciudad de México, CDMX)
  1. The agent's name is used to uniquely identify its flows and tasks.
  2. Wrapping the agent with PrefectAgent enables durable execution for all agent runs.
  3. PrefectAgent.run() works like Agent.run(), but runs as a Prefect flow and executes model requests, decorated tool calls, and MCP communication as Prefect tasks.

(This example is complete, it can be run "as is" — you'll need to add asyncio.run(main()) to run main)

For more information on how to use Prefect in Python applications, see their Python documentation.

Prefect Integration Considerations

When using Prefect with Pydantic AI agents, there are a few important considerations to ensure workflows behave correctly.

Agent Requirements

Each agent instance must have a unique name so Prefect can correctly identify and track its flows and tasks.

Tool Wrapping

Agent tools are automatically wrapped as Prefect tasks, which means they benefit from:

  • Retry logic: Failed tool calls can be retried automatically
  • Caching: Tool results are cached based on their inputs
  • Observability: Tool execution is tracked in the Prefect UI

You can customize tool task behavior using tool_task_config (applies to all tools) or tool_task_config_by_name (per-tool configuration):

prefect_agent_config.py
from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.durable_exec.prefect import PrefectAgent, TaskConfig

agent = Agent('gpt-4o', name='my_agent')

@agent.tool_plain
def fetch_data(url: str) -> str:
    # This tool will be wrapped as a Prefect task
    ...

prefect_agent = PrefectAgent(
    agent,
    tool_task_config=TaskConfig(retries=3),  # Default for all tools
    tool_task_config_by_name={
        'fetch_data': TaskConfig(timeout_seconds=10.0),  # Specific to fetch_data
        'simple_tool': None,  # Disable task wrapping for simple_tool
    },
)

Set a tool's config to None in tool_task_config_by_name to disable task wrapping for that specific tool.

Streaming

When running inside a Prefect flow, Agent.run_stream() works but doesn't provide real-time streaming because Prefect tasks consume their entire execution before returning results. The method will execute fully and return the complete result at once.

For real-time streaming behavior inside Prefect flows, you can set an event_stream_handler on the Agent or PrefectAgent instance and use PrefectAgent.run().

Note: Event stream handlers behave differently when running inside a Prefect flow versus outside: - Outside a flow: The handler receives events as they stream from the model - Inside a flow: Each event is wrapped as a Prefect task for durability, which may affect timing but ensures reliability

The event stream handler function will receive the agent run context and an async iterable of events from the model's streaming response and the agent's execution of tools. For examples, see the streaming docs.

Task Configuration

You can customize Prefect task behavior, such as retries and timeouts, by passing TaskConfig objects to the PrefectAgent constructor:

  • mcp_task_config: Configuration for MCP server communication tasks
  • model_task_config: Configuration for model request tasks
  • tool_task_config: Default configuration for all tool calls
  • tool_task_config_by_name: Per-tool task configuration (overrides tool_task_config)
  • event_stream_handler_task_config: Configuration for event stream handler tasks (applies when running inside a Prefect flow)

Available TaskConfig options:

  • retries: Maximum number of retries for the task (default: 0)
  • retry_delay_seconds: Delay between retries in seconds (can be a single value or list for exponential backoff, default: 1.0)
  • timeout_seconds: Maximum time in seconds for the task to complete
  • cache_policy: Custom Prefect cache policy for the task
  • persist_result: Whether to persist the task result
  • result_storage: Prefect result storage for the task (e.g., 's3-bucket/my-storage' or a WritableFileSystem block)
  • log_prints: Whether to log print statements from the task (default: False)

Example:

prefect_agent_config.py
from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.durable_exec.prefect import PrefectAgent, TaskConfig

agent = Agent(
    'gpt-4o',
    instructions="You're an expert in geography.",
    name='geography',
)

prefect_agent = PrefectAgent(
    agent,
    model_task_config=TaskConfig(
        retries=3,
        retry_delay_seconds=[1.0, 2.0, 4.0],  # Exponential backoff
        timeout_seconds=30.0,
    ),
)

async def main():
    result = await prefect_agent.run('What is the capital of France?')
    print(result.output)
    #> Paris

(This example is complete, it can be run "as is" — you'll need to add asyncio.run(main()) to run main)

Retry Considerations

Pydantic AI and provider API clients have their own retry logic. When using Prefect, you may want to:

  • Disable HTTP Request Retries in Pydantic AI
  • Turn off your provider API client's retry logic (e.g., max_retries=0 on a custom OpenAI client)
  • Rely on Prefect's task-level retry configuration for consistency

This prevents requests from being retried multiple times at different layers.

Caching and Idempotency

Prefect 3.0 provides built-in caching and transactional semantics. Tasks with identical inputs will not re-execute if their results are already cached, making workflows naturally idempotent and resilient to failures.

  • Task inputs: Messages, settings, parameters, tool arguments, and serializable dependencies

Note: For user dependencies to be included in cache keys, they must be serializable (e.g., Pydantic models or basic Python types). Non-serializable dependencies are automatically excluded from cache computation.

Observability with Prefect and Logfire

Prefect provides a built-in UI for monitoring flow runs, task executions, and failures. You can:

  • View real-time flow run status
  • Debug failures with full stack traces
  • Set up alerts and notifications

To access the Prefect UI, you can either:

  1. Use Prefect Cloud (managed service)
  2. Run a local Prefect server with prefect server start

You can also use Pydantic Logfire for detailed observability. When using both Prefect and Logfire, you'll get complementary views:

  • Prefect: Workflow-level orchestration, task status, and retry history
  • Logfire: Fine-grained tracing of agent runs, model requests, and tool invocations

When using Logfire with Prefect, you can enable distributed tracing to see spans for your Prefect runs included with your agent runs, model requests, and tool invocations.

For more information about Prefect monitoring, see the Prefect documentation.

Deployments and Scheduling

To deploy and schedule a PrefectAgent, wrap it in a Prefect flow and use the flow's serve() or deploy() methods:

serve_agent.py
from prefect import flow

from pydantic_ai import Agent
from pydantic_ai.durable_exec.prefect import PrefectAgent

agent = Agent(
    'openai:gpt-4o',
    name='daily_report_agent',
    instructions='Generate a daily summary report.',
)

prefect_agent = PrefectAgent(agent)

@flow
async def daily_report_flow(user_prompt: str):
    """Generate a daily report using the agent."""
    result = await prefect_agent.run(user_prompt)
    return result.output

# Serve the flow with a daily schedule
if __name__ == '__main__':
    daily_report_flow.serve(
        name='daily-report-deployment',
        cron='0 9 * * *',  # Run daily at 9am
        parameters={'user_prompt': "Generate today's report"},
        tags=['production', 'reports'],
    )

The serve() method accepts scheduling options:

  • cron: Cron schedule string (e.g., '0 9 * * *' for daily at 9am)
  • interval: Schedule interval in seconds or as a timedelta
  • rrule: iCalendar RRule schedule string

For production deployments with Docker, Kubernetes, or other infrastructure, use the flow's deploy() method. See the Prefect deployment documentation for more information.