Architecture
System Overview
How UnderOcean's platform layers fit together.
Platform layers
UnderOcean is organized into a small number of clearly separated layers, each with a single responsibility:
- Orchestration Engine — executes agents and flows as governed, stateful workflows, with built-in checkpointing so multi-step work can pause, resume, and recover safely.
- Model Provider Layer — a unified gateway in front of every supported AI provider, so agents and flows are never locked into a single vendor and can switch models without any workflow changes.
- Knowledge & Retrieval Layer — a vector-based knowledge store, isolated per project, that powers Agentic-RAG — grounding agent answers in your own documents rather than relying on model memory alone.
- Secure Multi-Tenant Data Layer — every read and write is scoped to an organization and project boundary, enforced beneath the application layer so tenant data cannot leak across boundaries.
- Background Intelligence Layer — long-running work such as document ingestion and context summarization runs asynchronously so it never blocks a user-facing request.
- Real-time Streaming Layer — every execution streams progress, reasoning steps, and tokens live to the UI over a persistent connection.
Agents and flows share one engine
An agent is the simplest possible workflow — a single step. A flow is a larger, user-composed workflow built from many steps. Both run on the same orchestration engine, which means every platform capability — streaming, checkpointing, visibility into reasoning — works identically whether you're running a single agent or an entire multi-agent pipeline.