Chapter 5: Sessions, Memory, and Context Management

Welcome to Chapter 5: Sessions, Memory, and Context Management. In this part of ADK Python Tutorial: Production-Grade Agent Engineering with Google's ADK, you will build an intuitive mental model first, then move into concrete implementation details and practical production tradeoffs.

This chapter focuses on context durability and state boundaries.

Learning Goals

• separate session state from long-term memory
• choose storage services based on workload needs
• control context growth with compaction patterns
• design memory usage for predictable outcomes

Practical Guidance

• use session services for per-conversation event history
• use memory services for cross-session recall
• monitor compaction behavior to preserve critical facts
• define retention and governance policies early

Source References

• ADK AGENTS.md: Sessions and Memory
• ADK Documentation
• ADK Deploy Docs

Summary

You can now reason about short-term context and long-term recall without mixing concerns.

Next: Chapter 6: Evaluation, Debugging, and Quality Gates

Source Code Walkthrough

google/adk/memory/ and session services

The memory and session interfaces live in google/adk/memory/ and google/adk/sessions/. These modules define the BaseMemoryService and BaseSessionService contracts that Chapter 5 explains. Examining the in-memory implementations shows the data structures ADK uses to maintain conversation context across turns.