Action lake

What it is

A data lake, in AWS's definition, is a centralised repository that lets you store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. It gave analytics one place to look instead of a copy of every source in every tool. An action lake applies the same idea to what agents do rather than what they read: one place where actions are declared, permitted, priced, run and recorded, whatever model or framework an agent uses.

The term is ours; actionlake is named after it.

Why it matters

Every agent project starts by connecting the same systems again: new credentials, new tool definitions, new guesses at permissions, and a log nobody else can read. As agents multiply, so does the sprawl. Payments needed a network. Data needed a lake. Actions need a lake too.

How it works

An action lake has six parts:

1. A catalogue of declared actions, each with an input schema, an effect class (read, write, destructive) and a canonical name.
2. A vault that holds vendor credentials apart from agents. See credential vault.
3. Identity and policy: a key per agent with permissions, caps and approvals.
4. A meter in a unit that tracks real cost: the upstream call.
5. Joins and a cache, so questions across systems are answered in one call and repeated reads are not.
6. A ledger that records every action with its reason. See hash-chained ledger.

Example

Three teams build three agents: one in an IDE, one in a chat app, one in a scheduled job. All three connect to the same action lake. Finance can see what each spent, security can see what each did, and revoking one agent's key stops only that agent.

Common pitfalls

What an action lake is not:

• Not a copy of your data. Reads go to the vendor or a short-lived cache; it is not a warehouse.
• Not a flow builder. Nobody drags boxes. Agents and schedules start the work.
• Not a model. It works with whichever model your agents use.

How actionlake handles it

In practice, actionlake is an action lake delivered as one MCP gateway: eight tools, 1,000+ connectors and 289,000+ actions (counted 24 October 2026), a vault sealed per tenant, scoped keys, caps refused before dispatch, approvals, a tenant cache where cached answers are free, ask for cross-system answers, and a hash-chained ledger. Request and response traces are kept only for your plan's window. Start on the platform page, or connect a client in the quickstart.