Does the agent need to continuously run in the Dagster Cloud hybrid?

Yes, in a Dagster Cloud hybrid deployment, the agent needs to continuously run in your environment. The agent is responsible for polling the agent API to see if any work needs to be done and launches user code as appropriate to fulfill requests. It communicates with the Dagster Cloud control plane over the agent API, and it is through this continuous operation that the agent can enqueue work when users interact with the web front end, when the GraphQL API is queried, or when schedules and sensors tick. The user code then streams metadata back to the agent API to make it available in Dagster Cloud. All user code runs within your environment, in isolation from Dagster system code, and the agent facilitates this process.