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Agent Substrate avatar

Agent Substrate

Sandboxed Kubernetes runtime that snapshots and resumes idle AI agents

  • Agent frameworks and tools
  • Servers and infrastructure
View on GitHub

What it is

Agent Substrate runs agents and other stateful workloads on Kubernetes inside gVisor or Cloud Hypervisor microVM sandboxes, fitting many actors into a few pre-started worker pods. Idle actors are snapshotted out of memory with their RAM and filesystem state, then restored on the next request. Each actor gets a short-lived SPIFFE identity, default-deny networking, and an egress gateway that injects credentials outside the sandbox. Platform teams use it to host untrusted agents, coding environments, and MCP servers at high density without giving them access to secrets.

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Facts

Stars
5,646 GitHub stars.
5,646

Forks
609
Commits
1,472
Contributors
121
Language
Go
License
Apache-2.0
Last commit
Oct 20, 2026
On GitHub since
May 2026
First release
May 2026
Platforms
Linux, self-hosted
Self-hostable
Yes
Tags
  • containers
  • agent-sandbox
  • ai-security
  • ai-agents
  • container-orchestration

Last synced from GitHub on Oct 20, 2026

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What people are saying

Updated Oct 21, 2026
  • Bluesky“I am happy to share a little thing we have been cooking up: Problem statement: How can we effectively host a bazillion mostly-idle agents in a regular-sized…”May 20, 2026 · 32 likes · 3 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Agent Substrate is an experimental #OpenSource system from #Google for running agents and similar workloads on #Kubernetes at scale. GitHub repo // Source…”Jul 31, 2026 · 3 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Congrats on the launch Marly 🙌 Do you know how this is different or similar to substrate?”Sep 24, 2026 · 1 like · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Hacker NewsAgent execution runtime engineered to run millions of sandboxesSep 21, 2026 · 2 points · 0 comments (opens Hacker News in a new tab)
  • Hacker NewsAgent Substrate: The Core SystemAug 6, 2026 · 2 points · 0 comments (opens Hacker News in a new tab)
  • Hacker NewsAgent SubstrateMay 23, 2026 · 2 points · 0 comments (opens Hacker News in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Unofficial but some Googlers doing Substrate too,”May 21, 2026 · 1 like · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“Standard Kubernetes pod scheduling for AI agents instead of custom control planes, using Agent Substrate for sub-second agent resume and high-density…”Sep 26, 2026 · 0 likes · 1 reply (opens Bluesky in a new tab)
  • Bluesky“250 agents, 8 machines. Agent Substrate is the runtime, not another framework. it packs idle agents onto shared workers and resumes them in under a second…”Aug 4, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 replies (opens Bluesky in a new tab)