Agent Substrate
Agent Substrate is an open-source Kubernetes runtime that manages agent actors, worker pools, sandbox lifecycle, snapshots, suspension, resumption, and request routing. It is intended for teams running AI-agent workloads and other sandboxed applications on Kubernetes, including GKE.
| Pricing model | Self-managed GKE deployment; compute is charged only during active processing, with no Agent Substrate rate published |
|---|---|
| Pricing The headline compute price as the provider states it. Sorting ranks prices stated per vCPU over time, converted to hourly. Other pricing models sort after, unranked. | No public Agent Substrate compute rate stated |
| Free while idle Whether a stopped, paused, or sleeping sandbox costs nothing. | ✓ |
| Elastic Resources flex with what the sandbox actually uses, and the bill follows: yes when the provider bills on active or observed use, no when capacity is reserved or allocated and billed while it runs. | ✓ |
| Memory snapshots Whether RAM state survives a pause and resume, not just disk. | ✓ |
| Wake on request Whether a stopped sandbox wakes automatically on inbound traffic. | ✓ |
| Start / resume Typical time from create or resume to running. Sorting ranks stated times, converted to seconds; claims with no figure sort after, unranked. | Sub-500 ms for resume; separate cold-start time is not stated |
| Max runtime The longest a sandbox may run. | – |
| Isolation The isolation technology between sandboxes. | gVisor or Cloud Hypervisor microVMs |
| GPUs Whether GPU instances are available for sandboxes. | ✕ |
| Docker Whether Docker containers can run inside the sandbox. | – |
| SDKs | – |
✓ yes · ✕ no · – no cited public fact.
The project is pre-1.0; APIs and behavior may still change significantly. Google offers GA production support on GKE via allowlist. Agent Substrate does not preserve open network connections, including database sessions and MCP server connections, when an agent suspends, so agent code must reconnect to external services after resume.
Sources
- https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate/blob/main/README.md
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/agent-substrate/substrate/main/README.md
- https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate/blob/main/docs/architecture.md
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/ai-ml/about-agent-substrate
- https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/agent-substrate-available-on-gke
- https://github.com/agent-substrate/substrate/blob/main/docs/glossary.md
Last verified 2026-10-06. Corrections land through the update log.