Google Cloud Agent Sandbox
GKE Agent Sandbox manages isolated, stateful, single-replica workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine. Developers use it to run AI-agent code, development environments, and interactive tools in sandboxes.
| Pricing model | Per-second charges for requested resources of running Pods, plus GKE cluster fees |
|---|---|
| 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. | GKE Autopilot general-purpose, regular price: $0.0445 per vCPU-hour |
| 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. | ~200 ms for 90% of warm-pool allocations; under 1 second with pre-warmed Pods |
| Max runtime The longest a sandbox may run. | No fixed limit; runs until deleted unless a shutdown time is set |
| Isolation The isolation technology between sandboxes. | Runtime-configurable kernel-level isolation, typically gVisor; Kata Containers is also supported |
| GPUs Whether GPU instances are available for sandboxes. | ✓ |
| Docker Whether Docker containers can run inside the sandbox. | ✓ |
| SDKs | Python, Go |
✓ yes · ✕ no · – no cited public fact.
Full feature support and snapshot compatibility depend on GKE version and configuration; Pod snapshots have machine-type, GPU, and storage limitations, and GKE stores snapshot data in Cloud Storage.
Sources
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/machine-learning/agent-sandbox
- https://gvisor.dev/docs/tutorials/docker-in-gke-sandbox
- https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/agent-sandbox
- https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/pricing
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/agent-sandbox
- https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/containers-kubernetes/bringing-you-agent-sandbox-on-gke-and-agent-substrate
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/agent-sandbox-pod-snapshots
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/how-install-agent-sandbox
- https://agent-sandbox.sigs.k8s.io/docs/
- https://agent-sandbox.sigs.k8s.io/docs/sandbox/lifecycle
- http://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/sandbox-pods
- https://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/pod-snapshots
Last verified 2026-10-02. Corrections land through the update log.