3. High-density and active-only compute economics
Agents spend most of their time waiting on model inference, tool responses, or user input. Reserving physical CPUs and RAM for idle containers can lock up expensive and scarce capacity and make running agent fleets at scale unsustainable.
Agent Substrate can release resources the moment an agent pauses. It snapshots the guest hypervisor’s state to the local disk and Cloud Storage, freeing up RAM and CPU to run other agents, while keeping the state intact. When the next turn or tool call arrives, Agent Substrate resumes the snapshotted session in milliseconds. This zero-idle model can pack over 1,000 dormant agents per host, delivering 10x higher compute density than traditional compute. For workloads that need shared filesystems across turns, an optional Filestore agent volume controller provides persistent NFS storage — more on that below.
4. Kubernetes as a foundation: scale and reliability
Building a custom sandbox orchestrator on standard VMs forces teams to maintain tedious operational tooling: node recovery, autoscaling, multi-zone scheduling, and network policy. But routing each sub-second tool invocation through the standard Kubernetes Pod lifecycle adds seconds of delay to each request.
Agent Substrate combines both approaches. The high-frequency suspend-resume runs directly on local workers through a purpose-built data plane. Meanwhile, Kubernetes manages the machines, handling self-healing nodes, fleet autoscaling, and cluster reliability, as well as drives the lifecycle of the worker pods themselves. For workloads that need standard Pod semantics, existing primitives like Agent Sandbox and kernel-isolated Pods continue to work side by side.
Optimized for Google Cloud infrastructure
Building an agent platform that can achieve 1M agent scale depends on having the right underlying compute and storage infrastructure. Agent Substrate on GKE maximizes machine obtainability and flexibility with custom ComputeClasses to dynamically manage machine pools across shapes and families, including spot and on-demand pools. This includes native support for Google Axion, our custom Arm-based processors, which deliver up to 30% better price-performance for sandbox workloads compared to competitive cloud offerings. For stateful workspaces, Agent Substrate on GKE can be optionally integrated with Filestore agent volumes, a new offering that attaches and detaches NFS mounts in milliseconds, allowing agents to start/resume near-instantaneously, along with native Read-Write-Many (RWX) access and POSIX-compliant file locking to enable safe multi-agent collaboration without write collisions.
Build your agent platform on a scalable foundation
When building production agent applications, you shouldn’t have to compromise between strong security, low latency, and operational scale.
Nous Research builds Hermes, the number-one AI agent in the world by usage according to OpenRouter, where it also ranks first in productivity, coding, personal and CLI agents. Nous Research has been an early design partner on Agent Substrate, evaluating how the runtime handles the isolation and identity requirements that agent workloads introduce.
“We built Hermes Enterprise to enable customers to deploy into their existing infrastructure, while handling per-agent isolation and extensible access control. Agent Substrate addresses both at the platform layer in a way that also preserves valuable compute resources. Our experience with Agent Substrate gives us confidence the architecture can scale efficiently as agent workloads grow.” – Hervé Bizira, Chief Business Officer, Nous Research
By pairing the machine resilience, self-healing nodes, and declarative management of Kubernetes with an agent-native data plane built for kernel isolation, active-only compute, and sub-second execution, Agent Substrate gives engineering teams a clear path to scale.
Agent Substrate is open source and available to all GKE customers for non-production workloads. GA support for production is available via allowlist. To deploy it on your GKE clusters, see Agent Substrate on GKE documentation. To learn more, see About Agent Substrate or visit the open-source repository.
