Introducing
Agent Substrate
Scaling Thousands of Stateful AI Agents on Kubernetes Without the Waste
Alex Van Boxel
Before we start
About me, and this talk
The problem, briefly
Your agent is mostly waiting
Core idea
Actors are not pods
Control plane
Kubernetes stays out of the hot path
A quick pause
Doesn't my framework do this already?
Isolation
How gVisor isolates an agent
Isolation
How Substrate runs gVisor
Another quick pause
How isolated is each agent?
Going to sleep
Suspend while the LLM thinks
Waking up again
Waking up
Birth of an agent
Born from a golden snapshot
One more quick pause
Framework, or Substrate?
For MCP and tool builders
Untrusted code, real credentials
Putting it together
A2A: sleep until the callback
Demo
demos/claude-code-multiplex
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Introducing Agent Substrate: Scaling Thousands of Stateful AI Agents on Kubernetes Without the Waste