CNCF Ambassador Lin Sun of Solo.io wrote on July 7, 2026 that sandboxing alone is not enough to run large-scale AI agent fleets, contrasting the Kubernetes SIG Apps project agent-sandbox with a newer, still-standalone project called agent-substrate. Agent-sandbox provides identity, persistent storage, and lifecycle management for sandboxed agent pods; agent-substrate goes further by dynamically waking agents on invocation using lightweight sandboxes such as gVisor or Kata Containers, letting many agents share one worker pool instead of running as always-on pods. Sun's team is exploring integrating agent-substrate with kagent and agentgateway. For practitioners, the takeaway is that secure isolation and fleet-level operational efficiency are separate problems, and both need solving to run agents at scale.
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