Google Cloud released Agent Substrate on Google Kubernetes Engine, an open-source agent runtime offering kernel and network isolation.

Google announced the availability of Agent Substrate on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The open-source agent-execution runtime can run on any Kubernetes infrastructure, while being optimized for GKE.

Google says the runtime is engineered to support millions of sandboxes at 10 times the density of standard container runtimes. It also reports resume operations below 500 milliseconds and more than 500 suspend/resume activations per second; these are Google’s reported runtime metrics, not independently verified application-throughput results.

The architecture separates agent execution from machine management and directly manages sandbox lifecycles. Its security mechanisms include native zero-trust kernel and network isolation, with Cloud Hypervisor micro–virtual machines or gVisor sandboxes identified as execution environments.

Google identifies arbitrary generated code, bursty sandbox creation, full tool-environment requirements, and idle CPU and memory reservations as problems the runtime addresses. Nous Research, developer of the Hermes Agent, is already building on Agent Substrate; Google also reports that Hermes ranks first by OpenRouter usage across the specified productivity, coding, command-line, and personal-agent categories, which is a usage ranking rather than a performance benchmark.