Overview

A high-density, low-latency execution runtime for stateful agent workloads.

2 min read ·

Agent Substrate is a secure-by-default agent execution runtime engineered to run millions of stateful sandboxes at 10x+ higher density than standard container runtimes. Autonomous agents spend most of their lifecycle idle waiting on user input, model responses, or external events; Substrate reclaims compute during those idle periods without losing session state.

Substrate decouples the Actor (a stateful agent or workload instance) from the Worker (a pre-warmed sandbox in a WorkerPool). Idle actors are checkpointed to object storage and evicted from compute; when a request arrives at the router, the control plane assigns a ready worker and the node-level supervisor restores the actor’s full memory and filesystem state in under 500ms—taking the Kubernetes control plane out of the critical path.

Agent Substrate Platform (ate-system) top-level mental model · control plane, atelet & worker pod
Agent Substrate Control & Data Plane ate-api-server + atenet Atespace registry · routes ate-target-actor · schedules Millions of Actors
assigns & wakes
Kubernetes Node DaemonSet atelet (Node Supervisor) streams GCS/S3 snapshots · drives checkpoint & restore (<500ms)
gRPC to pod
Pre-Warmed Worker Pod (WorkerPool) Worker (ateom + Sandbox) ateom herder · atunnel mTLS · microVM / gVisor hosting Actor
How Agent Substrate, atelet, and a Worker interact — idle actors hibernate to snapshot storage and resume into any warm worker sandbox on demand. Read full architecture →
  • Core Platform Terms at a Glance: Each actor lives in an atespace (<atespace>/<actor>), traffic enters via atenet, node supervision and snapshot streaming are handled by atelet, and sandbox execution inside each warm Worker is managed by ateom (internally prefixed ate across binaries and CRDs). See the Glossary for complete definitions.
  • Framework Agnostic: Runs standard OCI containers inside zero-trust sandboxes—supporting ADK, LangChain, Hermes, OpenClaw, MCP servers, and stateful coding environments out of the box.
  • Ready to try it? Jump straight to Quickstart to launch your first actor locally on Kind, follow the GKE Installation Guide to deploy on Google Kubernetes Engine, or explore the Architecture.
Was this page helpful?