Agent Substrate: The Agentic AI Isolation Layer On K8s

Isolation/sandboxing Agents give the ability to run agentic workflows in a safe, secure, and governed way. Without it, your Agents can access just about anything you can along with doing any type of web research and API calls.

With sandboxing solving this agentic issue, the next question is "where and how will sandboxes run?" and that's where Substrate comes into play.

In this blog, you'll learn about what Substrate is and how to deploy it in GKE.

Prerequistes

To follow along with this blog post from a hands-on perspective, you will need:

1. A GCP account


2. A GKE cluster

What Is Agent Substrate

There are two things that Kubernetes is incredibly good at out of the box:

1. Orchestration


2. Clustering worker nodes to ensure users have a pool of GPU, CPU, and memory

What can be built on top of k8s that isn't out of the box is higher levels of efficiency for hardware resource management, lower latency, and the implementation of Agentic workflows (e.g - running Agents and isolating Agents). However, the primitives of Kubernetes (Pods, autoscaling, clustering of Worker Nodes) is still very-much needed, so there needs to be a tool/platform for the Agentic era that builds on top of what we know as k8s today. Something that has its own Control Plane/management layer, but still uses what Kubernetes has to offer.

That's where Agent Susbtrate comes into play.

Underneath the hood, Substrate uses Stateful Actors across only 8 Pods (the Workers).

Interacting With Substrate

Because Substrate has its own management plane and resources, you can interact with it via its own command-line tool, ate.

e.g - kubectl ate (more to come on this in the configuration sections that are upcoming).

Environment Configuration Needs/Prereqs

There are a few things that you will need configured for your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster, GCP environment, and CLI tools.

1. 
   gcloud and all of the auth that goes with it to manage your GCP and GKE environment on the terminal.
   

export PROJECT_ID=<your-project-id>



gcloud auth login

gcloud auth application-default login --project="$PROJECT_ID"

gcloud auth configure-docker gcr.io

1. The required APIs for Substrate.
   

gcloud services enable \

  cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com \

  container.googleapis.com \

  networkconnectivity.googleapis.com \

  serviceusage.googleapis.com \

  storage.googleapis.com \

  --project="$PROJECT_ID"

1. The Agent Substrate repo cloned down in your local environment. You can clone it from
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   1. Wait for the system Pods to come up.
      
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   CODE Kopieren

   kubectl get pods -n ate-system --watch
   
   

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   After the Pods come up, Substrate is now installed.

   
   
   

   
   
   
   Install The Substrate CLI
   

   
   
   

   With the Substrate system up and running, you need a way to interact with it's control/management plane. To do that, you'll use the ate sub-command.

   
   
   
   
   
   1. Install the command.
      
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   CODE Kopieren

   go install ./cmd/kubectl-ate
   
   

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   1. Add the binary to your path.
      
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   CODE Kopieren

   echo 'export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin"' >> ~/.zshrc
   
   source ~/.zshrc
   
   

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   1. Test out the sub-command.
      
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   CODE Kopieren

   kubectl ate --help
   
   

   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

   You now have ate installed and are ready to interact with Agent Substrate.

   
   
   

   

   
   
   

   
   
   
   Wrapping Up
   

   
   
   

   As the Agentic AI era continues to change how we think about Agents, so will the systems that we run them on. The next phase of "the systems we run them on" is Sandboxes, which will continue to rise in popularity for many organizations, as it gives the ability to isolate Agents from an ingress and egress perspective, along with what actions they can take with the tools that are available to them. I see Sandboxes being especially important as autonomous Agents become more relevant as well.

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