Agent Runtimes on Kubernetes: Isolation, HA, and OpenShell vs. Agent Substrate

Running an AI agent in a sandbox is one thing. Running isolated, highly available agents in production is another.

NVIDIA OpenShell and similar approaches focus on secure agent execution, while Agent Substrate provides the infrastructure layer for running stateful agents on Kubernetes. This session compares the approaches, including what true workload isolation means beyond simply putting agents in containers, and what it takes to make an agent runtime genuinely highly available.

See how kagent builds on Agent Substrate to deliver a production agent runtime with durable state, multi-zone workers, stateless service replicas, and recovery from node and zone failures, alongside agentgateway for secure agent-to-tool connectivity.

You'll learn:

• How true sandbox isolation differs from simply running agents in containers
• How Agent Substrate compares with approaches such as OpenShell
• What high availability for stateful agents actually requires, including durable state, multi-zone workers, replicas, and failure recovery
• How kagent builds on Agent Substrate to manage and govern agents in production
• How agentgateway provides connectivity, security, and policy for agent-to-tool traffic
• How to test HA in practice with node kills, zone failures, and rolling restarts

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