AI Infrastructure
DigitalOcean Launches Managed Agents to Handle AI Agent Infrastructure at Scale
A new managed cloud platform lets developers deploy and scale AI agents without building their own runtime infrastructure, handling persistence, tool access, and security automatically.
InfoQ
DigitalOcean has introduced Managed Agents in public preview, a hosted infrastructure service designed specifically for running AI agents in production. The service aims to eliminate repetitive infrastructure work that developers typically face when deploying agentic systems.
The Infrastructure Challenge#
Running AI agents on standard cloud infrastructure requires developers to handle numerous operational concerns beyond code: maintaining agent context across sessions, storing and retrieving generated artifacts, coordinating parallel work, and securing how agents access external tools and services. Additionally, teams must maintain idle compute capacity to keep response times fast while avoiding wasteful overprovisioning.
DigitalOcean's new offering tackles these problems by providing two integrated components: a Harness Runtime for agent execution and an Action Gateway for controlled tool access.
Harness Runtime: Persistent Compute Environments#
The Harness Runtime runs agents on lightweight, security-hardened microVMs that offer isolated, persistent environments. It supports several agent frameworks—including Claude Code, Codex CLI, and OpenCode for coding tasks, plus general-purpose agents like Hermes and custom agents built with LangGraph.
Key capabilities include:
- Session persistence: Agents can pause, resume, or fork execution while retaining conversational history and working state
- Idle pause: Sessions automatically suspend when agents aren't actively processing, reducing unnecessary compute costs
- Parallel execution: Multiple sessions can run concurrently across different repositories and tasks, enabling workflows like divide-and-conquer and map/reduce patterns
- Secure internal access: Agents connect to internal services without exposing them publicly
Action Gateway: Governed Tool Access#
The Action Gateway serves as a unified interface through which agents access external services and tools. The platform currently offers over 16,000 pre-integrated tools, ranging from web search and browser automation to infrastructure APIs and third-party connectors for GitHub, HubSpot, Stripe, and other platforms.
