2026-09-20 · news · framework

Google AX makes the agent, not the container, the unit of isolation

AX is Google's declarative runtime for agent workloads, and its four primitives are the argument: Task (sandboxed execution with CPU and memory limits), Workspace (pre-wired git repos, MCP servers and skill packs so each run starts warm), Gateway (an outbound allowlist that defaults to deny and injects credentials at the edge), and Model (provider plus secrets). Applied with kubectl-shaped commands: ax apply, ax get, ax watch, ax suspend, ax resume, ax ssh. The v0.3.0 rewrite moved task state out of Kubernetes etcd into Redis Streams, because etcd was never built for millions of short-lived agent tasks. Suspend checkpoints a waiting agent and resume restarts it from the interruption - the cost control that matters when an agent idles on a model API. The caveats are on the record too: the README still warns of breaking changes before a stable release, early testers report dropped egress-proxy connections and thin secrets management, and the billions-of-workloads-per-cluster claim ships without a reproducible benchmark.