DigitalOcean launches managed infrastructure for persistent, tool-using AI agents
AI agents · Friday, 2 October 2026
Why it matters
The launch packages several production-agent primitives—persistent execution, idle pausing, parallel work, governed tool access, and managed scaling—into a cloud service rather than leaving developers to assemble them around conventional virtual machines. Its positioning against Docker Cloud Sandboxes highlights a market split between developer-oriented sandbox portability and production-oriented orchestration and tool management.
What happened
DigitalOcean launched Managed Agents in public preview, combining isolated microVM-based runtimes with a centralized Action Gateway for external tools. The Harness Runtime supports coding, general-purpose, and custom LangGraph agents, preserving conversational history and working state across sessions that can pause, resume, fork, and run in parallel. The Action Gateway exposes more than 16,000 tools through a unified MCP endpoint, including web, browser, infrastructure, GitHub, HubSpot, and Stripe integrations, with permissions, human approval for sensitive actions, rate limits, retries, backoff, and timeouts.
Players & places
- DigitalOcean
- Docker