coreweave/substrate

coreweave/substrate

Description: Agent Substrate: the core system

License: NOASSERTION

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Forks: 0

Open issues: 2

Created: 2026-05-20T19:15:43Z

Pushed: 2026-05-21T16:17:51Z

Default branch: main

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Parent repository: agent-substrate/substrate

Archived: no

README:

Agent Substrate

NOTE: This is not an officially supported Google product. This project is not eligible for the Google Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program.

What is Agent Substrate?

Agent substrate is a system built on top of Kubernetes which manages agent-like workloads to achieve higher scale and efficiency than Kubernetes alone can offer, with lower latency. It builds on top of Kubernetes features like Pods and Pod autoscaling, but takes the Kubernetes control-plane out of the critical path to achieve lower latency.

It can run on any Kubernetes cluster and does not inhibit “regular” use of Kubernetes in any way. Kubernetes provides the infrastructure provisioning and management for all types of workloads, while Agent Substrate provides agent-specific scheduling and control.

At its core, Agent Substrate maps a larger set of “actors” (applications such as agents) onto a smaller set of ready “workers” (Kubernetes Pods), relying on the fact that agent-like applications tend to be idle most of the time to achieve heavy multiplexing. It provides functionality to manage an actor’s lifecycle (e.g. create/destroy, suspend/resume), to assign actors to workers in real time, and to route incoming traffic to them.

Agent Substrate is intended to be a low-opinion system. The workloads it manages don't have to be literal AI agents, but those are the best example of the kind of applications it is designed for. It is not an SDK for building agents, but rather a system for running them at scale.

Demo


*Watch the Agent Substrate cluster multiplex ~250 stateful actor sessions across just 8 physical pods.*

This demo highlights the core developer experience and "Agentic Infrastructure" capabilities of Substrate:

1. Instant Session Teleport: High-performance suspend and resume of actors onto any available worker in the pool with sub-second activation. 2. State Persistence: Persistent working memory (volatile RAM) and filesystem state preserved perfectly across hibernation cycles via full-state snapshots. 3. Agent Swarm Multiplexing: Demonstrates 30x+ oversubscription by "juggling" a large registry of stateful actors onto a small pool of shared physical pods.

To reproduce this demo in your own cluster, please refer to the detailed walkthroughs in the [Counter Demo](demos/counter/README.md) and [Secret Agent Demo](demos/agent-secret/README.md).

For more videos and walkthroughs, visit our YouTube channel: [agent-substrate](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN9PPqlTtVxlcpbQ-NWpfZQ).

Framework Agnostic & Compatibility

Agent Substrate is designed to be framework and agent harness agnostic. Because it manages standard OCI containers at the kernel level (via gVisor), it can host agents built on any stack.

• Agent Development Kit (ADK): Native support for ADK-compatible session identity and persistent working memory.
• LangChain: Ideal execution environment for long-running, stateful LangChain agents and sandboxed tool-calling.
• Claude Code & CodeX: Support for high-density, stateful coding environments that preserve terminal and filesystem state across sessions.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): Deploy secure, sandboxed MCP servers as Substrate Actors to provide durable tools for any LLM.

Status and compatibility

Agent Substrate is currently in VERY early development. It is not ready for production use, and the APIs are almost guaranteed to change. We are not making any guarantees about backward compatibility at this stage, and everything in this project may be changed.

Community

For announcements, technical discussions, and community support, please join the [ate-dev](https://groups.google.com/g/ate-dev) Google Group.

Developing

Please see [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) for guidelines on contributing to the project. We welcome contributions of all kinds, but the project is VERY young. Our immediate focus is on building out the core system and demos, so we may not be able to review or merge contributions that don't align with those goals in the near term.

Quickstart (Development)

To quickly set up the complete environment:

1. Make sure you have `kind`, `kubectl`, and `docker` installed and configured on your dev machine.

2. Run the following steps:

# create cluster and local registry
hack/create-kind-cluster.sh

# install ate, valkey, rustfs
hack/install-ate-kind.sh --deploy-ate-system

# install counter demo
hack/install-ate-kind.sh --deploy-demo-counter

# install kubectl-ate
go install ./cmd/kubectl-ate

# create a counter actor and demo it
kubectl ate create actor my-counter-1 --template ate-demo-counter/counter
kubectl port-forward -n ate-system svc/atenet-router 8000:80 &
curl -X POST -H "Host: my-counter-1.actors.resources.substrate.ate.dev" -i http://localhost:8000/

GKE Quickstart (Development)

1. Create and configure your environment file:

cp hack/ate-dev-env.sh.example .ate-dev-env.sh

# Edit .ate-dev-env.sh to match your project and preferences, then source it:
source .ate-dev-env.sh

2. Enable application-default credentials for gcloud:

gcloud auth application-default login --project=${PROJECT_ID}

3. Provision the required GCP resources (GKE cluster, Redis, GCS, and IAM bindings):

go run ./cmd/setup --all

4. Deploy the Agent Substrate system to your cluster (remember to navigate back to root directory of this repo before running the following commands):

./hack/install-ate.sh --deploy-ate-system

5. You can then deploy the sample applications. See [demos/counter/README.md](demos/counter/README.md) or [demos/sandbox/README.md](demos/sandbox/README.md) for detailed walkthroughs.

./hack/install-ate.sh --deploy-demo-counter

Custom Setup and Deployment

You can run individual setup steps to create GCP resources as needed. See go run ./cmd/setup --help…