The rise of the agent runtime: The compute platform behind production agents

This is part of a (sponsored) series I'm going about Microsoft services and tools for getting the most out of AI agents, and the infrastructure side of this is really interesting because it's a workload with a lot of familiar needs but some really different ones too, and as I'm researching and writing I keep coming across real-life examples of why these issues matter.

If OpenAI had put the governance of its agent in an external gateway rather than in the internal sandbox, it wouldn't have mattered that the private registry had a live internet connection they'd forgotten about: the gateway would have stopped it using that to get out and hack Hugging Face.

The rise of the agent runtime: The compute platform behind production agents

Picking an AI model won't guarantee good agents. Here's why the runtime — fast startup, durable state, security, isolation — is what makes them work.

agentic AI

agentic infrastructure

agent sandbox

agent platform

Azure Container Apps Sandboxes

Azure Container Apps Express

Microsoft Foundry

Auger