The most capable agents have something simple in common: they are given their own computer to work with. Coding agents work this way. You give them a filesystem, a shell, tools, packages, and the ability to run code.
They inspect the environment, make changes, test their work, and keep going. The computer gives the model a familiar way to act on the world. At Cloudflare, we’re working hard to provide the right primitives on which to build the most capable agents.
Today we’re introducing an early preview of @cloudflare/computer . The @cloudflare/computer package provides an agent runtime where the details and mechanics of what code runs in an isolate, a container sandbox, or a web browser are handled by the platform. Each agent gets a computer, the runtime optimizes for efficiency, and scalability.
We believe that in order to meet the growing demand for compute required by agentic systems we need to look to solutions beyond traditional containerization. Changing how agents are built We’ve seen a subtle evolution of this story over the past six months. At the start of the year, spinning up a container and running an agent inside of it was the norm.
In recent months, we’ve seen a rapid move for agent harnesses to provide sandboxed code execution via tools. This separates the hands (the sandbox where work is done) from the brain (the agent loop). No matter where the harness runs, giving every agent a container presents a challenge — across all the clouds, all the hyperscalers, there’s nowhere near enough compute in the world for every company to give each of their users’ agents their own containerized compute environment.
This will not scale to hundreds of millions, then billions, of concurrent agents. This is why there is desperate, panicked industry demand for CPU compute, not just GPU compute. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time at Cloudflare, creating a more efficient compute primitive: isolates.
We made that out-of-consensus bet almost 10 years ago when we introduced Cloudflare Workers . We made it again when we introduced Durable Objects almost six years ago. We made this bet because isolates are infinitely horizontally scalable.
They spin up and tear down incredibly quickly. They can hibernate when the agent is idle, store the agent’s own state , and even spin up their own isolates to run untrusted code. Isolates are the best way to scale horizontally, and horizontal scale is what agents demand.
Last year, we gave isolates the ability to spin up their own container sandboxes . From day one, Cloudflare’s architecture has been designed to run the agent harness in the isolate (in a Durable Object) and call an attached container on-demand as a tool. This allows you to utilize heavier compute primitives only when required, optimizing performance and cost.
Durable Objects scale infinitely horizontally, and the attached container lets it scale vertically to perform any task. This is how we build agents ourselves, and we’re seeing customers build incredible things this way too. But when we look at this need to have multiple underlying compute primitives to build agents (isolates and containers) and the need for our customers and developers to combine them themselves in userspace, we think we can do better.
We think that we can provide a simpler abstraction. That’s why we’re starting this experiment by shipping @cloudflare/computer as an open-source library, to learn with our customers who are pushing the bounds of running agents at scale. A shared filesystem across isolates and containers The @cloudflare/computer package starts with a simple premise: what if we give an agent a primed filesystem, declaratively defined, containing everything required for the task at hand and a selection of execution environments to operate on those files, each with their own pros and cons regarding speed, capability and cost?
It turns out that agents today are surprisingly capable of selecting the right environment for the task at hand. A job that only needs to manipulate files, process data, or manage a git repository can run inside an isolate. A command that needs Linux, npm , or a native binary can run inside a container.
Both work against the same files that are kept in sync with the source filesystem. The @cloudflare/computer package provides a durable filesystem that you can use with git repositories, storage buckets or any files you choose. It provides tools that let you read, write and edit files using Code Mode or bash commands.
All operations are gated, audited and observed, giving you fine-grained control over changes the agent is allowed to perform as well as a clear paper trail showing what the agent did. How you use it An instance of a @cloudflare/computer workspace can be instantiated on any Durable Object to provide a virtual filesystem and execution runtime. It is installed via npm: The primary use case is provide that filesystem and tooling to an agent.
For example, here’s how to instantiate the workspace on an agent powered by @cloudflare/think intended to triage bug reports. Several execution backends are provided as part of the @cloudflare/computer package, or you can write your own. Here we wire up a Cloudflare Container.
Expose the file, git, and shell tools alongside product specific tools to reply to reported issues. The model can use tools during the agent loop, but you can also use the workspace API directly, for example, to prepare the environment before prompting the agent. Check out the workspace repository for more examples of how to use the different backends and tools including a step-by-step tutorial walking through building an agent from scratch.
How it works The central piece of @cloudflare/computer is the workspace. A virtual filesystem backed by SQLite that can be populated from various sources including cloud storage and source control. The workspace supports optional execution runtimes that allow code to be run against the file system.
Originally published at blog.cloudflare.com
