Dean W. Perkins - Anthropic just released a 37-minute guide on how to build AI agents t...

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2 Video Views·Sep 13, 2026
Anthropic just released a 37-minute guide on how to build AI agents that can automate an entire business. It’s free, and it comes straight from the engineers who built Claude. Agents that actually work, delegate tasks, and get things done on their own. Save this post 🔖 https://t.co/cUivoVVk9d
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Video Summary
AI GeneratedIsabella He introduces Cloud Managed Agents (CMA), a production-ready harness that simplifies AI agent deployment. The session details the transition from raw APIs to managed infrastructure, emphasizing the decoupling of the agent's \"brain\" (logic) from its \"hands\" (execution) to improve security, reduce latency, and enhance scalability for complex tasks like incident response.
All right, hello everyone.
It's great to see you all here today
for our session on shipping your first manage agent.
Let's go ahead and get started.
My name is Isabella He.
I'm a member of technical staff at Anthropic
on the Applied AI team.
The Applied AI team at Anthropic
sits at the intersection of products,
research, and our customers,
which means that I get to contribute internally
to products at Anthropic,
like Cloud Code and our Cloud Harnesses,
as well as work externally with our customers
that are building on top of Cloud
and on top of our Harnesses.
So my goal today is to get you all hands-on
with actually building on top of manage agents,
understanding how the Harness works under the hood,
and getting you ready to actually ship
your first incident response management.
So as a quick overview of today's agenda,
we're gonna cover first a quick refresher
of Cloud Manage Agents.
I wanna talk to you for a little bit
about how this Harness works under the hood
and what makes it so special.
Our team put a lot of thought
into the architectural design of Cloud Manage Agents
to make sure that it runs ready
and reliably for production-ready agents.
So I wanna talk you through a little bit
about how that works,
so that then when we transition
to the second portion here,
which is the hands-on workshop,
you'll actually understand
what each of the primitives you're building
actually mean for your agents under the hood.
So for the majority of today's session,
I want you all to actually have your laptops open,
building alongside me,
actually working inside of a repository,
and getting you ready to actually spin up
a working incident response agent.
Lastly, we'll talk a little bit about Beyond the Basics.
Today's session is the first session
of a couple of other ones
that we'll build on top of this on Cloud Manage Agents.
Specifically right after this one,
I think there's another session on Dreaming,
which is one of my favorite new features
with Cloud Manage Agents for self-improving agents
and memory built into the Harness.
So encourage everyone to dive in a little bit deeper
into what else is in the box
after we set you all up for success today
with a quick introduction.
So let's first touch a little bit
about how we got here with Cloud Manage Agents.
When we first released the very first Cloud back in 2023,
we released the Messages API alongside Access to Cloud.
This provided raw model access to all Cloud models.
This became the very first way
that people could programmatically build on top of Cloud,
and essentially gave a way for people to access tokens in
and tokens out via our Cloud models.
This also meant that for everyone
building on top of Cloud models,
they had to implement all the various primitives themselves,
things like context management,
the actual agent loop, compaction, et cetera,
all the primitives that come alongside making an agent work.
When models were less intelligent back in the early days
of, let's say, 2023,
some of these primitives were much simpler
because agents could simply do less.
But as we evolved into now with higher model intelligence,
and as agents are able to take on more complex tasks
and actually take actions within environments
and come to actually do entire tasks for humans,
the primitives that come alongside context management
and managing an agent's ability to execute API calls
and tool calls becomes much more complex.
So that's when we moved to the Agent SDK,
which became a harness that allows you
to programmatically call Cloud Code,
one of our favorite agents at Entropiq.
So Cloud Code is something that an agent has access
to a computer and takes actions within the file system.
So the Agent SDK became a way
for you to make Cloud much more powerful
by leveraging the power of Cloud Code within harness.
The main thing here, though, is that with the Agent SDK,
developers still had to manage hosting
and scaling on their own,
and making sure that the Agent SDK
would be safe to run within their containers.
That's when we then evolved into Cloud Managed Agents,
which is the first harness to be able to handle scaling
and production-ready components for you by Entropiq,
providing things like a purpose-built harness,
sandboxing, observability, tool runtime,
all within a managed infrastructure system.
This means that developers can focus on task
and agent configuration, custom tool logic,
the things that actually matter
for bringing domain expertise
and customizability to your agents,
where you're handing off the rest of all the primitives
and core compute and primitives
of essentially managing the basics
of agent running to Entropiq.
So that brings me to Managed Agents
as the fastest way to build
production-ready agents on Cloud.
We've seen people build 10 to 15 times faster
to production with Cloud Managed Agents
by leveraging our purpose-built harness.
Part of the reason why we built Cloud Managed Agents
is because harnesses should evolve alongside your agents.
For example, back when we were building ourselves
on top of models like SONNET 4.5,
we noticed that SONNET 4.5
emitted a particular behavior called context anxiety.
This meant that with SONNET 4.5,
Cloud started wrapping up tasks early,
even when it still had room to spare in its context window.
To manage that in our harness,
we then added some mitigations
to combat against this early stopping behavior.
But when Opus 4.5 then came out,
we actually saw this behavior go away,
making all that work we had done inside of the harness
essentially obsolete,
because Cloud had evolved beyond that behavior
that we had built into the harness to manage.
So the takeaway there is that it's a lot of work
to maintain harnesses and make sure
that they actually evolve alongside your agents,
which is why with Cloud Managed Agents,
we want to make it really easy for Cloud and Anthropic
to handle all the complexities that come with compaction,
caching, things like context anxiety,
all these various primitives
that come with actually making agent production ready
and getting the most out of Cloud.
So again, you can focus on the tasks, tools,
and things that actually matter
for building agents on Cloud.
So three primary resources
go into building on Cloud Managed Agents.
First is the agent's endpoint,
which is the persona and capabilities
This is the core system prompt that powers your agent.
Essentially here, you're defining the model,
the MCP servers, the skills,
the various components that your agents
can actually leverage
when it's able to run in that agent loop.
The next is the environments.
You can think of this as the hands of the agent,
where the previous one is the brain of the agent,
where the agent is thinking through what to execute,
and then it's using an environment
to actually have a space and a container
to actually take action on your behalf.
Sessions are next the way to tie together
agents and environments.
A single session has spun up on an agent instance
within an environment.
So you can connect the two together
and actually stream events back to your user
and start to take action on behalf of your humans
as part of a Cloud-powered agent.
A key thing here, as I alluded to briefly before,
Cloud Managed Agent has the agent loop run server-side.
This means that a lot of the complexities
that come with managing hosting and scaling
are abstracted away.
And when you close your laptop
or you hit hard refresh on your agent
that you're building on Cloud Managed Agents,
everything is maintained
and you don't have to worry about durability, reliability,
all these various aspects that usually come to bite you
when you're trying to turn your agent
from a prototype into production.
And lastly here, before we dive into the hands-on portion,
is I want to talk you through a key design decision
that went into Cloud Managed Agents.
Previously, with a lot of agent harnesses,
we saw the agent loop coupled tightly with tool execution.
This design pattern made sense
and still makes sense for some agents
because you want to give the agent powerful abilities
to actually take action with an environment.
For instance, with Cloud Code,
we want the agent to be able to access various files
on your computer, take action within a file system,
and therefore it makes sense for the agent
to have access to all those tools
spun up on every container.
But we also realize there are some constraints for this,
especially with some agents
where you essentially want to be able to decouple
the hands from the brains of the agents.
For instance, credentials and security
became a huge concern.
With the ability to have the agent access your file system,
you can actually add very distinct sandboxing
by decoupling these two components,
where the agent is no longer able to access
the actual credentials without encryption
by decoupling the hands from the sandbox of the agent.
The other aspect here is actually,
you can see huge benefits by doing this decoupling
on things like time-to-first token and latency.
Previously, with the agent loop and tool execution
in the same box, you had to spin up containers
for every single session that you're spinning up an agent,
which contributed to additional latency
from a time-to-first token perspective.
But with this now decoupled,
our teams actually saw reductions in time-to-first token
along the lines of over 90% reduction in TTFT
for our P95 metrics on latency.
So here you can start to see the power
of this design decision coming through
from the perspective of safety, reliability, latency,
and everything else that you care about
when it comes to building production-ready agents.
All right, so now it's time
for the exciting part of today's session,
which is where I want you all to open up your laptops
and go to this URL here to actually clone a repository,
and let's start to actually feel the magic
of everything that I just talked through.
So I'm gonna give everyone a second
to just go over to that URL there
and just spin up the repository that we have ready for you.
All right, so here's some additional commands
that I want you all to run
to make sure this is all set up on your computers.
So the first step, many of you might have done already,
but just take that repository, hit the URL, get clone it,
and then I want you to CD
into the specific repository for the session,
which is ship your first managed agent.
And then if you're on Mac,
you'll see those two commands on the side,
the Python and the source.
There's a command there for Windows as well.
And you'll just do the rest there
where you want to install the requirements,
copy over the environment key into your .env file.
Here, you'll put in the Entropic API key
that hopefully all of you also received
from the QR code for free credits earlier.
And lastly, we'll just run the app.
All right, let's go ahead and dive in.
But as I mentioned before,
let me just show everyone where these instructions are.
If you go into the repository in the link
and then go to ship your first managed agency,
you scroll down on the readme,
you'll see all the setup instructions here.
So feel free to do this as we go along
or even in your own time later today
and continue playing around with it.
But as I mentioned before,
everything will be also shown on the screen
to follow along with.
So do not worry if you did not have time
to fully get it set up on your laptop.
Without further ado, let's go ahead and dive in.
So once you run streamlitrunapp.py,
you should be able to see a URL that looks like this
and a page that looks like this.
What we're doing here is we're going to be simulating
an agent interaction here
where we have an incident that's going to come up.
A lot of you who might be software engineers in the room
will be intimately familiar with the pain
that comes alongside incident response.
If you are a software engineer,
you might be woken up at let's say 3 a.m. in the morning,
2 a.m. in the morning when you're out on vacation
as you're on call.
And this is usually a very painful portion
of a software engineer's life
because when you're on call,
it means that if a server goes down
or a service goes down,
you have to be immediately the one there
to respond and tackle the incident.
Usually for a human, this means diving into metrics
and logs and deployments
so you can actually investigate what's going on.
And so what we're gonna do is we're going to now
have an agent run on Cloud Manage Agents
to do all this for us
so that when we get woken up by 3 a.m.,
we can hand it off to an agent
or maybe we don't even get woken up at all
if Cloud is able to do everything for us.
Okay, so let's now go ahead and dive into the code here.
What we're gonna open up here
is we have the agent.py file on the left
and the agent.complete on the right.
If you wanna challenge yourself,
you can of course try to implement everything yourself here
or with Cloud,
but what we're gonna do just for simplicity's sake
is just copy over various elements
from the completed file
onto the incomplete file one by one
so you can see how these primitives
compose our agent one piece at a time.
So let's go ahead and start off with this very first part,
which is the agent.
We mentioned before that the agent
is the one that defines the persona
and the capabilities of the agent here.
So that's the model, the system prompts,
and the tools in our case for our agent here.
So let me go ahead and copy over
what we see there on the screen
and you can see here that we're defining the SRE agent.
We're gonna use Cloud Opus 4.7 here
and I've pre-configured a system prompt
and tools for the agent.
We can actually take a quick look
into what that system prompt and tool looks like here.
For the system prompt,
you can see that it's actually extremely simple
for the agent that we're defining today.
You can, of course, add more complexity
and constraints here,
but we actually see a very simple prompt
working for our agent that we're building today.
We're just telling it that it's an SRE agent,
it's responsible for coming in and debugging incidents,
and it has access to various tools
like metrics, recent deployments, get diff.
These are tools that you would want as a developer
if you're actually managing an incident response as well,
like the ability to actually fetch logs
so you can see exactly what's going wrong.
So we're gonna give those same tools
and the same instructions over to our agent.
So now that we've configured this on the screen
and feel free for those of you
who are able to spin it up on your own laptops
to just follow along with exactly what I'm doing,
which is copying over this portion from the right
onto the left here.
And then when we flip back over to the screen,
what we'll see is this wasn't there
until I had just added that there,
but we can now actually have a unique identifier
attached to the agent that we're building.
Okay, so that's step one.
Now let's go ahead and move over to step two,
which is the environment where the agent
is going to actually do work in.
All of you here, we're very lucky
for those of you who were able to come yesterday as well
to code with Cloud London.
We actually just released yesterday
the ability to bring your own containers
and your own compute to Cloud Manage Agents,
which means that you can actually execute the agent
for the tools and the actual ability
for the agent's actions to work
within your own infrastructure
and not just Entropiq's managed infrastructure.
So that's an exciting update
that just came to Code with Cloud London.
But for today's purposes,
you can actually see if we copy over
this environment configuration here.
We're defining our SRE agent to work
within the Entropiq Cloud,
and here we're just giving it unrestricted access
from a networking perspective.
We've made Cloud Manage Agents very composable
and very customizable.
So this networking list here is actually an allow list.
If you want your agent to only be able
to access specific sites and URLs,
you can restrict this down as much as you would like.
We also released Cloud MCP Tunnels,
which actually also gives you the ability
to run MCP servers within a private environment
instead of on the public network as well.
So again, just offering various components
to help you make sure that your agents
are as production-ready and as secure as possible.
So now that we've defined this environment here,
let's flip back over,
and we just saw that environment piece
come into our agent as well.
So here we have unique identifier
for an agent in an environment,
and that will next help us as we go along
with setting up the rest of our agents
as we start to get into session definitions here.
The next thing that we have to do
is actually give our agent the ability to look at logs.
With Cloud Code, that isn't one of the first times
where we realized the power of giving the agent access
to files in a file system.
Here with Cloud Manage Agents,
we're leveraging essentially the files API
by uploading the metrics and logs to the agent
so the agent can start to run code
and process through those files.
So here we've attached the log here as a file for our agent,
so we just also saw that populate and come through.
Again here, the key takeaway is as much data
as you're able to give the agent as possible
is what makes it so powerful.
Context engineering is a huge portion
that comes to actually making an agent powerful,
and this is where we see the developers
spending the majority of their time
working on top of primitives like Cloud Manage Agents
is managing context and managing
what types of files are uploaded,
how the agent processes those files.
These are components that you compose yourself
and are very customizable on top of Cloud Manage Agents
to make it work as far and as wide as you want it to.
Okay, so now let's go ahead and start to define
the session that we have here.
The session is going to, oops,
the session is going to bind the agent and the environment
and also mount the log here.
So you can see we're passing in the agent ID,
the environment ID, and the resources
that we're giving to the agent.
And this is going to give it the ability
to start to actually act and interact with me as a user.
Let's go ahead and just complete the rest of this here
so that we can actually start to run our agent.
What we wanna do is now also give the ability
for the agent to come in and stream responses to me
as we go along.
Okay, and the key portion here is that
when our Cloud Manage Agents runs within a single session,
instead of responding in tokens in and tokens out,
it actually works in units of events.
Events here are things like user messages
or agent tool calls, agent responses,
so that every event can be logged
from an observability perspective,
as well as streamed back to the user
for the user to see the agent responding
as it calls tools and as it starts to populate responses.
This is crucial for both a user experience perspective,
so users start to see things as they come through
and not just when Cloud finishes an entire task.
And also from an observability perspective,
and Cloud Manage Agents actually has a very neat console
built in for looking at everything the agent is doing,
and a lot of observability features
built into Cloud Manage Agents.
Okay, the last step here of just being able
to put our agent together,
you can start to see that our agent
is actually starting to come together.
We can start to create sessions
and we can start to do things.
What we're actually gonna see here though
is that if I send something like hi to the agent,
it can respond, but it doesn't actually have the ability
to be able to call the various tools that we want it to yet,
because we haven't connected that locally
to what we want the agent to do
when it calls tools like GetMetrics.
So the agent is ready,
the agent is actually defined on the server side already.
The missing piece here is just to finally give it
our local tools, so the agent can start to take action here
on my computer or my infrastructure.
Okay, so now that we have that copied over,
the agent is going to be able to start to call GetMetrics,
GetRecentDeploys, GetDiffs,
so it can truly start to take action
in terms of helping us debug this instance.
Last thing I'm going to do here is also just to make sure
I give my agent the ability to delete sessions,
so that when I come in, I can start to hit
this delete button and delete sessions
as I compose my agent.
And this is also crucial from a security perspective.
If you wanna make sure that nothing is being retained
for sessions that you don't want on the cloud
or on your infrastructure,
you can actually just come in and proactively manage
how sessions are deleted.
And once they're deleted, they will be also removed
from every single log aspect here,
so that you can truly make sure that whatever data
you want managed is managed actively
and proactively via Cloud Managed Agents.
Okay, so with that all set up,
let's go ahead and give our agent a test run here.
I'm going to click the new session here,
and I'm going to just go ahead and ask the agent
to debug my incident for me.
You can see here that because we gave the agent access
to tools like sandboxing and bash and get recent deploys,
the agent is starting to really take powerful actions
on my behalf here.
It's come in, it's run the sandbox command.
We can open this up and see what this looks like.
We can see that it's actually coming in
and looking at what the logs were added to.
It's then come in and called this tool
called get recent deploys, which is coming in
and returning results like what the recent deployments
look like, the metrics.
We can see this from a user perspective
if you click on the tabs here,
but this is essentially the data
that's actually being passed into the agent
via these local tools that we've designed.
And again, we can start to see the magic of that streaming
that we implemented come through as well,
because we saw these tools come in
as they were being called from the agent.
We saw the user prompts come in
as soon as I prompted it to the agent.
And the agent is actually streaming responses to me
as it comes through with more token response and outputs,
as well as as it calls more tools as it goes along as well.
Okay, so what we're gonna start to see
is the agent being able to help us actually debug
what's going on here,
which we can see here that the incident
is that there's something going wrong
with our P99 latency that seems to be 10 times
above baseline.
The agent is coming in and debugging everything for us.
Just taking another second there.
So some of the major design decisions that come in here
when you're designing a real site reliability,
site incident response management agent for your systems
is to think deeply about the various components that go in
and the various MCP servers and skills
that you wanna give your agent.
Here we've defined, of course, a very, very simple agent,
but for lots of the SRE agents that we build,
we actually also think about things like
how can we give the agent a skill
to actually execute and run runbooks?
Runbooks are things where as teams debug incidents,
they note down and document how they debug that incident
so that they can do it again
for a future session or a future incident.
You wanna give the agent same access to the materials
that you would have as a human developer.
So something like a runbook skill
where the agent is actually able to look at example runbooks
or fetch other postmortems from other incident responses.
That is something that is very powerful
for the agent to be able to understand
how to work within your systems
and debug incidents successfully.
Okay, let's go ahead and take a look at the agent here.
Let's see.
I'm going to go ahead and just start a new session here
to make sure everything is working well.
All right, let's say debug my incident for me.
Okay, hopefully this one works.
Is anyone able to get it working on their laptops
better than I have on the screen?
Okay, we got some success in the room,
so hopefully this will work as it goes along.
Okay, it looks like we are streaming,
we're getting everything in.
Where did the agent go?
Okay, agent is checking logs, debugging everything.
So if we just also look through some of the data here
as the agent is working,
the data that's actually being passed in for our agent here
is all local just for our purposes for our demo
and our workshop that we're running today.
But with the ability for you to run your agents
within a container and infrastructure,
you can start to see how things like your get metrics tool
that are currently pulling from JSON
can be easily moved to something like Datadog
or other production systems for your infrastructure
from that perspective.
So everything that you see here that is currently local
can be something that's easily movable into infrastructure
as well via Cloud Manage Agents.
Okay, let's all cross our fingers and see if this one works.
Oh, there we go, success.
Okay, so the agent has come in,
you can see here that we scroll through all the tool calls,
everything is persisted in the cloud.
From a logs perspective, all of this will also be logged
in the observability console.
And then the agent has come back to us
with the incident response here.
It says that this needs to be caused
by a database pool exhaustion.
Seems like a commit that someone added here from Alice
to refactor the order summary builder,
introduced a query that then caused
the pool resources to be exhausted.
So it's looking at and giving us the exact everything
that went wrong from all the metrics they were able to call.
It ruled out various other causes
and then it's also giving us recommended actions to take.
Another key component here
and a lot of other incident response management agents
that we built is actually giving the agent
to actually go ahead and fix everything
that it's been able to find.
By giving the agent then access
to something like Cloud Code, for instance,
you can actually imagine this agent
can then go into your code base,
suggest fixes, put up a PR,
and essentially do everything that it needs to do
to help you go from initial incident
all the way to fixing the root cause.
So again, here for demo purposes,
we're stopping at just the agent
giving us the recommended actions,
but I want you all to imagine the possibilities
of where this can go.
If we give our agent more tools,
more ability to take actions,
access to your code base,
ability to put up PRs,
ability to fix incidents
so that you as a human developer
can just become the oversight
and watch over the agents as they take action
and you no longer have to go through
and do manual steps
like actually following the agent's instructions here
to fix the root cause of the incident.
So another key component of what we've built here
on Cloud Managed Agents is session persistence.
So when I come in and hit hard refresh on the screen,
we're seeing that the agent is listing the sessions
and everything is retained
from all the sessions that we just ran.
We also have the previous sessions that we ran
all retained in the cloud.
Looks like this one actually came back to us as well.
And the previous sessions where we just said hi,
everything is retained in the cloud.
And we didn't have to deal with things like database
and deployment of our agent
and moving it from our laptops, production.
Everything is already maintained server side.
We can also see the ability to delete sessions come in.
So I've run that delete.
And now we have that running the session here.
Now we have that removed from our list here.
Another thing that I want you to take a note of,
which we'll talk through a little bit in just a second
is the states of the session.
Here we can see that the sessions are now idle.
Just now as they were running,
they were in a running state.
We have the sessions managed by state here
as part of that same durability
and maintenance and reliability of the session.
So when I come in and ask the agent something else,
like, who are you?
It's able to easily resume the session
and execute as it goes along
within that same session window.
So state management here is really important
to how managed agents works under the hood.
All right.
So now as if we just take a quick step back
and look through everything we were able to accomplish,
we started with an empty agent here,
just built on a couple of primitives on Cloud Managed Agents.
We then went and defined the agent's definition,
the persona, the capabilities.
We gave the agent an environment.
We gave the agent data and context to operate over.
We then gave the agent sessions,
combining the agent definitions to an environment
so the agent can think through
which tools to call from an agent perspective.
And then it can actually call those tools
and take action on our behalf.
We then came in and streamed the responses
to the user into our logs,
implemented some local tools,
as well as the ability to delete sessions.
And within this Streamlit app here,
we saw how that actually affected
from a front-end perspective,
how our agent was actually able to be presented to our users
by adding all of these primitives together.
So now let's go ahead and move back over to the slides
to do a quick recap
and talk through some of the lessons of what we learned
about how Cloud Managed Agents works under the hood.
But hopefully for all of you
who are able to actually build on your laptops,
you all were able to just build a site reliability agent.
So congrats to you all.
But let's go ahead and dive in a little bit here
into understanding what actually happened
when we put all those pieces together.
The first thing we saw is that
we saw sessions speak in events
and not responses in and tokens in,
tokens out from a request response perspective,
like we see typical with things like Message API
or other APIs that we see.
With Cloud Managed Agents,
instead of just having a request response,
we actually have events appended to the logs.
Again, this is a huge portion of why Cloud Managed Agents
is so reliable and secure
because events are coming through
and just added into an existing session logs
so that it's easy to then resume a session
and kick back off where you left off.
And it's easy to then come in
and look at everything from a log perspective.
This is also really important
from a reliability perspective
when we separate the hands from the brain of the agent
that if a container goes down,
you can just spin that container back up again.
And we don't have to restart the entire agent loop
alongside that container.
The next thing here is that we saw the ability
to implement local tools.
And we implemented in our workshop
these local tools defined in JSON
and loading them in via our local files here.
We were then actually able to see
how with our Cloud Managed Agents harness,
the execution of the agent
is completely separate from the agent.
We defined everything that executed locally
on our laptops and our scripts,
and our agent loop ran on the cloud
inside of Anthropx managed infrastructure.
Again, here, especially with what we just released
with bring your own compute
and bring your own sandboxing here,
you can swap out where you want that agent
to execute its tools in your own infrastructure
or on Anthropx managed infrastructure,
but within your own environments
and your own containers as well,
as you spin them up,
moving from things like loading our tools in from JSON
into anywhere you want to have your tools run
like a Datadog client using the same wire protocol,
making it very easy to then go from
initially building the agent for Cloud Managed Agents
to then actually producing it
and deploying it on production ready infrastructure.
Next thing we saw here,
as we thought about how our sessions
are being streamed into our users
and what we see from a front end perspective,
is that we saw when our events
were being able to be streamed to our users,
these were in the forms of actually things
we care about as a user.
We saw events come in and we saw the agent's ability
to actually log everything to its observability console.
And another key thing here is that
as we think about how sessions are controlled
in Cloud Managed Agents,
you can actually think about the state
as being something very powerful
when you can start to take action on behalf of events.
What that means is that we saw a couple of key states
for sessions in CMA or Cloud Managed Agents.
We went from idle to running,
rescheduling if the agent needs to retry anything
or terminated if any of the sessions fail.
And so the agent is able to restart
from a reliability perspective,
a resumability perspective,
but also it can actually do some very powerful things.
For instance, you can actually have a webhook run
and when an event happens from a webhook,
the agent receives that webhook in
and can then do something like resume a session
or kickstart a specific state based on external events.
So again, this powerful form of having events and sessions
be the core concepts of how Cloud Managed Agents runs
means that you can make it very, very easy
to compose your agent however you want it to
and have the agent listen for things that happen
both internally and externally via webhooks
to take actions or resume your agent as you desire.
And lastly, here's something that we saw come through
through the agent that we all built
for the site reliability agent
is that everything lives in the cloud
from the agent loop's perspective.
The conversation is persisted.
When we hard refresh the page,
we saw those same sessions were maintained
and we saw that if we were able to, let's say,
exit out of the agent and come back,
we didn't have to manage anything
from a database perspective
or wire up where the agent is stored.
We were just able to have all of that persisted in the cloud,
again, making it very, very easy
to go to production-ready agents.
And lastly here, I just want to talk you through,
we just built the very basic form of Cloud Managed Agents.
We saw it was possible
with just the very, very simple primitives
that we all built with,
the basic level of what you can do with Cloud Managed Agents.
And already there, we were able to have
something that would usually take us a lot of time
to spin up from a production perspective,
all of compaction, caching, tool calling,
all of that was handled for us via Cloud Managed Agents.
And even if we wanted to go beyond that
to make our agent much, much more powerful,
we could do things like add in skills,
add in sub-agents, add in memory, add in outcomes.
These are all core components
that we offer to developers out of the box
from Cloud Managed Agents.
I'll just briefly talk you through
a couple of the key components,
but want to encourage everyone
to check out our documentation,
what's publicly available on Cloud Managed Agents,
attend the session after this one on Dreaming,
to dive in deeper onto these topics.
Sub-agents or multi-agents
is a way for you to have an orchestrator agent
spin up context with other agents
so that you can manage it
from a context engineering perspective,
where sub-agents can then handle tasks
and have their own context windows
and contribute back to the main agent,
making it much more powerful
from a parallelization perspective,
as well as the ability for context management.
Memory is something that's always very important
as we're building agents.
I hear a lot of questions
about how you can build self-improving agents
or agents that learn from user corrections,
agents that start to remember user preferences.
That's where we're offering memory
and a Dreaming service
for Cloud Managed Agents out of the box.
What Dreaming means for Managed Agents
is that Cloud can actually come
and also look through its own memory logs
and determine what to keep
and determine how it can actually start to memorize
and manage context for its own memory.
So it can actually be able to really accurately remember
which parts of your user preferences matter
and which part of user corrections
you want to retain for future sessions
you run on that same agent.
Outcomes is another one of my favorites
where for Cloud Managed Agents,
this means that you can actually define a rubric
for your agent outcomes.
So you can start to think of your agent's tasks
as something where you want the agent
to reach a desired outcome
instead of just executing calls
and doing things on your behalf,
but not associating that to a result that you want.
So with outcomes, you can define a rubric
of exactly what you want the agent to produce,
and it'll figure out along the way
which tool calls and what it needs to do
to execute towards that final result.
Vaults is something else that I hear come up a lot
as of interest for Cloud Managed Agents
because managing user credentials
is something that's very painful
from an access management perspective,
making sure that your agents are secure and safe to run.
So for Vaults and Cloud Managed Agents,
there's actually an encryption that happens
between where the credentials are stored
on a separate endpoint
and what the agent is actually able to access.
So you can manage these credentials
on a per user per session basis,
all very safely and securely.
And this relies in large part
to that architecture that I described earlier
of how the brains and the hands of the agent are separated
so that credentials can be stored
very securely in these vaults.
This means that you don't have to set up
your own secret stores or your own credential stores,
and you can just rely on the built-in capability here.
There are a couple other things here
that I won't have time to go through in depth.
So again, I encourage everyone
to check them out in more detail.
There are things like the ability to do web hooks
and really make this agent run on external events,
things like detailed and fine-grained permission policies,
the MCP servers that I mentioned
where we just released new MCP server controls as well.
And something that I also love just to briefly touch on
is the Console Agent Builder
where we have built in a lot of capability and functionality
into the default developer console
where you can start to see
a beautiful observability dashboard come through
and other ways for you to define Cloud Managed Agents
right there on your consoles.
So just as a quick recap to end us off here
of what we were able to accomplish today,
hopefully everyone leaves here with a bit of a mental model
about how Managed Agents actually works under the hood
and be proud of yourselves
for everyone that was able to come in
and build on your laptops
and actually ship a Site Reliability Agent.
So you can all leave here being very happy with yourselves
that you were able to come in and save future developers
hours of time of being woken up
at 3 a.m. or 2 a.m. in the morning
and being able to handle incidents for them.
And next, you also learned a little bit
about where to go next
for how you can really start to unlock the power
that comes with Managed Agents
and think about how your agents can become super powered
with all of these additional functionalities.
So that is where I'll end off today,
but thank you all so much for coming.
I'll be around in a second.
