Link: Agent Substrate — agentic infrastructure on Kubernetes

Agent Substrate — a new open-source project from Tim Hockin, co-founder of Kubernetes, tackling a gap that Kubernetes itself was never designed to fill: running large fleets of stateful, mostly-idle agent sessions without paying for one Pod per agent. Substrate sits on top of a regular Kubernetes cluster and maps a much larger set of "actors" onto a smaller pool of ready workers, suspending and resuming them with full state snapshots (volatile memory + filesystem) in sub-second time. The control plane stays out of the critical path, so activation latency is far below what the Kubernetes scheduler can offer. Early demos show ~250 stateful sessions juggled across 8 Pods — 30× oversubscription — with the project still in very early development.