Building a computer that can pause and resume in milliseconds: Inside the MicroVM architecture behind Managed Agents

DigitalOcean’s Managed Agents platform uses Firecracker microVMs to let agent sessions pause, resume, and fork while retaining processes, memory, files, and execution context without permanently consuming host resources. Its region-scoped cell architecture separates Kubernetes-based control-plane functions such as lifecycle management, placement, routing metadata, and PostgreSQL-backed state from hypervisor hosts that run microVMs, networking, storage, and memory services. Guests retain a fixed internal network identity through isolated Linux namespaces, while host-side Envoy proxies enforce destination policies, support private VPC connectivity, and can inject credentials for approved HTTPS integrations without exposing secrets inside the guest. Checkpoints capture disk, memory, and virtual-device state, store immutable artifacts in content-addressed object storage, and allow new branches to share base content while receiving independent writable disk overlays. Storage combines remotely addressable immutable disk layers with local sparse writable overlays, avoiding full disk downloads and remote writes for ordinary changes. During restore, userfaultfd demand-paging loads memory only when accessed, while ublk similarly serves disk content on demand, enabling a prepared template to become traffic-serving in under 200 milliseconds at the reported internal p50 under warm conditions. The design emphasizes isolated execution, fault-contained capacity cells, controlled networking, checkpoint portability, and rapid restoration as foundational capabilities for persistent, governed agent workloads.

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