Private Preview: DigitalOcean Managed Agents Runtime Services

AI agents are helping developers, teams, and businesses do more: writing and executing code, conducting research, and running dynamic workflows across systems. But that ability is often bounded by where they run. Close the laptop, and the work stops there. You can’t pick it up on another device, hand off to a teammate, or scale it across users. Moving agents to cloud VMs solves part of this problem; developers and companies building agent harness frameworks still have to build a high-fidelity experience that can match a local session, including agent friendly execution environments, session persistence, secure tool access, human-in-the-loop approvals, and observability.

Now available in Private Preview, DigitalOcean Managed Agents Runtime Services (M.A.R.S.) provides that infrastructure as a fully managed service. It gives developers, teams, and ISVs a powerful yet lightweight environment for operating coding agents and long-running, multi-tool agentic workflows without building and managing the underlying infrastructure themselves.

M.A.R.S. brings together two products: Harness Runtime provides the managed execution environment in which agents run, persist, and scale. Action Gateway gives those same agents governed access to the tools, APIs, and SaaS systems they need to complete real-world work.

Rather than requiring you to rebuild your agent around a proprietary framework, M.A.R.S. lets you define an environment template that packages your preferred harness, dependencies, tools, and configuration. Designed to work with Claude Code, Codex CLI, and OpenCode, as well as agents built with LangGraph or CrewAI, giving teams the freedom to choose the agent experience that best fits their needs without being locked into a single harness or framework.

Agent sessions that outlive your laptop

Harness Runtime helps agent sessions run independently of any local machine. They can start in under a second and resume from a pause in as little as 200 milliseconds while preserving their files, processes, and working state.

Developers can continue a session from another device, hand work to a teammate mid-task, or run multiple agents in parallel without multiplying the infrastructure setup. Each session runs inside an isolated Firecracker microVM, designed to separate agent-generated code from local machines and shared infrastructure.

Govern how agents interact with the outside world

Action Gateway gives agents governed access to services such as GitHub, Jira, Notion, Linear, and Postgres. Authentication, permissions, approvals, and audit controls are managed centrally. OAuth credentials are brokered through Secrets Manager and are exposed to neither the model nor the execution environment in which the agent runs.

M.A.R.S. capabilities at a glance:

• Durable sessions: Pause and resume work without losing the session’s environment or state.

• Isolated execution: Run agent-generated code inside dedicated Firecracker microVMs.

• Human approvals: Define which actions agents can take autonomously and which require sign-off.

• Native GitHub support: Allow agents to clone repositories, create branches, commit changes, and open pull requests.

• Managed tool access: Connect agents to external systems through centrally governed authentication and policy controls.

• Harness flexibility: Run supported coding agents, LangGraph workloads, or your own custom agent environment.

With M.A.R.S., developers retain control over the agents they build and the experiences they deliver. DigitalOcean manages the execution, persistence, isolation, scaling, and governed external access underneath them.