Welcome to Agents Week (opens in new tab)

Cloudflare argues that AI agents require a fundamental shift in Internet and cloud infrastructure. Unlike traditional one-to-many applications, agents create unique, ephemeral execution environments for individual users and tasks, making current container-based economics and scaling inadequate. The company positions lightweight V8 isolates, alongside containers and browser support, as the foundation for making agents practical at global scale.

The Internet Was Built for Applications, Not Agents

• Cloud infrastructure evolved during the smartphone era to serve many users through a finite number of application instances.
• Microservices, containers, Kubernetes, load balancing, and replication all support this one-to-many model.
• Agents differ because an LLM dynamically determines code paths, tool usage, and task duration.

One User, One Agent, One Task

• Each agent may need its own execution environment, filesystem, tools, and state.
• Coding agents currently use containers with access to Git, Bash, filesystems, and arbitrary binaries.
• As agents spread to assistants, analysts, customer service, and planning tasks, the number of simultaneous environments could grow dramatically.

The Scale Challenge

• If 100 million US knowledge workers used agents at 15% concurrency, infrastructure would need about 24 million simultaneous sessions.
• At 25–50 users per CPU, that implies roughly 500,000 to 1 million server CPUs in the US alone.
• Multiple agents per person and global adoption would increase demand by orders of magnitude.

Isolates as Agent Infrastructure

• Cloudflare’s Workers platform uses V8 isolates instead of containers.
• Isolates start in milliseconds, use only a few megabytes of memory, and provide secure sandboxing.
• They can be up to 100 times faster to start and up to 100 times more memory-efficient than containers.
• Dynamic Workers can create execution environments on demand, run code, and discard them at a scale of millions per second.
• This efficiency could make one-agent-per-user economics viable beyond expensive coding assistants.

The “Horseless Carriage” Phase

• Early agent infrastructure often adapts existing systems instead of using designs built specifically for agents.
• Agents use headless browsers to navigate human-oriented websites, though structured protocols such as MCP could provide direct service access.
• Many MCP servers simply wrap REST APIs, despite LLMs often being better at writing and executing code than making long sequences of tool calls.
• CAPTCHAs and behavioral fingerprinting ask whether a requester is human, while agent systems need identity, authorization, and permission controls.
• Full containers are frequently used for tasks that require only a few API calls and a response.

Supporting Both Old and New Models

• Infrastructure transitions rarely happen all at once; technologies such as IPv4/IPv6, HTTP/2/HTTP/3, and TLS 1.2/1.3 coexist.
• Cloudflare plans to support existing agent workloads while developing more efficient primitives.
• Containers remain important for coding agents that need filesystems, Git, Bash, and arbitrary binaries.
• Cloudflare is also expanding container-based sandbox environments and browser-rendering capabilities for services that do not yet support agent-native protocols.

Cloudflare’s broader recommendation is to build infrastructure that can serve today’s container-based agents while moving toward lightweight, ephemeral isolates designed for billions of specialized agent sessions.