Agent Substrate Glossary

July 31, 2026 · View on GitHub

This document defines the core terms used across Agent Substrate.

For how the pieces fit together, see the Architecture and API Guide.

Resources (declarative, Kubernetes CRDs)

ActorTemplate: the definition of an actor "class": the container image(s) and snapshot configuration. Creating an ActorTemplate triggers creation of a Golden Snapshot. It is treated as immutable: you create a new template for a new version rather than editing an existing one. It is analogous to a Pod template, but for a checkpointable workload.
WorkerPool: declares warm compute capacity, a fleet of pre-started worker pods. It is reconciled into a Kubernetes Deployment by the atecontroller.
SandboxConfig: a cluster-scoped resource holding the sandbox binaries for one runtime family (the gVisor runsc binary, or a micro-VM kernel/firmware/config). A WorkerPool resolves its binaries from the config it names, or from the cluster default for its class, so one config pins the runtime version for many templates.

These are not Kubernetes objects; they live in the control-plane database because they change too frequently for etcd.

Atespace: the isolation boundary an Actor belongs to, and the first half of its identity: an Actor is addressed by (atespace, name), so the same name can exist in two atespaces. Atespaces are global-scoped, not Kubernetes namespaces, and are distinct from the namespace an ActorTemplate lives in. One must exist before any Actor can be created in it, and it can only be deleted once empty.
Actor: a single instance derived from an ActorTemplate, identified by a DNS-1123 name. It is the unit that is suspended and resumed, and it moves between workers over its lifetime. An Actor record tracks its lifecycle status and snapshot references.
Worker: a record representing one worker pod in a WorkerPool. A Worker hosts at most one Actor at a time; many Actors are multiplexed across a pool over time.

ate-api-server (binary ateapi): the control plane. It owns the Actor lifecycle, schedules Actors onto Workers, and coordinates their snapshots, all backed by the state store. The kubectl-ate CLI talks to it.
atecontroller: the Kubernetes controller that reconciles the CRDs (for example, it turns a WorkerPool into a Deployment).
atelet: the node-level supervisor, run as a DaemonSet. It pulls images, assembles OCI bundles, drives the sandbox lifecycle on the node via ateom, and streams snapshots to and from snapshot storage.
ateom: the coordinator that runs inside each worker pod and drives the sandbox runtime on behalf of atelet. This decouples the physical pod lifecycle from the sandboxed agent process.
atenet: the networking stack. It provides a DNS server for actor resolution and a router that resumes suspended Actors on demand and routes traffic to the right worker pod.
podcertcontroller: issues short-lived pod certificates that components use as their TLS identity to authenticate connections to one another (mutual TLS).
kubectl-ate: a kubectl plugin CLI for managing the Actor lifecycle and listing Workers.

Suspend: hibernate a running Actor by checkpointing it to a snapshot and freeing its Worker. The requested snapshots are uploaded to external storage.
Pause: a short-term checkpoint of a running Actor. Snapshot files remain on the node VM, and the following Resume is prioritized onto the node VM where the snapshots are persisted.
Resume: activate a suspended/paused Actor by restoring it onto a Worker. The common path restores from a snapshot rather than cold-booting.

DurableDir volume: a directory mounted into one or more containers whose contents are preserved by the Data snapshot scope and therefore survive across Suspend/Resume independently of process memory or other rootfs writes. A volume may be mounted into multiple containers, potentially at different paths. This is the per-Actor application-data surface.

How many an ActorTemplate may declare depends on its sandboxClass: a microvm template may declare several (they are subdirectories of one virtio-fs share, so they cost nothing extra per volume), while a gvisor template is limited to one until gVisor can accept more than a single durable mount.

Snapshot scope: what an ActorTemplate's SnapshotsConfig includes in a given snapshot. Two scopes exist today:
- Full: process memory plus the rootfs delta on top of the OCI image, and any attached DurableDir volumes. Used to capture everything needed to resume hot.
- Data: only the contents of attached volumes that support snapshots — currently DurableDir volumes. Process memory and the rest of rootfs are discarded; on Resume the Actor cold-boots from the OCI image with DurableDir contents restored. Used to persist application data cheaply without the cost of a full memory image.
Configured per-trigger via onPause and onCommit: onPause selects what is captured during a Pause (kept on the node), and onCommit selects what is captured during a Suspend (uploaded to snapshot storage). onCommit must be a subset of onPause.
Golden Snapshot: the initial checkpoint captured once, when an ActorTemplate is created, from a temporary "golden" boot of the workload. By default an Actor of that template is first restored from this shared snapshot.
Last Snapshot: the most recent per-Actor snapshot, written on Suspend and used to restore that specific Actor on the next Resume.
Snapshot storage: the object store (GCS or S3) where snapshots are persisted so Actor state is durable and portable across the cluster.

Uniform DNS Mesh: every Actor is reachable at a uniform address, <actor-name>.<atespace>.actors.resources.substrate.ate.dev, resolved by atenet. Traffic to that name is routed (and the Actor resumed if needed) automatically.