DigitalOcean Opens Managed Agents Public Preview with Auto-Pause and Per-Second Billing
DigitalOcean announced on September 22–23 that Managed Agents, its managed service, is now in open preview and fully available. Aimed at developers looking to run AI agents at scale in production, its key pitch is that you don't have to rebuild your agent stack.
Confirmed
- Supports major agent harnesses including Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode; users can also run their own LangGraph agents, or even bring their own containers or harnesses.
- Harness Runtime runs each session in an isolated microVM inside a coding sandbox, and sessions continue even after a device disconnects.
- Cost optimization: runtime environments auto-pause when idle, with per-second billing; resuming a session takes just 300ms.
- A unified governance endpoint lets you put 16,000+ tools behind a single governance endpoint, with support for 75+ models.
- The service integrates with its Inference offering.
Why it matters
Managed Agents turns the infrastructure for running agents into a managed commodity: developers can move existing agent workflows straight to the cloud without building their own sandboxing, billing, and governance systems. The idle-pause and per-second billing design directly addresses the cost pain of long-running agents with low utilization — another move by cloud vendors to compete for the AI agent infrastructure market.
2026-09-22 ~ 2026-09-23 · 11 related posts
Primary sources
- DigitalOcean launches Managed Agents with microVM sandboxing and 16k tool access — testingcatalog ·
- DigitalOcean opens Managed Agents: microVM-sandboxed sessions with ~300ms resume and 16,000+ tools — testingcatalog ·
- DigitalOcean Managed Agents goes GA: 300ms session resume, 16,000+ tools — testingcatalog ·
- DigitalOcean Managed Agents enters public preview with idle-pause billing — damianplayer · 2026-09-22
- DigitalOcean launches Managed Agents with 16,000+ tools, Claude Code and Codex support — dair_ai · 2026-09-23
- [source] DigitalOcean launches Managed Agents with microVM sandboxing and 16k tool access — testingcatalog · 2026-09-23
- [source] DigitalOcean opens Managed Agents: microVM-sandboxed sessions with ~300ms resume and 16,000+ tools — testingcatalog · 2026-09-23
- DigitalOcean Managed Agents Enters Public Preview: Pause-When-Idle Cloud Claude Code and Codex — _AustinCalvert_ · 2026-09-23
6 near-duplicate retellings: SimplyAnnisa · HeyAmit_ · SimplyAnnisa · testingcatalog · rohanpaul_ai · Scobleizer