Technology Radar
Managed agents runtime is the practice of running software delivery agents on a platform that manages their execution, infrastructure and operational needs rather than relying on a developer's workstation. The runtime hosts the agent loop and provides sandboxed compute, triggers, credential handling, session state and observability, leaving teams to define the model, prompt, tools and skills. Long-running, asynchronous work is well-suited to background agents that pick up tasks from issues, pipelines or schedules and submit pull requests for review.
Coding tools are converging on this approach, with Cursor cloud agents, the GitHub Copilot coding agent and OpenAI Codex cloud tasks all running in remote sandboxes. Claude Managed Agents offers a general-purpose equivalent. Our internal security team runs a daily agent that triages endpoint detection false positives and proposes rule changes. "Managed" doesn't necessarily mean someone else's cloud. At one client, we run custom agents on a self-hosted runtime in a continuous loop across multiple repositories, fixing code smells flagged by scanners and upgrading dependencies along with any required code changes.
A hosted service is often the easiest place to start, but organizations with data residency, security or integration constraints may need their own platform. Either way, we recommend treating the runtime as production infrastructure, with agent sandboxing and version-controlled agent definitions.
