Agents need short-lived permissions and disposable infrastructure

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 13:02

   Well, you know, look, I think, like I said, much of our infrastructure is actually pretty well set up to handle the scale, which is good. I think there's been a couple of things which are interesting, which are, I think, interesting paradigm shifts where you could argue that some of our systems are... I wouldn't say over-engineered, but as an example, many agents want to create a database, do a little bit of work, and then have the database go away.

2. 13:32

   You really need that database to have five nines of durability. Exactly. Right, and so there's some things that we rethink there where when you're creating an Aurora database, like as your production database, like you do want five nines of data. You know, you need durability, you want availability, you want all of those things. And for the agent use case, that's arguably, or maybe not arguably, like over-engineered for what we need.

3. 13:53

   And so, you know, it's hard. We don't, and we kind of have this, like a belief that we don't really want to have like a non-durable option that's going to cause problems either. Because you never really quite know if the database that's created wants to stay around for a long time or a short amount of time. And so we're trying to do the hard work to think about how do you accomplish both of those things where you can create it quickly and throw it away and you don't really waste a lot of resources.

4. 14:18

   But if you do want it, and it can be durable and stay for a long time, it can actually grow into a big production database. So those are some trade-offs that we think about actively as we think about how does the more traditional kind of, this is going to be my production system kind of capabilities match with some of the more transient nature of the infrastructure that agents want to use. So that's one, I think.

5. 14:43

   But there's a bunch. I think the scale and speed and latency of creation of durable resources is another one that's interesting. You know, I think the other one that we actively think about too is just are there new building blocks that agents are going to want that we just didn't really need before? And so compute sandboxes, gateways, agent permissions versus people or service role permissions. A lot of those are things that we have built and are building and thinking actively about because they are just brand new building blocks.

6. 15:14

   It's not using the existing building blocks differently, but it's brand new ones where pretty clearly you want a different permissions for agents. You don't just want to give it Ragu's permissions and let it go do whatever you can do. You actually want, you know, very time box, short-term permissions to just go do a task. You actually may not want to give permissions to a whole tool at all. You may want to get very fine-grained commissions of what an agent's able to do from a sandbox, right?

7. 15:38

   you actually want a sandbox that you want to... Virtualization is having its act too. That's right. That's right. Exactly. And they're different. It's similar. It's the same idea, but it's, you know, how do you have that lightweight and think about... And fortunately, we've done a lot of work with Firecracker, our kind of micro VMs. In fact, a lot of the sandbox company startups use Firecracker. They all use Firecracker, which we invented 10 years ago, maybe, or something like that.

8. 16:04

   And it's really purpose-built for... I mean, it wasn't purpose-built for agents, but it's actually quite good for agents because you can spin them up really rapidly. They have a great security boundary, and you don't have a lot of that virtualization overhead that you have from a traditional large VM. So, you know, I think those are some new building blocks that we're thinking about, and more emerge every single day, you know.

9. 16:26

   So, I've not told enough to agents, I'll come back to it later, but it's a fascinating topic. Super cool. But let me switch gears a little bit