Katelyn Lesse
@katelyn_lesse
sierra is another one of many eng teams building internal agentic software dev platforms. everyone doing this is working through hard architecture and infrastructure problems to achieve speed, reliability, and security. in this case, i think sierra is taking on more complexity than necessary to accomplish their goals.
on architecture: they chose to make the runner the durable thing. and since a singleton has to survive, they needed a lot of machinery to let it sleep and then resurrect it: state machine lifecycle, checkpoint events, replay on wake. their output queue with checkpoints is a hibernation mechanism. they could have instead made the durable thing just a session log in a database. then the runner could die and recovery is much simpler - reprovision the sandbox and pick up from the session log.
on infra: they mention avoiding sandbox vendors, but they went even further and avoided csp managed sandbox primitives too. agentcore runtime is per-session microvms with free idle cpu time, for example. even plain ec2 stop/start would accomplish most of hibernation but with a stronger boundary than their choice of hardened containers on a shared kernel.
one choice they made that adds complexity that i think is good and necessary is credential injection via egress proxy. i haven’t seen a better way to avoid agents holding keys.
it’s fascinating to see the proliferation of system design choices in this space. like harness inside the sandbox vs out, and how to manage state. it’s a good reminder that we’re still in the first inning of long running agents, and there’s so much more that’ll play out.
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Space Investor
@SpaceInvestor_D
The Space Force has established a pool of 15 companies to build out a complex, digital environment for testing new systems and training guardians, the service announced Friday.
The 15 companies in the vendor pool are Amentum Technology, BAE Systems, CACI, Firefly Aerospace, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Pacific Crest Alliance, Parsons, Redwire Space Missions, Rocket Lab, Sierra Space, Boeing, Viasat and York Space Systems.
The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity deal has a value of up to $981 million and includes two five-year periods, according to the Space Force.
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