Introduction
Cube Sandbox is a purpose-built infrastructure for AI Agents — a production-hardened runtime service that hosts Agent processes, stateful services, and provides secure execution environments in hardware-isolated MicroVMs. Built on RustVMM + KVM, each sandbox boots in under 60ms with less than 5MB of additional memory consumption. The core system has been validated at scale in Tencent Cloud production environments before open-sourcing.
Key Advantages
⚡ Sub-60ms Boot · High Density: Average <60ms cold start, <5MB overhead per instance — run thousands of Agents on a single node. Under 50 concurrent creations: avg 67ms, P95 90ms, P99 137ms.
🔒 Hardware-Level Isolation: Each sandbox gets its own dedicated Guest OS kernel — no shared-kernel container escapes. Run untrusted LLM-generated code safely with hardware-enforced boundaries (KVM + eBPF).
🤖 Agent Hosting, Not Just Code Execution: Sandboxes can host long-running Agent processes (e.g. OpenClaw assistants via AgentHub), complete service stacks (Redis, MySQL, browsers, dev environments), or one-shot code execution — all with the same lifecycle primitives.
🔌 Seamless E2B Migration: Native E2B SDK compatibility — swap one URL environment variable, zero business code changes.
⏸️ Auto-Pause & Auto-Resume: Idle sandboxes are automatically snapshot-suspended (zero resource cost) and transparently restored on the next request — hundred-millisecond resume, zero caller awareness.
📸 Snapshot · Clone · Rollback: Hundred-millisecond checkpoints — roll back to any saved state or fork multiple exploration branches. Powered by CubeCoW Copy-on-Write with incremental dirty-page tracking.
🔐 Credential Vault: Keys never enter the sandbox, model context, or logs. Secrets stay in the control plane.
🛡️ Egress Control: Domain allowlists, instant block on unauthorized egress, full audit logs. CubeEgress provides L7 domain filtering, credential injection, and access auditing.
🖥️ Web Console: Manage sandboxes, templates, nodes, and version matrix in the browser — open
:12088right after install.📦 Template System: Turn OCI images into templates in one step, install presets from the Template Store, auto-distribute across nodes.
📦 Ready Out of the Box: No complex dependencies. A minimal deployment script gets a full environment running in minutes. Supports bare-metal deployment, Kubernetes cluster deployment, and Terraform-based deployment on Tencent Cloud.
💾 Volume Framework: CubeSandbox provides an E2B-compatible Volume framework that lets users plug in custom backend storage solutions while remaining compatible with the E2B standard.
CubeSandbox vs Alternatives
| Metric | Docker Container | Traditional VM | CubeSandbox |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation Level | Low (Shared Kernel Namespaces) | High (Dedicated Kernel) | Extreme (Dedicated Kernel + eBPF) |
| Boot Speed | 200ms | Seconds | Sub-60ms |
| Memory Overhead | Low (Shared Kernel) | High (Full OS) | Ultra-low (<5MB) |
| Deployment Density | High | Low | Extreme (Thousands per node) |
| Agent Hosting | Manual setup | Manual setup | ✅ Native (AgentHub) |
| Auto-Pause / Resume | / | / | ✅ Platform-managed (100ms resume) |
| Snapshot / Clone / Rollback | / | / | ✅ Sub-second |
| E2B SDK Compatible | / | / | ✅ Drop-in |
Next Steps
- Quick Start — the fastest path from zero to a running sandbox.
- Sandbox Lifecycle — state model, auto-pause, auto-resume.
- Digital Assistant (AgentHub) — host and manage AI Agent instances.
- Self-Build Deployment — single-machine deployment reference.
- Multi-Node Cluster Deployment — scale beyond a single machine.
- Kubernetes Deployment — install with Helm on an existing K8s cluster.
- Creating Templates from OCI Images — step-by-step template guide.
- WebUI Console — visual management right after install.
- Security Proxy & Credential Vault — CubeEgress domain filtering and auditing.