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The Deployment

Everything an agent runs on: sandboxing, session persistence, tenant isolation, secrets handling, and capacity. The infrastructure half of the agent question.

Hand-drawn ink-line illustration on terracotta: two loopy hands stack wide cream slabs into a low foundation with a small block resting on top, a one-line profile face observing.

What it is​

The harness is the loop; the deployment is the ground it stands on. Anthropic's Scaling Managed Agents post (April 2026) draws the line between the two, and the distinction is the most useful sorting question on the platform, because two of the four ways to build hand you a harness while still leaving the entire deployment to you.

The bill of materials​

The Agent SDK documentation at code.claude.com makes the deployment burden concrete, because the SDK is harness-only and the docs enumerate what the builder still owns (verify against the current docs; specifics drift):

  • Sandboxing. The SDK spawns a subprocess that owns a shell and a working directory. Containing it is your job: Docker, gVisor, Firecracker, a cloud sandbox, or your own VMs.
  • Session persistence. Session transcripts live on local disk, so a container restart loses the session even if you saved the session ID. Durable sessions mean wiring your own store.
  • Tenant isolation. Per-tenant working directories, per-tenant configuration, egress rules. Nothing isolates customers from each other for you.
  • Secrets. Tool credentials visible to the agent's environment are credentials a prompt injection can go looking for. Keeping them out requires an egress proxy you build. See Vaults for the managed answer.
  • Capacity. The docs' sizing guidance is on the order of a gigabyte of RAM and several gigabytes of disk per concurrent agent, with memory growing over a session's life. Autoscaling that is an infrastructure project.

Anthropic's security posts describe what its own deployments do about the first item: Claude Code sandboxing (October 2025) covers filesystem and network isolation boundaries, and How we contain Claude across products (2026) covers the broader containment model.

Why it matters​

For a small team, this list is the real cost of an agent product. The model call is minutes of work; the deployment is months of it. That is the trade the four ways to build makes visible: Managed Agents is the only path where Anthropic supplies the deployment, which is exactly why its customer stories talk about calendar time.

How it shows up in the field​

  • Sentry shipped its Managed Agents integration "in weeks instead of months" with a single engineer, and credits the platform with removing "the ongoing operational overhead of maintaining bespoke agent infrastructure." (source)
  • Pendo spent about three months trying to build its agent infrastructure in-house, then reached production on Managed Agents in "About three days." (source)
  • Greptile, a ten-engineer team, frames the same trade from the SDK side: "For a company reviewing over a billion lines of code each month, the ability to focus on domain expertise rather than infrastructure has become a strategic advantage." (source)

Further Reading​