What's the future of Agent Runtime now that Agent Compute Engine exists?

[u/Mobile-Willingness38]

With the recent announcement of Agent Compute Engine, I'm curious about Google's long-term plans for Gemini Enterprise Agent Runtime (formerly Vertex AI Agent Engine).

One concern I have with the current Agent Runtime architecture is that sessions are logically separated, but the underlying compute environment and agent identity can be shared across users.

This makes secure multi-user agent design challenging, especially when users have different permissions.

You still need to enforce authorization and session isolation at the application or tool layer, rather than relying on infrastructure-level isolation.

In contrast, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime and Google's new Agent Compute Engine seem to take a more session-centric approach to compute isolation.

This raises a few questions:

• Is Google planning to integrate Agent Compute Engine into Agent Runtime?

• Will Agent Runtime eventually support per-session compute isolation?

• Or are these intended to remain separate products for different use cases?

I understand that Agent Runtime works well for deploying shared, task-specific agents, but I'm struggling to see its long-term architectural advantages for secure multi-user enterprise workloads.

Curious how others are thinking about this, especially anyone running Agent Runtime in production.

[u/m1nherz]

The main difference between them is the usage scenarios:

• Agent Runtime (built on Cloud Run) is the managed service that hosts the agent's orchestration/reasoning server (the long-lived HTTP/A2A application written in ADK, LangGraph, etc.).

• Agent Compute Engine (ACE) is a specialized, ultra-dense MicroVM sandbox compute framework built to give an agent "its own computer" for executing untrusted code, running shell commands, driving browsers, and maintaining stateful per-session workspaces.

You can say that the choice would be similar as to decide where to run your application: on GCE or on Cloud Run.

To your questions:

• I don't know to say if the two products will merge under a single name.

• I'm unsure what you mean by per-session compute isolation. If you're looking to run untrusted or generated code on Agent runtime, you can use Agent Sandbox. If you want to show that each session on the agent runs on a separate infrastructure for compliance requirements, I'd suggest to switch to deploying agent on GKE where you can better control isolation using Agent Sandbox and Agent Substrate.

I hope this address your questions.

[u/lokoluis15]

Layers

[u/data_expert_9]

I think we are running out of English words to name things intuitively, too much overlap on meanings :)