kubernetes-sigs/agent-sandbox v0.4.6 on GitHub

🚀 Announcing Agent Sandbox v0.4.6!

We're excited to announce the release of Agent Sandbox v0.4.6! This release introduces major scalability enhancements through opt-in Service management, robust developer guidance with AI agent skills, expanded API and Network Policy documentation, and new stateful AI agent examples.

⚠️ Breaking Changes / Action Required

Service Creation Opt-In (#775, #800): The Sandbox controller no longer creates a headless Service by default for new Sandboxes. This architectural change significantly improves cluster scalability by eliminating kube-proxy and Kubernetes DNS overhead when scaling to thousands of pods. Existing Sandboxes with an auto-provisioned Service are preserved automatically.
- Action Required: For new Sandboxes that require an auto-provisioned headless Service, explicitly set spec.service: true. To explicitly remove an existing Service, set spec.service: false.
- New service field: Sandbox spec and SandboxTemplate spec now support the service boolean field to control the headless Service creation (default false). If omitted, existing services of Sandboxes will not be removed, to avoid disruption.
- Python SDK & Router Integration: The Python SDK and sandbox-router have been updated to support direct Pod IP routing via the X-Sandbox-Pod-IP header, bypassing Service routing overhead. The SDK gracefully recovers from API server timeouts and disables Pod IP routing if permissions are lacking (falling back to Service routing).

Key Highlights

Core Stability and Lifecycle Management
Fixed an issue where the sandbox name hash (selector label) was unavailable when a sandbox was scaled down to zero replicas during suspension (#754). status.labelselector is no longer unset when replicas is 0. If the hash cannot be resolved, suspension fails gracefully with a clear error reason. Added integration tests for suspend/resume on new client instances.
AI Agent Skills & Developer Guidelines
Introduced specialized AI agent skills in .agents/skills/ (k8s-api-conventions and dev-rules) to guide AI coding assistants contributing to the repository (#766). Added AGENTS.md at the repo root covering project layout, build/test/lint flows, codegen rules, and GitHub Copilot/CLA guidelines (#707). Updated .github/copilot-instructions.md with Kubernetes API conventions and CLA reminders (#768).
Enhanced Documentation and Examples
Added comprehensive core API documentation in docs/api.md (#247) and detailed Network Policy management documentation explaining the capabilities and limitations of networkPolicyManagement in SandboxTemplate (#743). Added a new example demonstrating how to deploy the Hermes Agent (hermes-agent.nousresearch.com) inside the Kubernetes Agent Sandbox with persistent storage (volumeClaimTemplates) and custom skill injection via ConfigMaps (#774). Updated the OpenClaw sandbox example to demonstrate usage with the gVisor runtime class on GKE for enhanced sandbox isolation (#475). Added a release automation guide and updated the PR template for release notes (#748, #790).
CI/CD and Release Automation
Enabled an automated weekly release schedule (Thursdays at 9:00 AM UTC) using GitHub Actions workflows (#783). Migrated Gemini release note generation from static API keys to secure Vertex AI with short-lived Google Cloud IAM credentials (#783). Updated GitHub Actions dependencies (#788).

Installation

Core & Extensions

# To install only the core components:
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/agent-sandbox/releases/download/v0.4.6/manifest.yaml

# To install the extensions components:
kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/agent-sandbox/releases/download/v0.4.6/extensions.yaml

Python SDK

pip install k8s-agent-sandbox==0.4.6

Contributors

We extend our sincere thanks to all contributors to this release:
@aleks-stefanovic, @dependabot[bot], @drogovozDP, @fedebongio, @flpanbin, @janetkuo, @shrutiyam-glitch, @vicentefb, @volatilemolotov

👋 New Contributors

• @fedebongio made their first contribution in #774

Full Changelog: v0.4.5...v0.4.6