Docker and Sandboxing AI Agents

The most useful coding agents can mutate their environments by downloading packages, writing files, and connecting to services across the network. However, that freedom also presents dangers and promises to usher in a new wave of security threats. Docker recently announced Docker Sandboxes, which gives each agent its own isolated micro VM while preserving the familiar ergonomics of a container. A standard container shares the host's kernel, but a micro VM emulates hardware and runs its own kernel, giving a stronger security boundary around code that cannot be trusted. Mark Kavage is the president and COO of Docker, and he previously worked at companies including Stripe, AWS, and Oracle. In this episode, Mark joins Gregor Van for a wide ranging conversation that includes why agents break the immutability assumptions containers were built on, how micro VMs differ from both containers and traditional VMs, and the still unsolved challenge of giving agents scoped trustworthy access to sensitive services and data. Gregor Vann is a security focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn. Hello and welcome to Software Engineering Daily. My guest today is Mark Kabbage. Thank you for coming on today, Mark. Yeah. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah. So super exciting. You're the president at Docker. And Docker, I'm sure a lot of our audience know pretty intimately. We'll get into what Docker is for those that don't know in a second as well. As we like to do, you've had a pretty, like, storied history in the tech world or through tech companies. Could you just give us, like, a kind of a brief story of how you got all the way to Docker? Absolutely. Well, it's a funny story. There's two other characters here, Don and Tushar. We were part of the let's call it generation one of Amazon Web Services back in 2005. Oh, wow. And we're all OfficeMates back when AWS was, I don't know, somewhere around a 100 to 200 people, somewhere in there. I don't time all blurs it together. We've gone off and done different things over the years. We had also gone to Oracle and built Oracle's cloud, which was I always tell people it's a weird thing to do voluntarily, but we did that. At some point in the last couple of years, Docker was looking for new leadership. And as I was joking, fortunately for Docker, they found us. And so Tushar had found his way to Docker 2.5 ago, three years ago. And then as the band of Merry Brothers do, sort of called on as friends and here we are. So then Don and I joined February of last year. Yeah. Let's start with Docker is and then actually might just kind of pull back for a second after that. But, yeah, what is Docker full stop for …