Making SPACE: Secure Runtimes for Long-Running Agents
SPACE is Perplexity’s secure, efficient sandbox platform powering long‑running agentic workflows and fast, isolated code execution.
TL;DR
- Agentic workflows require long-lived, stateful execution environments, posing challenges for traditional sandboxes.
- SPACE (Sandboxed Platform for Agentic Code Execution) is Perplexity's solution, designed for secure, reliable, and efficient agentic workflows.
- SPACE architecture comprises a control plane, node-local services, and the sandbox itself (VM + space-daemon).
- Key security features include VM isolation, controlled communication channels, network egress control, and secure credential injection.
- Functionality is enhanced through rich lifecycle support, including quick creation, indefinite persistence, clean pausing, and support for forking, rollback, and crash recovery via state machines and snapshotting.
- Efficiency is achieved using btrfs filesystem for copy-on-write cloning and atomic snapshots, leading to significantly faster sandbox creation times.
- SPACE has successfully powered millions of Perplexity Computer sessions, demonstrating 3-5x faster sandbox creation.
- The platform aims to provide a unified layer for provisioning and controlling sandboxes across various environments.