Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Before he joined Upsun, Andrew Kester spoiled the biggest sale of a client's year. He was one of two or three web developers at a creative agency that did branding, logos, print, and websites. A design boutique was about to run its annual trunk show, and the discounts and featured brands were meant to stay secret until the reveal on Tuesday at noon. The client asked for a preview. The preview reached production.

A team ships at a steady pace for most of the year. Then an audit approaches, and delivery slows. Engineers get pulled off feature work to support the audit, producing the configuration exports, logs, and environment checks that the evidence depends on. The slowdown lasts as long as the audit does. It is tempting to read this as a team that needs to move faster or be bigger. It is usually neither.

As a product manager at Upsun with a computer engineering background, Kateryna Dvornichenko had spent months researching competing tools in the agentic development space, running tests, comparing features, and building a picture of where the market was heading. She realized the tools were impressive, but something kept standing out. "Collaboration was not the strong point of any of them," she says. "Everyone stays on their own machine with their own setup.".

Somewhere in most production setups there is a container that stays awake all week to do one job on Friday. Maybe it re-indexes a database. Maybe it runs a batch report, or a data migration that only matters at month end. Either way, the resources are billed for seven days. Task containers close that gap. They are ephemeral, API-triggered containers that spin up inside an Upsun Cloud environment, run exactly one command, and remove themselves when that command exits. Nothing sits idle between runs.

Task containers are now generally available on Upsun Cloud, giving you a place to run AI agents alongside the rest of your application. The agent runs as a container inside your Upsun Cloud project, next to the app it works on, with the same access to your environment and data as everything else deployed there. The lifecycle is the part that's new: it fits how agent workloads behave instead of forcing them to pretend to be servers. A few things up front: This is a hands-on guide.

There are many conversations about the use of AI, particularly how engineering teams are using it in their coding workflows. Manual work is being replaced by agent-driven automation, and human value increasingly lies in the higher-order work: writing specs, thinking through architecture, steering the direction, exercising taste, and reviewing the output.

Application migrations stall for a predictable reason: the demanding part is rarely the application code itself. It is the infrastructure around it: the deployment logic, pipeline, and environment configuration that has to be rebuilt. That surrounding work is what turns a migration into a multi-month project, and it is why teams stay on infrastructure that no longer serves them. Upsun Cloud reduces migration to a much smaller task.

You push a branch. If your team is like most, that branch now waits: for the shared staging server to free up, for someone to remember to refresh the seed data, for whoever broke staging last to fix it. By the time you actually test your change, you're testing it in an environment that's drifted from production in ways nobody fully tracked. The alternative isn't a better staging server. It doesn't need one.

Infrastructure for AI agents usually forces a choice between two bad options. A sandbox is safe but blind, cut off from the data and services that would make the agent's output useful. Full access means paying to keep a container idle between runs, waiting on a prompt that might not arrive for hours. Task containers, which Upsun released on August 12, 2026, are built to avoid that choice. A task container is a single-purpose container defined in a project's.upsun/config.yaml file.

When you choose a cloud platform, you're entrusting a provider with sensitive business information, customer data, critical applications, and a growing share of your operational resilience. Increasingly, you are also entrusting it with AI. And that changes the questions you should be asking. Marketing claims cannot answer these questions. Independent evidence can. Here is what that evidence looks like at Upsun and why it matters to your next supplier review.