Why it matters
Nikhil Harithas describes a gateway that provisions customer-controlled compute through provider-specific drivers, while an outbound relay connection carries agent-session traffic. The design separates compute lifecycle from the agent product and addresses missing acknowledgements, request routing and snapshot recovery. Customer-hosted execution still requires explicit decisions about identity, inference endpoints and data crossing the relay.
My takeaway: Map which identity provisions compute, runs tools and calls the model, then scope each separately. Test dropped acknowledgements and reconnects for duplicate machines or requests reaching the wrong user’s session. Exercise snapshot restore and teardown, including credential expiry. Document relay and inference egress before treating a VPC deployment as a data-isolation control.