Workstation
Long-lived cloud shells with agentproto and your connector keys pre-wired. Operators that need a real machine.
A workstation is a long-lived cloud shell. Files in /home/user/workspace
persist between sessions. agentproto and your connector keys are pre-wired.
Run multiple in parallel to isolate experiments from your daily work.
Workstations are how operators that need a real machine — to run code,
edit files in claude-code, drive a browser, ship a build — get one
without you provisioning infrastructure.
The composable model
Workstation = workspace × sandbox × runtimes[].
- Workspace — the file root (
/home/user/workspace). One of the storage providers: cloud bucket, GitHub repo, local IDE, MCP filesystem. - Sandbox — the compute. An e2b sandbox or equivalent. Persistent disk; pause/resume preserves state.
- Runtimes — what's installed on top:
agentproto,claude-code,node,python, anything from the runtimes registry.
You compose those three to get a workstation tuned to what your operator does — a marketing workstation has no node toolchain, an engineer's workstation has the full dev stack.
When you'd use one
- Local IDE work — operator edits files in your codebase via
claude-code, you watch the diff stream in real time. - Long-running scripts — provision a job that runs for 30 minutes, come back to its output.
- Code-execution operators — operators that need to actually run the thing they wrote.
- Browser automation — pair with the Browser surface to drive a real Chromium instance.
Lifecycle
- Provision — first launch takes ~30s. Pulls the sandbox image,
restores your
/workspacefrom the persistence layer (GCS backup), installs the requested runtimes. - Run — operator works in it. You can SSH-equivalent in to inspect.
- Pause — when idle, the sandbox pauses. Disk persists; CPU/RAM billing stops.
- Resume — same workstation, state intact, reconnects in seconds.
- Tear down — explicit. Pause-forever is the default.
Billing
Workstations follow the sandbox's running + paused-disk rate. See Billing and Usage for the per-provider rate sheet.
What's next
- Runtimes — what you install on top
- Workspaces — the file layer
- Operators — who runs in the workstation