Microsoft deploys security agents; Chainguard goes virtual

Welcome to Runtime! Today on Product Saturday: Microsoft introduces new agents for security teams, Chainguard moves beyond the container, and the quote of the week.

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Securing AI with AI: It's been almost a year since Microsoft embarked on its latest security reset, which came after a series of disastrous attacks on its infrastructure that compromised government information. While nobody needs to break into Microsoft to figure out what the federal government is up to these days, the company introduced six new agents this week for Microsoft Security Copilot users that promise to help prevent and diagnose threats to their information.

"The relentless pace and complexity of cyberattacks have surpassed human capacity and establishing AI agents is a necessity for modern security," Microsoft said in a blog post. The new agents will help triage alerts, detect users on the network that aren't following corporate security policies, and help customers deal with Patch Tuesdays.

Wasmup with you? (sorry): The WebAssembly folks were in Barcelona this week for Wasm I/O 2025, an update on the state of a technology that could be the next step beyond Kubernetes in platform engineering. Ahead of that conference, Cosmonic unveiled Cosmonic Cloud, which "provides a unified control plane for managing WebAssembly workloads from a single interface," the company said in a press release.

Cosmonic Cloud was built on wasmCloud, the company's open-source WebAssembly orchestration platform, and it "enables platform engineering teams to maintain, migrate, and update applications at scale [by] letting developers focus on what they’re good at: building new features," Cosmonic CEO Liam Randall said in the release. WebAssembly has yet to achieve the breakthrough in the enterprise that many saw around the corner a few years ago, in part because the tooling needed to make it happen is just starting to emerge.

VMs, but different: The virtual machine is the workhorse of enterprise tech, and it has been running the world for decades now. Chainguard, which has raised $256 million to tackle container security, now wants to bring its curated approach to cloud-based virtual machines.

Chainguard VMs, now available through an early access program, were designed to provide hosts for containers that the company promises will be free of any vulnerabilities. "Our approach shrinks the attack surface of the virtual machine, making it more efficient and secure, without compromising performance," the company said in a blog post.

Edge cases: One of the major factors holding back enterprise AI adoption has been the cost of inference, which describes the computing power needed to shuttle a prompt to an LLM and return a result. A lot of companies think they'll be able to reduce their costs by running inference workloads at the edge of their networks, rather than through their cloud provider, and Akamai launched a new service this week catering to those folks.

Akamai Cloud Inference "provides tools for platform engineers and developers to build and run AI applications and data-intensive workloads closer to end users, delivering 3x better throughput while reducing latency up to 2.5x," the company said in a press release. Best known for its content-delivery services, Akamai has been trying to reinvent itself as an alternative general-purpose cloud provider for the last several years.

Secrets that you keep: Now that IBM has finally closed its acquisition of HashiCorp, Pulumi has its sights set on taking its place as a leading independent infrastructure-as-code company. This week it announced several new additions to its security portfolio that were designed to help companies manage how automated infrastructure tools access privileged information.

Pulumi ESC now supports automated rotation of access credentials as well as a new way to include secrets in GitHub Actions. "Managing secrets effectively is no longer a 'nice-to-have'—it’s a must-have for any organization building and scaling applications in the cloud," the company said in a blog post.

Stat of the week

Cloud repatriation has been a fun talking point for venture capitalists tired of paying computing bills for their portfolio companies, but CIOs aren't so sure. A survey of 300 CIOs conducted by Azul found that 71% run more than 60% of their workloads in the cloud, and 42% of that group wants to get more than 80% of their workloads into the cloud over the next five years.

Quote of the week

"What we believe is that we'll actually see businesses pop up in a way that are actually agent or MCP-native that didn't exist before, where you can have a service that's designed around basically being entirely called on by LLMs." — Rita Kozlov, vice president of product at Cloudflare, explaining the impact that Cloudflare and a growing number of AI companies think Anthropic's Model Context Protocol is going to have on enterprise generative AI adoption.

The Runtime roundup

CoreWeave's stock finished its first day on the market even with its opening price of $40, raising $1.5 billion but coming in well under expectations for one of the first major AI-era IPOs.

The DOGE dipshits are going to try and migrate the Social Security Administration's COBOL code base to Java "in a matter of months," according to Wired, which made just about every single expert I know on distributed computing and webscale software development cringe in unison.

Thanks for reading — see you Tuesday!