Islo
Persistent microVM "Machines" for autonomous coding agents from the Incredibuild team, with a credentials gateway, snapshots and lifecycle policies, billed per vCPU-hour. A credible agent-computer platform from an established build-tooling vendor, best suited to teams who want workflow orchestration and credential brokering alongside the sandbox.
Overview
Islo is built by the team behind Incredibuild and describes itself as "infra for safely running autonomous coding agents in real, secure dev environments". Its unit is a Machine: a prepared environment with repositories, dependencies and tools that runs in a microVM with its own kernel, stays up for hours and keeps state between runs. Around the Machines sits a factory model of Agents, Lines (repeatable workflows triggered manually, on a schedule or by GitHub, Slack, Linear or Sentry events) and Gateways that inject credentials and log every outbound call. You work through the islo CLI (islo use, islo snapshot, islo ssh), a REST API with an OpenAPI 3.1 spec, or an MCP server for the docs.
Machines pause, resume and delete under lifecycle policies, and snapshots of warm environments restore without rebuilding. Billing is per vCPU-hour, GB-hour and GB-hour of disk with no seat fee; the control plane and Machines can also run inside your own VPC. The site lists Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe and HSBC among customers (presumably shared with Incredibuild) and a reinforcement-learning solution for Harbor benchmarks and rollouts. The hypervisor, machine size limits, startup times, regions and compliance status are not documented, and no Python or TypeScript SDK is listed.
Notable
- Built by Incredibuild; footer carries "© 2026 Incredibuild".
- Pricing: $0.07 per vCPU-hour, $0.04 per GB-hour memory, $0.0007 per GB-hour disk, billed while running.
- API reference lists roughly 230 endpoints including sandboxes, snapshots, gateway profiles, cloud roles and compute regions.
Islo specifications
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Isolation | MicroVM with its own kernel per agent computer; hypervisor not named |
| Deployment | Hosted platform · BYOC available |
| Open source | No |
| SDKs and interfaces | CLI, REST API |
| Cold start (vendor claim) | Not documented |
| Max session length | No fixed limit documented; lifecycle policies set pause_after_idle, pause_after (total active runtime) and delete_after (from creation) |
| Persistence | Pausing snapshots the VM and releases compute; files, processes and in-memory state return on resume (auto-resume on activity); snapshots can be saved, listed and used to create new sandboxes |
| GPU | Not documented |
| Networking | Gateway profiles enforce access policies and inject credentials at the gateway boundary so agents never hold keys; every outbound request is logged, allowed or denied; port forwards; SSH, scp and rsync through an Islo proxy |
| Pricing | $0.07 per vCPU-hour, $0.04 per GB-hour of memory and $0.0007 per GB-hour of disk, billed only while a Machine runs (example: 2 vCPU and 4 GB for 2 hours about $0.60); no seat licences or idle fees; per-task cost limits; enterprise and BYOC terms by contact |
| Free tier | Sign-up credits with no card required (amount not stated) |
| Compliance | Not stated; compliance documentation by request to support@islo.dev |
| Regions | Not listed; the API exposes an endpoint listing the compute regions allowed for a tenant |
Facts from Islo’s public documentation, verified November 9, 2026. Performance numbers are vendor claims.
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- You want persistent, pausable microVM dev environments rather than disposable sandboxes.
- You need agents to use GitHub, Slack or Linear without ever holding the credentials.
- You run scheduled or event-triggered agent workflows across a codebase.
- You want BYOC deployment of the control plane and machines into your own cloud account.
Trade-offs
- Hypervisor is not named and no startup, size or region figures are published.
- No Python or TypeScript SDK; the CLI and REST API are the documented interfaces.
- Compliance certifications are not stated on the site.
- The product is wrapped in its own factory/line workflow model, which may be more than a plain sandbox user wants.
Good fit for: Engineering teams running autonomous coding agents on full repositories with brokered access to GitHub, Slack and Linear.
How Islo compares
| Sandbox | Isolation | Open source | Self-host / BYOC | Cold start (vendor) | Max session | Snapshots / pause | GPU | SDKs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Islo | MicroVM (hypervisor not named) | No | No / Yes | Not documented | Policy-driven | Yes / Yes | Not documented | CLI, REST API |
| Ona (formerly Gitpod) | Dedicated cloud VM | No | No / Yes | Not documented | Not documented | Not documented / Yes | Yes | Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, CLI, REST API |
| Daytona | Containers or VMs | No | Not documented / Yes | <90 ms | Unlimited | Yes / Yes | Yes | Python, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, Java |
| Superserve | Firecracker microVM | No | No / Yes | Not documented | Unlimited | Yes / Yes | Not documented | Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, CLI, REST API, MCP server |
| OpenComputer | QEMU/KVM VM | Yes | Yes / No | Not documented | No limit documented | Yes / Yes | Not documented | JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, CLI, REST API |
| Coder | Template-defined (VM/pod/container) | Yes | Yes / No | Not documented | Not documented | Not documented / Yes | Not documented | CLI, REST API, MCP server |
| Namespace | KVM virtual machine | No | No / No | Not documented | Deadline-based; Devbox 3-24 h | Yes / Yes | Not documented | JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, CLI, MCP server, gRPC/Connect API |
Frequently asked questions
What is Islo?
How does Islo isolate code?
Is Islo open source?
How much does Islo cost?
What are the alternatives to Islo?
Sources
Cite this page
Agent Sandboxes. (2026). Islo. agentsandboxes.org. Last reviewed November 9, 2026. https://agentsandboxes.org/sandboxes/islo/
Found an error or a missing sandbox? Submit a correction — every entry links to the sources it relies on.