Best BYOC sandbox platforms in 2026

AI agents may need to test code against private APIs, work with internal repositories, or process data that must stay within a defined network boundary. Bring your own cloud (BYOC) lets teams place sandbox execution inside their cloud account while using a provider's APIs and lifecycle management.

The deployment model matters as much as the location. One provider may operate the cluster for you; another may connect its control plane to machines your team maintains. Check execution, storage, logs, and orchestration metadata separately: running compute in your account does not automatically mean every category of data stays there.

Compare the infrastructure and execution requirements of your AI agents before choosing a deployment model.

• Deployment breadth: Check support for your cloud, region, or on-premises environment, including the instance types required for sandbox isolation.
• Access model: Determine whether you can configure the deployment self-serve or need an Enterprise agreement or support-assisted setup.
• Operational responsibility: Establish who provisions nodes, updates the runtime, scales capacity, handles networking, and responds to failures.
• Isolation model: Verify the runtime used in your deployment. MicroVMs provide a separate guest kernel; gVisor interposes a user-space kernel. Ordinary containers share the host kernel. Select the boundary appropriate to your workloads.
• Sandbox execution and scale: Check custom-image support, concurrent sandbox capacity, startup performance, session duration, persistent storage, and GPU availability. Capacity in your cloud still depends on quotas and provisioned infrastructure.
• Compliance and data flows: Review where execution, logs, snapshots, backups, and control-plane metadata reside. Check the scope of relevant compliance evidence and agreements against your deployment.

Northflank provides isolated sandbox environments for AI agents and code execution inside your own infrastructure. Run coding agents, generated APIs, scripts, repository builds, and GPU tasks in custom environments, with support for thousands of concurrent sessions and no fixed session time limit.

With bring your own cloud (BYOC), Northflank acts as the control plane to run coding agents and their sandboxes in your virtual private cloud (VPC). It manages workload scheduling and lifecycle operations while execution runs on your infrastructure. Standard deployments use Northflank-hosted orchestration metadata; an Enterprise forward-deployed control plane supports fully private and air-gapped environments.

Key features:

• Self-serve bring your own cloud (BYOC): Deploy on supported AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, CoreWeave, and Civo infrastructure, with options for on-premises and bare-metal environments.
• Sandbox orchestration: Manage sandbox creation, execution, scaling, and cleanup through APIs and reusable deployment configurations. Northflank manages Kubernetes infrastructure for its provisioned customer-cloud clusters.
• Configurable isolation: Enable sandbox security and select a supported runtime class, such as Kata Containers or gVisor. MicroVMs require compatible hardware or nested virtualisation; installing the runtime alone does not enable isolation for every workload.
• Concurrent execution: Run separate environments for agents, users, or jobs and scale capacity around their resource requirements. Northflank Cloud offers sub-second sandbox boot times; startup in your own cloud depends on your configuration.
• No fixed session limit: Use short-lived sandboxes or long-running agent environments. Attach persistent volumes when files need to survive restarts and pauses.
• Custom environments and GPUs: Deploy container images with the dependencies your agents need, configure CPU and memory plans, and run GPU sandboxes on appropriately configured GPU node pools.
• Repeatable deployments: Use templates, APIs, CLI tooling, and GitOps workflows to manage sandbox configuration.
• Security controls: Northflank is SOC 2 Type II compliant and supports HIPAA-compliant workloads with BAAs under an Enterprise contract. Enterprise identity and audit controls help manage access to sandbox infrastructure.

cto.new migrated their entire sandbox infrastructure to Northflank in two days after EC2 metal instances made scaling costs unpredictable, going from unworkable provisioning to thousands of daily deployments with linear, per-second billing.

Best for: Teams running AI agent sandboxes at scale inside their own infrastructure, including multi-tenant code execution, long-running agents, and workloads that need access to private services.

Pricing: Customer-cloud deployments combine your infrastructure bill with Northflank fees. On Northflank Cloud, compute costs $0.01667/vCPU-hour and $0.00833/GB-hour, with H100 GPU plans at $2.74/hour all-inclusive (CPU and RAM included). The free developer Sandbox tier offers always-on compute with no sleeping, two free services, one database, and two cron jobs. Pay-as-you-go supports CPU and GPU workloads with per-second billing; Enterprise adds custom terms, 24/7 support, SLAs, and enterprise access controls. See the full pricing details for plans and additional GPU options.

E2B offers Firecracker sandboxes for AI agent code execution through Python and TypeScript SDKs. Its Enterprise bring your own cloud (BYOC) offering supports AWS, GCP, and Azure. E2B provisions, operates, and monitors the cluster in your cloud account.

This managed customer-cloud service is distinct from E2B Embed, its self-hosted single-node package. Review the enterprise deployment details to understand the network boundary and which control and monitoring data reaches E2B.

Best for: Enterprise teams that want SDK-driven sandbox execution in a supported cloud account with E2B managing the cluster.

Pricing: Customer-cloud pricing is custom through Enterprise. Managed Hobby includes a $100 one-time usage credit and 20 concurrent sandboxes. Pro starts at $150/month plus usage, with 100 concurrent sandboxes and sessions up to 24 hours; higher concurrency costs extra.

Daytona supports customer-managed compute through custom regions: your organisation supplies and manages runner machines, while Daytona provides the control plane. This model lets you place sandbox execution on infrastructure you control and scale capacity by adding compute.

Daytona calls this bring your own compute (BYOC). Its control plane coordinates sandbox operations, and runners carry them out. Your team remains responsible for the underlying infrastructure and capacity. Daytona offers container, Linux VM, Windows, and GPU sandbox environments. Confirm the sandbox classes supported by your custom-region configuration.

Best for: Teams that want agent sandbox execution on their own compute and have the engineering capacity to operate runner infrastructure.

Pricing: Managed compute uses usage-based pricing and includes $200 in free credits. Customer-managed deployment terms should be agreed separately from managed-cloud resource rates.

Rates checked October 1, 2026. The table below shows managed-cloud resource rates for reference, not the cost of running sandboxes in your own cloud. Customer-cloud deployments combine infrastructure costs with the provider's platform or contract fees. E2B Pro also has a $150/month subscription plus usage.

Choose Northflank for self-serve AI agent sandbox execution across supported cloud and private infrastructure, with configurable isolation and managed orchestration. E2B fits teams that want its SDKs and a vendor-operated cluster through Enterprise. Daytona fits teams that want to attach and manage their own runner compute.

It means sandbox execution runs in infrastructure you control, such as your cloud account or VPC. The provider supplies management APIs and usually operates some or all of the control plane. The division of operational responsibility varies by platform.

Bring your own cloud (BYOC) places execution in your infrastructure while the vendor manages agreed parts of the service. Self-hosting generally makes your team responsible for deploying and operating the software, including its control plane, upgrades, and incident response.

Customer-cloud deployments introduce different networking, permissions, hardware, and upgrade requirements across environments. Some providers focus on managed infrastructure; others support customer-cloud deployment through self-serve setup or Enterprise agreements.

Northflank supports AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, CoreWeave, and Civo, with options for on-premises and bare-metal infrastructure. Standard customer-cloud deployment is self-serve. Sandbox runtime support depends on the cluster configuration and underlying hardware.

Yes. E2B's Enterprise offering supports AWS, GCP, and Azure, with E2B provisioning and operating the cluster in your account.

Yes. Northflank supports databases such as Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis alongside sandbox workloads in your infrastructure. Configure network access and credentials so agents can reach only the services they need.

The best bring your own cloud (BYOC) sandbox platform depends on the workloads your agents execute, the infrastructure they must use, and the operations your team wants the provider to handle.

Northflank is a strong fit for AI agent code execution in your own infrastructure, with custom environments, concurrent CPU and GPU workloads, persistent files, and no fixed session time limit. E2B offers managed customer-cloud clusters through Enterprise, while Daytona connects its control plane to customer-managed runner infrastructure.

If you want to go deeper on the topics covered in this guide, these articles are a good next step.

• Self-hosted AI sandboxes: guide to secure code execution: Covers how self-hosted and BYOC sandbox approaches differ operationally, and when each makes sense for regulated or compliance-sensitive workloads.
• How to sandbox AI agents: microVMs, gVisor, and isolation strategies: Technical deep-dive into isolation technologies including Firecracker, Kata Containers, and gVisor, and how to choose between them based on your threat model.