https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/04/google-agent-testbed-scion/ BT InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter A monthly overview of things you need to know as an architect or aspiring architect. View an example Enter your e-mail address [ ] [ ] Select your country [Select a country] [ ] I consent to InfoQ.com handling my data as explained in this Privacy Notice. [Subscribe] We protect your privacy. Close Toggle Navigation Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development English edition * English edition * Chinese edition * Japanese edition * French edition Write for InfoQ Search [ ] [Search] Register Sign in Unlock the full InfoQ experience Unlock the full InfoQ experience by logging in! Stay updated with your favorite authors and topics, engage with content, and download exclusive resources. Log In or Don't have an InfoQ account? Register * Stay updated on topics and peers that matter to youReceive instant alerts on the latest insights and trends. * Quickly access free resources for continuous learningMinibooks, videos with transcripts, and training materials. * Save articles and read at anytimeBookmark articles to read whenever youre ready. Logo - Back to homepage News Articles Presentations Podcasts Guides Topics Development * Java * Kotlin * .Net * C# * Swift * Go * Rust * JavaScript Featured in Development * When Every Bit Counts: How Valkey Rebuilt Its Hashtable for Modern Hardware Madelyn Olson discusses the evolution of Valkey's data structures, moving away from "textbook" pointer-chasing HashMaps to more cache-aware designs. She explains the implementation of "Swedish" tables to maximize memory density. She shares insights on systems intuition, memory prefetching, and the rigorous testing needed for mission-critical caches. When Every Bit Counts: How Valkey Rebuilt Its Hashtable for Modern Hardware All in development Architecture & Design * Architecture * Enterprise Architecture * Scalability/Performance * Design * Case Studies * Microservices * Service Mesh * Patterns * Security Featured in Architecture & Design * Panel: Taking Architecture out of the Echo Chamber Andrew Harmel-Law and a panel of expert architects discuss the shifting practice of architecture in 2025. They explain strategies for communicating technical debt to stakeholders, the benefits of decentralized decision-making through ADRs, and the career paths of modern leaders. The panel shares insights on bridging the gap between mobile and backend teams to ensure a holistic system. Panel: Taking Architecture out of the Echo Chamber All in architecture-design AI Infrastructure * Big Data * Machine Learning * NoSQL * Database * Data Analytics * Streaming Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering * Context Engineering with Adi Polak In this episode, Thomas Betts and Adi Polak talk about the need for context engineering when interacting with LLMs and designing agentic systems. Prompt engineering techniques work with a stateless approach, while context engineering allows AI systems to be stateful. Context Engineering with Adi Polak All in ai-ml-data-eng Culture & Methods * Agile * Diversity * Leadership * Lean/Kanban * Personal Growth * Scrum * Sociocracy * Software Craftmanship * Team Collaboration * Testing * UX Featured in Culture & Methods * A Better Alternative to Reducing CI Regression Test Suite Sizes How can you focus in a sea of results from a large regression test suite? This article describes a stochastic approach that relies on some degree of redundancy in your CI regression test set. This approach does not guarantee you will catch every bug every time, but it gives you your best bet of not missing the subtle signatures of all the bugs uncovered by your CI regression test suite runs. A Better Alternative to Reducing CI Regression Test Suite Sizes All in culture-methods DevOps * Infrastructure * Continuous Delivery * Automation * Containers * Cloud * Observability Featured in DevOps * Duolingo's Kubernetes Leap Franka Passing discusses the architectural shift of Duolingo's 500+ backend services to Kubernetes. She explains the move toward GitOps with Argo CD, the transition to IPv6-only pods, and the "cellular architecture" used to isolate environments. She shares "reports from the trenches" on managing developer trust, navigating AWS rate limits, and productionizing early adopter services. Duolingo's Kubernetes Leap All in devops Events Helpful links * About InfoQ * InfoQ Editors * Write for InfoQ * About C4Media * Diversity Choose your language * En * Zhong Wen * Ri Ben * Fr InfoQ Architect Certification - image InfoQ Architect Certification Join Luca Mezzalira for this 5-week online cohort. Master socio-technical architecture leadership. Register Now. QCon AI Boston - image QCon AI Boston Learn how leading engineering teams run AI in production--reliably, securely, and at scale. Early Bird ends April 14. QCon San Francisco - image QCon San Francisco Learn what's next in AI and software, from teams already doing it. Early Bird ends April 14. InfoQ Homepage News Google Open Sources Experimental Multi-Agent Orchestration Testbed Scion AI, ML & Data Engineering Google Open Sources Experimental Multi-Agent Orchestration Testbed Scion Apr 07, 2026 2 min read by * Sergio De Simone Write for InfoQ Feed your curiosity. Help 550k+ global senior developers each month stay ahead.Get in touch Listen to this article - 0:00 Audio ready to play Your browser does not support the audio element. 0:00 0:00 Normal1.25x1.5x Like * Reading list Designed to manage concurrent agents running in containers across local and remote compute, Scion is an experimental orchestration testbed that enables developers to run groups of specialized agents with isolated identities, credentials, and shared workspaces. Google describes Scion as a "hypervisor for agents" that enables to integrate multi-agent system components like agent memory, chatrooms, and task management as orthogonal concerns. Scion orchestrates "deep agents" (Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, and others) as isolated, concurrent processes. Each agent gets its own container, git worktree, and credentials -- so they can work on different parts of your project without stepping on each other. Agents run locally, on remote VMs, or across Kubernetes clusters. Scion enables developers to manage a graph of tasks that evolve dynamically and execute in parallel pursuing distinct goals, such as coding, auditing, and testing. Rather than relying on a fixed set of agents, it support distinct agent lifecycles, with some agents being specialized and long-lived, while others are ephemeral and tied to one single task. One basic tenet of Scion is preferring isolation over constraints to make agents operation safe. This means that instead of constraining an agent's behavior by defining rules and embedding them into its context, Scion opts for letting agents do whatever they need to do to complete their tasks while enforcing outside boundaries and guardrails: Scion favors running agents in --yolo mode, while isolating them in containers, git worktrees, and on compute nodes subject to network policy at the infrastructure layer. Scion supports multiple popular agents through adapters called harnesses, which manage lifecycle, authentication, and configuration. Supported agents include Gemini, Claude Code, OpenCode, and Codex, though support for the latter two is currently partial. Developers can use distinct containerization runtimes with Scion, including Docker, Podman, Apple containers, and Kubernetes via named profiles. To use Scion developers should familiarize themselves with its unique lexicon, which includes concepts such as grove, corresponding to a project; hub, a central control plane for orchestration; runtime broker, a machine where hubs run, and others. To showcase Scion's capabilities, Google has released the codebase for a game, Relics of the Athenaeum, in which groups of agents collaborate to solve computational puzzles. The code demonstrates how distinct agents running on different harnesses work together to impersonate distinct characters, with a game runner in charge of spawning new characters/agents and those agents in turn spawning worker and specialized agents dynamically. Collaboration occurs through a shared workspace for reading and writing data about the challenge and solutions, as well as via direct messages and party-wide broadcasts. About the Author Sergio De Simone Show moreShow less Rate this Article Adoption ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) Style ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) [ ] [Submit] [ ] [Submit] [ ] Author Contacted This content is in the AI, ML & Data Engineering topic Related Topics: * Development * Architecture & Design * AI, ML & Data Engineering * Gemini * Agents * Open Source * Large language models * Claude * Google * Related Editorial * Related Sponsors * Popular across InfoQ + Anthropic Designs Three-Agent Harness Supports Long-Running Full-Stack AI Development + Dynamic Languages Faster and Cheaper in 13-Language Claude Code Benchmark + Beyond RAG: Architecting Context-Aware AI Systems with Spring Boot + TigerFS Mounts PostgreSQL Databases as a Filesystem for Developers and AI Agents + Pinterest Deploys Production-Scale Model Context Protocol Ecosystem for AI Agent Workflows + Context Engineering with Adi Polak Related Content The InfoQ Newsletter A round-up of last week's content on InfoQ sent out every Tuesday. 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[Subscribe] We protect your privacy. * Development + When Every Bit Counts: How Valkey Rebuilt Its Hashtable for Modern Hardware + Bloom Filters: Theory, Engineering Trade-offs, and Implementation in Go + Anthropic Accidentally Exposes Claude Code Source via npm Source Map File * Architecture & Design + Pinterest Reduces Spark OOM Failures by 96% Through Auto Memory Retries + Anthropic Designs Three-Agent Harness Supports Long-Running Full-Stack AI Development + Panel: Taking Architecture out of the Echo Chamber * Culture & Methods + A Better Alternative to Reducing CI Regression Test Suite Sizes + How to Handle Trusts and Psychological Safety When Scaling Organizations + The Principal Engineer's Path: Skills, Strategies, and Lessons Learned * AI, ML & Data Engineering + Google Open Sources Experimental Multi-Agent Orchestration Testbed Scion + Context Engineering with Adi Polak + TigerFS Mounts PostgreSQL Databases as a Filesystem for Developers and AI Agents * DevOps + Istio Evolves for the AI Era with Multicluster, Ambient Mode, and Inference Capabilities + Duolingo's Kubernetes Leap + Open Source Security Tool Trivy Hit by Supply Chain Attack, Prompting Urgent Industry Response The InfoQ Newsletter A round-up of last week's content on InfoQ sent out every Tuesday. Join a community of over 250,000 senior developers. View an example * Get a quick overview of content published on a variety of innovator and early adopter technologies * Learn what you don't know that you don't know * Stay up to date with the latest information from the topics you are interested in Enter your e-mail address [ ] [ ] Select your country [Select a country] [ ] I consent to InfoQ.com handling my data as explained in this Privacy Notice. [Subscribe] We protect your privacy. March 16-19, 2026 | The QEII Centre, London Reliability rules have changed. At QCon London 2026, unlearn legacy patterns and get the blueprints from senior engineers scaling production AI today. 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