Proposal: Add Katakate Secure Sandbox Backend Option for Smolagents Code Execution

[gkatakate]

Hi Smolagents team! 👋

I maintain Katakate (K7) — Secure sandbox VMs for executing untrusted code at scale.

🔐 Why Katakate could be a strong backend for Smolagents

Fully self-hosted

Python-first design — automation is pure Python + a lean Ansible playbook
→ easy for AI/Python engineers to customize, audit, and fork

Strong isolation using Kata Containers + Firecracker
→ lightweight VMs with real syscall + namespace isolation

• Scales efficiently and Kubernetes orchestrated. You can even hit the K3s API directly of Katakate to manage your cluster

• Proven ability to run 50+ micro-VMs on a 20-vCPU node (each ~0.3 vCPU)

• Uses devmapper snapshotter + thin-pool + CoW for efficient storage at scale

• Designed for LLM code-execution security: resource limits, restricted networking, fast teardown

• Runs locally both on Linux AMD/ARM. It even runs on Mac if >=Sequoia + >=M3 Pro inside a Qemu VM, with near-zero virt. nesting overhead.

🧩 Proposal

I’d love to explore adding executor_type="k7" as a secure backend alongside the existing local / Docker / WASM options.

Repo for reference:
👉 https://github.com/katakate/k7

Happy to iterate quickly with your guidance — excited to explore whether this can help strengthen secure code execution in smolagents! 🙌

— Gary