Palana (Part 2): Architecting isolation, identity, and auditability for AI agents

This post dives into the technical architecture of Palana, Grab's secure execution platform for AI agents. It details the implementation of isolation, identity, and auditability through Kubernetes namespaces, RBAC, network policies (Cilium), and proxy-based access control (Traefik, OAuth2-Proxy, OPA). It also explains the secrets management strategy using Vault, LLM access via a dedicated proxy wrapper, and the observability mechanisms including structured logging and an idle-shutdown reaper. The post highlights lessons learned regarding platform-level security, user experience, credential handling, namespace compounding, and lifecycle management for long-running agents.