Agent Infrastructure · Commentary

Our layers are solid — Aiven, Scaleway, KYA meet Nadella’s Foundry

22 April 2026 · by Risto Anton Paarni

Satya Nadella, this week

“Every agent will need its own computer. And with new Hosted agents in Foundry, every agent gets its own dedicated enterprise-grade sandbox, with durable state, built-in identity and governance, and support for any harness or framework.”

That is the other half of what we have been shipping. The sandbox half is now a Microsoft product. The identity half is KYA. The EU-sovereign ground underneath is Aiven (Helsinki) and Scaleway (Paris). Our layers are solid, and they line up one-to-one with what Foundry asks for.

Four layers, one stack

Layer 1 · Distribution

Microsoft Foundry — Connect tier

Foundry’s Hosted Agents give each agent a dedicated sandbox with durable state and harness freedom. For DWS clients already on the Microsoft stack, Connect tier is how our skilled agents land in their environment without re-platforming. One sandbox per KYA-bound agent, per tenant, per policy. Metadata to Foundry; data stays on EU sovereign infra.

Layer 2 · Data plane

Aiven — Helsinki, Finland

Aiven is the Finnish managed open-source data platform (PostgreSQL, Kafka, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, Valkey) with an official Aiven MCP server — AI agents call SQL, pgvector similarity search and Kafka topics through RBAC-enforced tool calls. EU HQ and EU data centres means sovereignty is about jurisdiction, not just pin-code. DWS_DATA_STANDARD locks Aiven-first; Aiven’s own sovereignty stance (“data residency in Frankfurt or Helsinki can still fall under foreign jurisdictions if the cloud provider is headquartered outside the EU”) is why.

Layer 3 · Compute

Scaleway — Paris / Amsterdam

SecNumCloud-eligible, French-headquartered, EU-only execution. Our compliance agents — ETS, CBAM, CSRD (E1–E5, S1–S4, G1), EU AI Act Article 12, EPBD, EED — run here, not on a US hyperscaler. CLOUD Act exposure on the execution path: effectively zero. The data never leaves the bloc.

Layer 4 · Identity spine

KYA Standard v1.5 — Know Your Agent

Every agent session bound to a KYB/KYC-verified human. Five pillars: Identity Attribution, Capability Gating, Forensic Observability, Autoresearch Governance, KYA Vision. TC-4 Leash Snap terminates the full agent chain when trust drops. Foundry says “every agent has a computer.” KYA says “every agent has an accountable human.” Both are true at once.

What Nadella describes, in our words

Foundry covers three things explicitly: sandbox, durable state, built-in identity and governance. “Built-in identity” inside a Microsoft tenant is fine — until you are deploying 21 skilled compliance agents for a regulated EU client, and the auditor asks: whose identity, whose tenant, under whose legal regime. KYA answers that with a cryptographic identity token issued by Lifetime Oy (Helsinki) and honored by the sandbox. The Microsoft identity is the seat. The KYA identity is the worker.

Concrete shape: 21 Skilled Compliance Agents per client

For a single EU enterprise under a CSRD + CBAM + EU AI Act engagement, the wiring is the same every time:

21 Skilled Agents — ETS, CBAM (transitional + definitive), CSRD disclosures across E1–E5 / S1–S4 / G1, EU AI Act Article 12, EPBD, EED.
Each one gets its own Foundry Hosted Agent sandbox.
Each one is bound to a KYA identity with capability gating and Firehorse trace IDs.
Each one reads and writes on Aiven for PostgreSQL (client tenant, RLS-enforced, pgvector for similarity search).
Each one executes on Scaleway EU compute.
Every action is logged to the Firehorse audit trail and signed by the sovereignty audit overlay for EU AI Act Article 12.
A single TC-4 Leash Snap revokes all 21 sandboxes at once if the bound human’s trust score drops below threshold.

Foundry asks → KYA already answers

Foundry requirement	KYA answer (already shipping v1.5)
Built-in identity, per agent	Pillar 1 — Identity Attribution. KYB/KYC-verified human → agent binding with cryptographic token.
Governance	Pillar 3 — Forensic Observability. Firehorse trace IDs on every action, tamper-evident chain.
Durable state	Aiven for PostgreSQL + memory audit trail (KYA-S v1.5 §10, KYA-O v1.7 §12).
Any harness or framework	Skills as `.md` contracts, CLI + MCP; portable across runtimes by design.
Accountability when the agent acts wrong	Pillar 2 — Capability Gating + TC-4 Leash Snap. One revoke, full chain terminates.
Data residency (EU-regulated clients)	Layers 2 and 3 above. Aiven + Scaleway. EU HQ, EU DC, EU law.

Foundry gives the agent a computer. KYA gives the agent a conscience.

That is the one-line version. The fuller version is that our four layers — distribution (Foundry Connect), data (Aiven), compute (Scaleway), identity (KYA) — compose. None of them compete with Nadella’s announcement; all of them complete it. For EU-regulated industrial clients, this is the shape the regulation will accept.