Against autonomy-first self-hosted agents.
The closest relatives. Same boundary story, the data stays home. The divergence is what happens at the moment of action, and whose name is on it.
The short version
When to choose which.
Choose an autonomy-first agent when
- Your operations can be fully pre-approved
- You are choosing on maturity: production references at enterprise scale
- You need secret redaction before model calls
- Integration breadth and team size decide it
Choose Infraware when
- An auditor, insurer or client will ask who approved a specific change
- Every write has to run on a named person’s grant
- Autonomy should be earned from your own record, per context
- A wrong model output should cost minutes, never a change
Question by question
Where the postures diverge.
| The question | Autonomy-first self-hosted agents | Infraware |
|---|---|---|
| What can it do without a human? | Pre-approved actions run unattended The direction of travel is autonomy: signed runbooks execute with no human present for that decision. | Reads only; writes on a named grant Per action, or as a standing signature for an exact context once the record has earned it. Same identity binding, same audit line. |
| Whose identity executes? | A scoped service identity The session is attributed to a user; the execution runs as the service. | A dedicated write account Split from the read principal. The audit entry names the person who approved. |
| Who approved, on what evidence, what ran? | Who was in the session What the agent did is answerable. A per-decision approval chain is not their model. | All three, per command The audit entry carries the approver, the resolved principal, the command and the outcome. |
| What happens when the model is wrong? | Guardrails filter the action The quality of the filter varies with the action surface. | A wrong proposal, not a wrong change It lands in a report a human reads. The failure mode is wasted minutes. |
| Verify before you pay? | A hosted sandbox or guided pilot Deployment quoted in weeks; pricing by sales conversation. | In your own cluster The failure suite, a first root-cause report inside an hour, and a pilot scoped on one call and fixed after it. |
How to start