Vercel Ship 2026: Agent Stack, eve, Docker, and Vercel Agent

Vercel used its Ship 2026 keynote in London to lay out a clear thesis: the next decade of software will be built by and for agents, and Vercel intends to be the infrastructure layer underneath. CEO Guillermo Rauch framed it as a natural extension of the company's decade-long bet on the web — now applied to software that can think.

Agentic infrastructure, in three parts

Rauch described agentic infrastructure as having three pillars. First, Vercel is the deployment target for coding agents like Claude Code and Codex — when an agent is asked where to deploy, the answer is Vercel because the platform is built around how agents work. Second, Vercel provides the primitives to build and run your own agents in production. Third, Vercel itself is increasingly automated by agents: the platform handles traffic, traces, and observability, and its internal agents investigate anomalies and surface pull requests instead of just alerts.

The Agent Stack and eve

The Agent Stack is Vercel's end-to-end set of building blocks for agents. It includes the AI SDK for a unified model API, AI Gateway for routing and failover across hundreds of models, Workflow SDK for durable execution, Vercel Sandbox for isolated microVMs, and Chat SDK for deploying agents across Slack, Discord, and GitHub.

New at Ship was Vercel Connect, a building block that gives agents secure access to external tools and data without long-lived provider tokens. Instead, agents request temporary credentials scoped to a single task, eliminating standing secrets that can leak.

Also new is eve, an open-source agent framework that Vercel says is the distilled architecture of the hundreds of agents it has built internally. eve agents live in a single directory with markdown instructions and TypeScript tools, with durable execution, sandboxed compute, approvals, subagents, and evals wired in.

Full-stack apps get Docker and microservices

Vercel also announced long-requested infrastructure features. Dockerfile support and the Vercel Container Registry let you build, store, and run Docker images on Vercel Functions or Sandboxes. The registry is OCI-compliant and works with standard docker commands, and images are optimized for Fluid compute as precompiled snapshots.

Backend support expands with FastAPI, Flask, Express, Hono, and other frameworks, plus backend-only services for REST APIs, queues, cron, and MCP servers. The Marketplace now offers Amazon Aurora, Aurora DSQL, DynamoDB, and OpenSearch directly from the dashboard.

Vercel Services, launching July 1, makes microservices a first-class citizen. Frontend and backend can be developed and deployed together, and services can communicate without touching the public internet.

Enterprise and Vercel Agent

For enterprises, Vercel announced Passport for private-by-default internal apps, a Security Dashboard to flag misconfigurations and long-lived credentials, and BYOC on AWS in private beta.

Vercel Agent, now in public beta, is the intelligence layer that monitors production, autonomously investigates alerts, and opens fixes as PRs. Its permissions model combines plan mode with batched permission requests, running read-only by default and asking for narrow, temporary access before touching production.

Ship 2026 also featured a hackathon with OpenAI, talks from Anthropic and Auth0, and a demo of Vertex, Vercel's support agent, automating 91% of tickets.