Managed Hermes hosting

SEAOTTER (seaotter.dev) is managed Hermes hosting: the control plane for Hermes Agent. Always-on hosted agents on Google Cloud. No VPS. No installer. No SSH. Not seaotter.ai (OtterScore).

Create. Poll. Run. Isolation, TLS, backups, and lifecycle stay on the plane. Hermes stays Hermes.

The Hermes community already runs standing assistants, research that lands where you read, and agents that learn a codebase. The hard part is everything after the first chat: keeping the process up, wiring secrets, and recovering when a host flakes.

Hermes stays Hermes. The plane is the product.

We do not replace Hermes. You bring model credentials. SEAOTTER hosts and operates the agent.

What the plane owns:

• Provision — POST an agent; the API returns immediately with status: provisioning. Work continues async while you poll readiness.
• Readiness you can see — stages walk namespace → Helm → pod ready → gVisor sandbox verified → DNS → TLS → dashboard reachable. Typical wall time is a few minutes—usually under five.
• Isolation by default — each agent gets its own Kubernetes namespace (agent-{id}), quotas, and network policy. No shared process namespace between tenants.
• Lifecycle without SSH — pause, restart, restore, reveal/rotate credentials, upsert secrets, logs, and metrics through the API or dashboard.
• Always-on — the agent keeps working when you close the laptop. That is a provisioned plane, not a local install left on a desk.

Full stage table and poll loop: Provisioning lifecycle.

Create. Poll. Run.

Self-hosting means an installer, a cloud account, and a process you keep alive. SEAOTTER turns that into three moves:

1. Create — Name an agent, pick a Google Cloud region, POST. You get provisioning back in about a second.
2. Poll — Read config.provisioning_stages on GET /agents/{id} until wizard_reachable is ok and status is running.
3. Run — Open the dashboard. Operate from the plane: stop/start, restart, restore from backup, secrets in Secret Manager, logs—without living on the box.

That triad is the product. Everything else—ingress, TLS on *.agents.seaotter.dev, backups of the Hermes home volume—is there so the triad stays boring in production.

When the plane wins

Self-hosting on a Pi or mini-PC you already watch can be enough for a personal operator. Friction shows up when:

• Uptime is the deliverable. Cron, inbox triage, and client-facing agents fail quietly if the host sleeps or the process dies.
• Environments multiply. Another client, another team, another “just one more VPS.”
• Ops steals roadmap. Without a managed plane you own the installer, the box, and the 2 a.m. restart—even when each incident is “only an hour.”

Evenings come back. The agent keeps the work moving.

When self-host still wins

Prefer the box you control when you need full OS access, exotic networking, or you are deliberately learning Hermes by operating the stack end to end. Prefer the plane when always-on, lifecycle APIs, and per-agent isolation matter more than owning the metal.

Self-host vs managed Hermes is the full tradeoff.

Run Hermes at the standard your work deserves

Purpose-built for Hermes. Isolated per agent. Usually live in under five minutes.

• What is SEAOTTER? · docs.seaotter.dev
• Create your first hosted Hermes agent
• One isolated Hermes per client
• Self-host vs managed Hermes