My EC2 instance has a public IP address. It has zero inbound firewall rules. And yet I can reach my AI agent from my phone on Telegram, pull up a full web workspace in my browser, and run shell commands on it — all without opening a single port, without a VPN, and without SSH.
The latest version also splits storage deliberately: persistent agent data stays on EFS, while the Hermes install and Python venv moved to the root EBS volume. That change keeps pip install / hermes update I/O off EFS and brings always-on infra to a highly predictable ~$35/mo.
That's the setup this post is about.
What is Hermes Agent?
Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent from Nous Research. It's not a chatbot wrapper. It has persistent memory, skills, a file system, a sandboxed terminal backend, and a full web workspace UI. You point it at a model provider and it runs as a daemon — hermes-gateway — serving an OpenAI-compatible API.
