Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, externalize the expense of dealing with it to each operator.
Been like that since what, early 2000s?
It... wasn't okay then. And now it's scaled up immensely.
How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
91–100 of 251 posts
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#92> Next: skip Chromium startup
> This is complex, as a running browser has open devices, timers, graphics state, network state, and fingerprint state.
Hmm, can't you just keep a set of browsers already running, like a warm pool, ready to assign to an incoming request? The latency would be close to zero for the user. You'd need some prediction logic to expand / contract the warm pool based on traffic patterns, but that seems like the easiest solution to me.
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#93> Plain headless Chromium is easy to detect by websites with anti-bot measures. Plain headless Chromium avoided getting blocked by websites only 2% of the time, according to our stealth benchmark. > Our browsers avoid blocks 81% of the time on our stealth benchmark, and 84.8% on Halluminate BrowserBench, the highest of any provider. Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of an…
> Who uses service providers like this? I use change detection to monitor all sorts of websites for changes. Some of my favorite authors don't have RSS. I always set up price monitoring for any big ticket item I'm considering like appliances so I can see how their pricing changes over time. I also use scrapers for websites that don't have an API. I like having all of my purchase history indexed in a database where I…
The litmus test here is whether they support https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ out of the box or not
They do not.
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#94What is firecracker needed? Couldn’t this just run in a container directly? I understand some of the isolation concerns but a browser and container breakout is a billion dollar CVE, no?
If you follow the kernel mailing list container breakout exploits are currently a weekly occurrence
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#95> Next: skip Chromium startup > This is complex, as a running browser has open devices, timers, graphics state, network state, and fingerprint state. Hmm, can't you just keep a set of browsers already running, like a warm pool, ready to assign to an incoming request? The latency would be close to zero for the user. You'd need some prediction logic to expand / contract the warm pool based on traffic patterns, but that…
Yes, warm pool work, but our goal is to replace them at all.
Warm pools are nice but at the end they also consume resources, And you need to always keep the pool warm, starting browsers to balance, etc...
With the upcoming changes we will keep Chromium startup and the VM will be ready in 50ms, defeating warm pools at all
Also some customers need special parameters and features, increasing warm pools complexity. The happy path will be fast but the edge case will be extremely slow , and we want to guarantee fast speeds to matter which features you need on the requested browser.
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of anti-bot measures is to get rid of bots - you are not wanted there. Unethical just because it does something someone else doesn't want? I guess it depends on why and what the intention is. I don't have time to sit 24/7 in front of a computer to get a ticket to some events, does that mean it's unethical for me to use my own bot so I c…
An example I ran into recently: I wanted to scrape pricing data for used cars, to better inform a friend's decision about what to purchase. I know there's a relationship between mileage and depreciation, but wanted to have a better sense of what that relationship is to know whether a given car was over or underpriced. Similarly, if I was pulling that data to build a service of my own to offer to users... is that unet…
> scrape pricing data for used cars
Time was you could get lovely json feeds from every site by iterating the inspector curl statement. Now-a-days you can't even use Selenium without Cloudflare getting grouchy. Last fall had to make my spreadsheet like a cave-person control c, control v. It wouldn't be so bad if the dealer aggregators' coverage was xor, but you have to dedupe listings. Then there is the whole online salespeople who don't show up at the dealership.
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#97We run a screenshot API (ApiFlash) with Chromium packaged in an AWS Lambda container image instead of Firecracker on EC2. AWS Lambda gives you the isolation and autoscaling for free which is ideal for spiky stateless work like screenshots. I believe we get mostly the same benefits compared to browser-use solution but with a much much simpler architecture. The tradeoff is the AWS lambda cold starts, but in practice se…
Your solution sounds very expensive.
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#98Something elided here is that nested virtualization on regular EC2 instances has only been possible since February this year[1] - before this, you had to use a metal EC2 instance to run Firecracker VMs. 1. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec...
Yeah pretty new stuff - official it’s still not recommended but works really well so far! Finally we don’t have to run baremetal
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#99What is firecracker needed? Couldn’t this just run in a container directly? I understand some of the isolation concerns but a browser and container breakout is a billion dollar CVE, no?
If you follow the kernel mailing list container breakout exploits are currently a weekly occurrence
Oh really, not a security expert, but could you send me some examples?
Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s
#100[flagged]
Your whole account is undisclosed marketing for this service. Fingerprinting in this manner is highly unlikely to be viable - there are too many middleboxes at the TCP layer to try and fingerprint on it.
Assuming you run on a mobile proxy - how would you even do that? 1 IP is shared across (potentially) thousands of phones?