Shouldn’t the title be “AWS Lambda MicroVMs”? MicroVMs are an existing concept.
Yeah, I'm surprised Justin posted this like it was new(s). Wasn't it doing the rounds on the 22nd when it launched?
MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
41–50 of 222 posts
Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#42There are sooooo many sandbox providers out there. They do spike on different features like: - snapshotting and forking - good SSH and VPN access for end-users - agent-friendly features, like obscuring secrets at network layer Then there's also the option to use libkrun to run local sandboxes on your own computer. That doesn't scratch the itch for hosted services, but works if your goal is to run agents inside isolat…
Why isn't libkrun good enough for hosted stuff? I use it as a podman backend in a microservice architecture.
Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#43There are sooooo many sandbox providers out there. They do spike on different features like: - snapshotting and forking - good SSH and VPN access for end-users - agent-friendly features, like obscuring secrets at network layer Then there's also the option to use libkrun to run local sandboxes on your own computer. That doesn't scratch the itch for hosted services, but works if your goal is to run agents inside isolat…
Setting up your own is not that hard and if you bought some compute before the Altman squeeze, very cheap.
Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#44Not so subtle plug for another sandbox provider, https://instavm.io :
Apart from the above features.
1. We support more than 32GB disk (as a shareable device, ideal for agentic memory)
2. We provide egress control
3. We provide vault for secret injection (to counter prompt injection)
4. Snapshot / forking.
5. long lived sandboxes.
Can be used via - npx skills add instavm/skills
Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#45Interesting, I have recently started working on a project which is similar and fully open source, maybe interesting to some here. Happy to receive any kind of feedback on it. https://github.com/mitos-run/mitos
> Didn't mean to highjack for self advertisement. > > As the topic matches, .... my project might be appealing to some here That's exactly what you intended to do. That is the definition of advertising. It is true, many people might like it, so own it. Don't lie about it, even to yourself.
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Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#46There are sooooo many sandbox providers out there. They do spike on different features like: - snapshotting and forking - good SSH and VPN access for end-users - agent-friendly features, like obscuring secrets at network layer Then there's also the option to use libkrun to run local sandboxes on your own computer. That doesn't scratch the itch for hosted services, but works if your goal is to run agents inside isolat…
What people aren't getting with `firecracker` is utilization. Don't get me wrong, `firecracker` is great software and it's what I'm using for lightweight virtualization, but workloads are really bursty over really short periods of time now, even with the snapshot and restore that you can get if you're willing to hack on `firecracker` substantially, you hit walls where it's like, this is too much against the grain, this thing wasn't designed to bounce from 1 core to 32 to 8 to 16 to 4 to 32 to 1 seamlessly, and that's what it takes to get extreme utilization even with extremely good ML on the prediction.
I am quite sure I'm not the only person working on post-firecracker KVM.
Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#47 > Containers launch in seconds, yet their shared-kernel architecture requires significant custom hardening to safely contain untrusted code
> you create a MicroVM Image by supplying a Dockerfile and code packaged as a zip artifact in Amazon S3
>
> MicroVMs support up to 8 hours of total runtime
This smells like a competing team building something to capitalize on AI hype, but the product isn't differentiated enough for this to make sense long term. If this was a service called managed AI agents, and you added features specific to AI agents, that has value. But "here's Fargate with a different name" isn't gonna last.
Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#48What's the point of microVMs for running agents?
Are you guys literally spinning up agents where a 100 ms boot time vs a 3 seconds boot time makes a difference?
I'm asking because I understand the appeal of micro VMs but every time the subject comes up people talk about "isolating agents": what's wrong about isolating agents in a regular VM (or in a container which, itself, is in a VM)?
FWIW I've got my stuff nicely isolated in regular VMs that are regularly up for hours and hours.
It's like the microVMs boots in 100 ms, then the agent does... What? And exits after another 100ms and now you need to launch another one?
What's the use case of "microVMs to isolate agents"?
Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#49There are sooooo many sandbox providers out there. They do spike on different features like: - snapshotting and forking - good SSH and VPN access for end-users - agent-friendly features, like obscuring secrets at network layer Then there's also the option to use libkrun to run local sandboxes on your own computer. That doesn't scratch the itch for hosted services, but works if your goal is to run agents inside isolat…
Why isn't libkrun good enough for hosted stuff? I use it as a podman backend in a microservice architecture.
Firecracker has more tooling for the orchestration layer that manages many sandboxes at once. Stuff like K8S integration, an external REST API control plane, more first-class support for snapshotting, etc.
You'd have to build more of that with libkrun
The core tech of both are great though.
Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control
#50There are sooooo many sandbox providers out there. They do spike on different features like: - snapshotting and forking - good SSH and VPN access for end-users - agent-friendly features, like obscuring secrets at network layer Then there's also the option to use libkrun to run local sandboxes on your own computer. That doesn't scratch the itch for hosted services, but works if your goal is to run agents inside isolat…
Setting up your own is not that hard and if you bought some compute before the Altman squeeze, very cheap.
Def!
My personal belief is that the future of an "app" is a combo:
1. micro VM
2. agent on the VM
3. software bundled into the VM