71–80 of 222 posts
This is why I have been avoiding the word sandbox for exe.dev. I don’t think developers agents need something “sandbox” shaped.
What'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…
What'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…
It's about time AWS got into the agent sandbox game. The startups in this space right now don't provide much value on top of the cloud providers they're wrapping. They don't tend to be run by experienced infra people either so they seem very vibecoded, insecure, janky, etc. They're also significantly overpriced because they're marking up already expensive providers. Something surprising from my own experience is that…
Major Sandbox providers (e.g. Modal) run on non-hyperscaler bare metal not AWS and so don't need to markup on AWS's markup. Thus, prices are comparable or better than AWS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 So, it should be stupid simple to run these local sandboxed apps/agents. Right now, not too hard for technical users (esp. with things like https://smolmachines.com/ and https://microsandbox.dev/ ), but not as easy as clicking an app icon or typing `/path/to/binary` in the CLI
Ah, the significant compute overhead: https://josecastillolema.github.io/podman-wasm-libkrun/. Much more cpu and ram usage at worse performance.
> Containers launch in seconds, yet their shared-kernel architecture requires significant custom hardening to safely contain untrusted code That's literally why they made Fargate. It's managed firecracker VMs with containers. They invented firecracker for this purpose. This new product is competing with Fargate, but they don't mention Fargate at all in the announcement. > you create a MicroVM Image by supplying a Doc…
That said, Fargate does kind of seem like a superior option
Edit: I guess this supports suspend and fast resume so invocation time should be somewhat better than Fargate.
What's the best provider to self-host Firecracker? I feel that AWS is not a safe or cost-effective option for a self-funded startup or small business. Although is anything cost effective anymore? Hetzner just had a massive price hike. Part of it might just be that I am old and inflation is catching up with my understanding of prices. But as far as AWS I still have to say no thanks. Imagine some group actually started…
bwrap args -- gvisor args do args -- /path/sandboxee args
Standalone gvisor (not the 'do' subcommand) used to be a mess with the OCI json requirement, but recently they began work on presenting their own bwrap interface (likely to pursue AI agent uses) though I wouldn't use it myself yet.
People often look down on gvisor because they think it's some kind of syscall filter, it is not. It can use one of ptrace, seccomp or even KVM to intercept ALL syscalls and service them with it's own logic (which is in Go). Basically it's a VMM and kernel in one.
It's about time AWS got into the agent sandbox game. The startups in this space right now don't provide much value on top of the cloud providers they're wrapping. They don't tend to be run by experienced infra people either so they seem very vibecoded, insecure, janky, etc. They're also significantly overpriced because they're marking up already expensive providers. Something surprising from my own experience is that…
AWS AgentCore runtime has been around for about a year: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguid... (spoiler, it's the same underlying technology as the Lambda MicroVMs).
Though I did know about this one! (Because I saw the announcement.)