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MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

aws.amazon.com

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Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#82
No one talks about new Railway Sandboxes - https://docs.railway.com/sandboxes

I think they have one of the best sandbox environments on the market with pay per utilized resources pricing, it's a huge cost reduction for agentic workloads when you have 95%+ idle CPU time and occasional spikes for CPU heavy work (e.g. agent run tests or something like this).

I use railway to host my openclaw like personal agent for friends and family (9 instances) and it costs like 1-2$/mo with scale to zero.

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#83

> 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…

Fargate does not use Firecracker, it is simply ec2 instances.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir...

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#84
I am wondering what type of workload this is for.

They give a tiny example and insist on micro, fast start, but the say it lasts up to 8 hours and is up to 16 vCPU.

What sort of app require faster boot (than lambda or ec2), but only for a limited interval, and with possibly plenty of processing power...

Maybe I am not the right target, but if you have examples so that I can better appreciate, I'd love that

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#85
post #78
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

To be fair to jacobgold, at this point there is more or less an AWS services announcement singularity: if you didn't see the announcement when it happened you may never catch up or even find it in the wretched console website. Though I did know about this one! (Because I saw the announcement.)

It just seems pretty different to me? I've lots of similar stuff and yet I still don't understand what it's for and how it works after scanning the docs quickly.

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#86
post #8

> MicroVMs support up to 8 hours of total runtime Does this mean you effectively can't use them as long-lived developer environments? It sounds like even if you suspend them, this is the hard limit on the total time it can run.

In theory, you could set up a process to move data/filesystem between sessions into and out of s3.

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#87
post #84

I am wondering what type of workload this is for. They give a tiny example and insist on micro, fast start, but the say it lasts up to 8 hours and is up to 16 vCPU. What sort of app require faster boot (than lambda or ec2), but only for a limited interval, and with possibly plenty of processing power... Maybe I am not the right target, but if you have examples so that I can better appreciate, I'd love that

SaaS offering the usage of LLMs via API. You want to launch something isolated, as quickly as possible, do the minimal amount of work and not have to throwaway all your state.

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#88
post #84

I am wondering what type of workload this is for. They give a tiny example and insist on micro, fast start, but the say it lasts up to 8 hours and is up to 16 vCPU. What sort of app require faster boot (than lambda or ec2), but only for a limited interval, and with possibly plenty of processing power... Maybe I am not the right target, but if you have examples so that I can better appreciate, I'd love that

It's in the very first body paragraph of the article:

"A new class of multi-tenant applications has emerged that all share the need to hand each end user their own dedicated execution environment in which to safely run code that the application developer did not write. AI coding assistants, interactive code environments, data analytics platforms, vulnerability scanners, and game servers that run user-supplied scripts all fit this pattern."

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