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
AI agents. Chatbot session of 8 hours is a lot. 16 vCPU might be useful when developing heavy application and agent need run application tests. You can think what infrastructure https://claude.ai/code needs.
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
I was going to add a comment praising smolmachines' smolvms. Simple, fast (sub-200ms cold start), OCI-compat, and has trivial packing to standalone 0-dep executables. No need for Docker Desktop / colima / orbstack. For those who prioritize security, kernel isolation is a meaningful benefit.
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…
This reminds me of Fly.io's model off the top of my head, though its not a self-hosted firecracker as such.
I specifically complained to a fly.io staff on here about their "gotcha, b*tch" usage based pricing which they basically copied from AWS, and they stood by it and other people here backed them up. No one is giving me a pile of free money, so I can't risk that kind of thing.
This is for people who want both faster execution, and better security isolation for agents/subagents. It is a different use case than yours
I understand that but micro VMs don't provide better security isolation than regular VMs. So that leaves faster boot times. Faster boot times and then the agent does what ? And at how many token/s? And what's the "time to first token" anyway? How do the time to first token and then the token/s inherent limitations of LLMs not totally dominate the running time? I just don't get the use case.
imagine installing an agent in slack at a company with 1000 employees, and you want each request to have its own VM for data analysis, downloading repos and working on them, ...
regular VMs just use too much memory, a typical ubuntu uses 512 MB as a baseline
Not informational but I kept reading that as 'MicroVMS' which would be a scaled down version of the DEC VMS operating system?!? And I was trying to figure out if they had added containers or something to it.
> 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…
I don't think Fargate fits for the use case they are describing. If you're running your own (trusted) code, then of course there's no reason to worry about containment threats. But the threat here is that you have to execute arbitrary, untrusted code that is presumptively malicious. It's a very different scenario and requires considerable measures to safeguard properly. You can't have a Fargate Task that runs multiple containers, one for each user, for instance, or even run multiple Fargate Task instances, one for each user, because you're still having them all share a virtual EC2 host (well technically a pool of EC2 servers but it's one hypervisor and shared virtual kernel, essentially) that would be compromised if any one container escapes. If you need true hypervisor-level host kernel isolation on a per-user basis due to the risk of containment, with guest worker microVM threads, plus the whole thing needs to scale and also needs to pause and restore very quickly and keep track of state upon restoration, it's actually a pretty hard challenge to build on AWS with existing tools. The problem arises with any interactive AI agent environment that scales on a per-user basis, for instance, but it also applies to any scenario in which the user needs to execute untrusted arbitrary code on your infrastructure in a sandbox. Fargate isn't the secure choice in that scenario; you would instead use VPC + EC2 + Firecracker + Docker (plus S3 and many others) and use a lot of orchestration scripting and fiddling with load balancers and the like to try to get everything working and scaling. When you combine it with tracking state and also restoring quickly from a paused or suspended state, I can see reasons why this might be the right choice if you want to implement something with an interactive AI agent that isolates at the per-user or per-session layer from the host kernel and is highly secured against containment escape and other vulnerabilities. I'm curious if anyone has used this for the use case described, maybe from AWS? Is this like the AgentCore orchestration that came out maybe like last year?
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…
For self-hosting, have a look at what we're building with SlicerVM.com (disclosure: I'm the founder). Also runs just as well on Apple Silicon. We run quite a few Slicer instances on mini PCs and Ryzen builds - also on Hetzner (and yes ouch 120 EUR / mo up to ~ 550 EUR / mo for 16core / 128GB RAM feels almost unfair)
Interesting. How does this compare to Firecracker? Also PhoenixNap looks really interesting. Do you happen to know if Linux software compatibility holds up on Ampere? 80 cores for $400 a month seems pretty good.
Fargate does not use Firecracker, it is simply ec2 instances.
Source? https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-vir... says > Battle-Tested – Firecracker has been battled-tested and is already powering multiple high-volume AWS services including AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate.