MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

What does the actual startup latency look like? Does it depend on the size of the resulting image?

Presumably it is Firecracker. It's just a different shape of offering, along with Lambda and Fargate, which are also Firecracker.

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 while there's certainly a huge role for async agents in cloud sandboxes, async agents running locally seem more useful in many cases.

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 using my hosted AI agent service for something compute and network intensive. It could turn into $2000 overnight and if I didn't account for one of the numerous types of AWS charges, I might have only collected $500 for credits purchases.

Or it could easily be ten times that. But who am I kidding. No one is going to use my agents. So it doesn't matter if it's gvisor or Firecracker or whatever.

They are long-lived if you're a mayfly.

But I think the point is that they should be cheap to set up, and because of the short life, never really contain anything except the potential to compute when needed, not important data.