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How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

browser-use.com

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Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#101

Post by timojeajea »

epolanski wrote: post #97
timojeajea wrote: post #77

We run a screenshot API (ApiFlash) with Chromium packaged in an AWS Lambda container image instead of Firecracker on EC2. AWS Lambda gives you the isolation and autoscaling for free which is ideal for spiky stateless work like screenshots. I believe we get mostly the same benefits compared to browser-use solution but with a much much simpler architecture. The tradeoff is the AWS lambda cold starts, but in practice se…

Your solution sounds very expensive.

From our production stats, a median screenshots capture is 5.7s. Browser-use bills per minute, not per millisecond like lambda does. As is, it's around 2x more expensive than Lambda for our use-case.

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#103

Post by MayCXC »

losteric wrote: post #9

> Plain headless Chromium is easy to detect by websites with anti-bot measures. Plain headless Chromium avoided getting blocked by websites only 2% of the time, according to our stealth benchmark. > Our browsers avoid blocks 81% of the time on our stealth benchmark, and 84.8% on Halluminate BrowserBench, the highest of any provider. Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of an…

I built a similar system for an identity protection service that automated removing PII from directory websites like whitepages. Which was less ethical, stealth browser automation or monetized privacy invasion?

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#104

Post by latchkey »

Reformedot wrote: post #81
latchkey wrote: post #58

Just hot stage a bunch of VMs and then there is no startup time. Every time someone finishes, just start another one and leave it running waiting for the next customer.

Browsers can't be reused between customers. They contain sensitive and private data. Everything needs to be isolated and ephemeral.

I never suggested reuse.

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#105

Post by BoorishBears »

orf wrote: post #50
turtlebits wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its unethical because you're intentionally bypassing restrictions. Just because others do it doesn't mean its okay. If you saw a sign in a store that said "1 per person" or "for registered guests only", would you ignore it?

Was Rosa Parks unethical for sitting down on a bus? The point is that the context matters: both the users context and the context of the restriction. It’s not as clear cut as “ignoring restrictions = bad”. The restriction itself can be unethical, in the same way that bypassing a restriction can be unethical.

Woah now, I'm for headless browsers but let's not start comparing any of this to Rosa Parks lol.

The reality is a lot of interesting, trivially harmful to non harmful things are illegal and we still do them anyways.

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#107

Post by Reformedot »

sandGorgon wrote: post #55

have you tried running android browsers ? we run RL workloads using android browsers. We are having to maintain a fork of https://github.com/budtmo/docker-android/ and android chrome on top. We would rather use browser-use if it had that support. P.S. we do maintain our fork of a browser for rubric computation...but that is not relevant for this. The infrastructure is what we are looking for.

I've experimented with Android Browsers. The problem is that android VMs are super heavy compared to the resources needed to run just Chromium

Startups are absurdly slow, isolation is harder, etc...

Android bloat is insane, you need to run the entire Java VM to start the browser... It's also harder to fingerprint, and at scale that's something that we need for Browser Use

Cool experiment but not yet production ready, at least for us

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#108

Post by Reformedot »

latchkey wrote: post #104
Reformedot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browsers can't be reused between customers. They contain sensitive and private data. Everything needs to be isolated and ephemeral.

I never suggested reuse.

Starting the VM itself takes 20ms with Firecracker, the slowest part is starting the browser.

So there's no benefit on reusing the VM but not the browser. VM isolation is also important, customers can leave downloads and other files that should not be accessible for freshly created browsers on that same VM.

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#109

Post by Reformedot »

andrewstuart wrote: post #71

How many tabs do you use per server?

Really depends on the server specs. Tab amount relies entirely in memory & CPU availability, not in the infra that runs behind the scenes

But yeah, in one server we can fit hundreds of browsers, or even thousands if we use bigger servers. And each one of them with dozens of tabs, no issue

Re: How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

#110

Post by smnscu »

Firecracker is fantastic technology. I'm using it for my interviewing startup to run isolated runtimes for coding interviews (and personal workspaces), and it's been rock solid and incredibly lightweight. Interfacing with it through the Go SDK has been a piece of cake, too.
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