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

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

#151

Post by flaminHotSpeedo »

SomaticPirate wrote: post #89

What is firecracker needed? Couldn’t this just run in a container directly? I understand some of the isolation concerns but a browser and container breakout is a billion dollar CVE, no?

Most mature and/or security conscious providers don't consider containers to be a secure isolation boundary (with Microsoft being a notable exception, though it's unclear whether that's a failure of internal policy or incompetent enforcement of policy).

Containers provide a much broader attack surface than VM's, and since they're not considered secure as an industry standard there's likely to be less resources put towards managing container escape CVE's than VM escape ones.

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

#152

Post by irjustin »

devmor wrote: post #147
baby_souffle wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who uses service providers like this? I use change detection to monitor all sorts of websites for changes. Some of my favorite authors don't have RSS. I always set up price monitoring for any big ticket item I'm considering like appliances so I can see how their pricing changes over time. I also use scrapers for websites that don't have an API. I like having all of my purchase history indexed in a database where I…

This attitude, and by proxy this business are the epitome of selfish entitlement. You state that you believe you deserve access to others’ resources, at their cost, despite their clear attempts to stop you from using them, simply because you want it.

Personally I consider it fair game in "price wars".

Dynamic pricing designed to extract every penny out. Then why shouldn't I be allowed to monitor your pricing changes?

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

#153

Post by flaminHotSpeedo »

thundergolfer wrote: post #12
roboben wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes only c8i, m8i and r8i instance types support it. It is called nested virtualization[1] [1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec...

Unfortunately supply is quite limited. If you want to horizontally scale on these instances you need to have a good relationship with AWS so they'll give you a big allocation before c9i is a thing.

I haven't personally tried, so I can't say for certain, but Lambda has publicly stated they run on bare metal EC2 instances, presumably the supply of whatever instance types they use should be fairly healthy

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

#154

Post by pwdisswordfishs »

baby_souffle wrote: post #79
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…

> Who uses service providers like this? I use change detection to monitor all sorts of websites for changes. Some of my favorite authors don't have RSS. I always set up price monitoring for any big ticket item I'm considering like appliances so I can see how their pricing changes over time. I also use scrapers for websites that don't have an API. I like having all of my purchase history indexed in a database where I…

> I use change detection to monitor all sorts of websites for changes. Some of my favorite authors don't have RSS.

Have you considered offering, as penitence, a public feed to share the information that this process produces?

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

#157

Post by Banditoz »

devmor wrote: post #147
baby_souffle wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who uses service providers like this? I use change detection to monitor all sorts of websites for changes. Some of my favorite authors don't have RSS. I always set up price monitoring for any big ticket item I'm considering like appliances so I can see how their pricing changes over time. I also use scrapers for websites that don't have an API. I like having all of my purchase history indexed in a database where I…

This attitude, and by proxy this business are the epitome of selfish entitlement. You state that you believe you deserve access to others’ resources, at their cost, despite their clear attempts to stop you from using them, simply because you want it.

Dude, it's a web request. It's not that deep.

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

#159

Post by kjkjadksj »

devmor wrote: post #147
baby_souffle wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who uses service providers like this? I use change detection to monitor all sorts of websites for changes. Some of my favorite authors don't have RSS. I always set up price monitoring for any big ticket item I'm considering like appliances so I can see how their pricing changes over time. I also use scrapers for websites that don't have an API. I like having all of my purchase history indexed in a database where I…

This attitude, and by proxy this business are the epitome of selfish entitlement. You state that you believe you deserve access to others’ resources, at their cost, despite their clear attempts to stop you from using them, simply because you want it.

You can already access these resources. What does it matter if you do the clicking or you have headless chrome do the clicking while you make a cup of coffee?

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

#160

Post by fc417fc802 »

sroussey wrote: post #41
joatmon-snoo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An example I ran into recently: I wanted to scrape pricing data for used cars, to better inform a friend's decision about what to purchase. I know there's a relationship between mileage and depreciation, but wanted to have a better sense of what that relationship is to know whether a given car was over or underpriced. Similarly, if I was pulling that data to build a service of my own to offer to users... is that unet…

All of these questions are easily answered by the question: can I run the bot on the same PC I use regularly? If so, then do it there. If not, then don’t do it at all.

Why should technical capability to evade countermeasures dictate whether or not something is ethical? My view is that scraping remains ethical as long as your actions aren't causing technical problems for the operator. If anything, a retailer attempting to hide pricing data is what's unethical in my view.
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