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MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

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Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#151

Post by crabmusket »

ilaksh wrote: post #18

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…

Not Firecracker, but Incus's system containers seem like a good middle ground between Docker and VMs.

https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/explanation/cont...

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#152

Post by anamexis »

tptacek wrote: post #141
anamexis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what the right term is, but maybe "deterministic" pricing (this is not the right term, but maybe closer). That is, I'm not going to know how much a sprite cost until I see the bill (or look up the live usage report), whereas if I spin up a Fly Machine, I know exactly how much I'm going to pay per unit of time. (Both make sense for their respective use cases.)

Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, that's a technical limitation! I'm sure we'll work through it at some point this year, but it's a consequence of the fact that for most people, most of their Sprites are dormant most of the time; it's how you comfortably get to having 20-30 Sprites (making a new one any time you do something new) for every user. It's a good callout, a genuine difference between Sprites and Fly Machines. Be…

I absolutely believe it! And feel the pricing model makes perfect sense for the use case.

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#153

Post by mzaccari »

PeterStuer wrote: post #43
dbmikus wrote: post #32

There are sooooo many sandbox providers out there. They do spike on different features like: - snapshotting and forking - good SSH and VPN access for end-users - agent-friendly features, like obscuring secrets at network layer Then there's also the option to use libkrun to run local sandboxes on your own computer. That doesn't scratch the itch for hosted services, but works if your goal is to run agents inside isolat…

Setting up your own is not that hard and if you bought some compute before the Altman squeeze, very cheap.

+1 for microsandbox. I've been using their golang SDK (https://docs.microsandbox.dev/sdk/go/sandbox) @v0.5.10 to create sandboxes, attach them to agent sessions to execute, and then throw away, all in a raspberry pi 5 k3s cluster (as they have ARM support, if you're into that sort of thing). The microsandbox code is still a bit in flux (since it hasn't reached v1.0 API stability yet), but it's definitely worth checking out as it looks to have a solid foundation.

(edit: ahh sorry, meant to post this to above comment)

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#154

Post by ilaksh »

tptacek wrote: post #146
ilaksh wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short version is it seems like a big "gotcha" that there is no way to limit bandwidth or spending on that or other resources ahead of time, and that might be a deliberate business model that is more aimed at well-funded startups or large companies that are monitoring costs much less closely than an individual or small business. It's not necessarily too hard to just not dynamically spawn a bunch of machines, but t…

Lots of people want limits. They might make sense for something like Sprites, where the end-users are often (but not always) individual developers. They're terrible for hosting fixed-function applications. The real gotcha is having limits, because that's the host effectively taking your app down for you. I know talk is cheap, but I've been in the room for every one of these discussions over the last 6 years at Fly.io…

Why is it that you claim limits are unworkable? If you can track or enforce it (others have been for years) then couldn't you make it an optional field or checkbox?

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#155

Post by skybrian »

otterley wrote: post #115
skybrian wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! These tabs render badly on mobile, but you can click on “Functions” to hide it and then click the “MicroVMs” tab to show it. This pricing model looks very complicated and unfriendly for hobbyists. Maybe it’s cheaper than exe.dev’s $20/month, but I have no idea. I’d have to a complicated calculation based on guesses to tell.

I don't think it's that complicated, but yeah, it's not as simple as $X/month. The primary difference is that with Lambda you pay by the second, not by the month. According to my math, the break-even point for a 8GB allocation (the minimum exe.dev supplies) would be about 1.65 days of continuous runtime. Less than that, and you're better off with Lambda. More than that, and you're better off with exe.dev (assuming we…

I’m running a web server in a VM and I use it every day. It’s mostly idle, but it’s continually available. I wonder how much “continuous runtime” that is?

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#156

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

spockz wrote: post #75
dbmikus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Microsandbox claims to start faster than docker, and it is isolated from the host, and to work with OCI. Why would I still want to use docker? The only reason I can imagine is that I actually want to be able to dynamically share resources between containers instead of dividing up VMs a priori. Ah, the significant compute overhead: https://josecastillolema.github.io/podman-wasm-libkrun/ . Much more cpu and ram usage a…

Starting faster than a container will need evidence since starting a container on Linux is basically instant.

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#157

Post by NamlchakKhandro »

chrisweekly wrote: post #94
dbmikus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No programmable network stack though, so can't pass fake credentials to things inside vm and exchange them on the boundary

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#158

Post by tastyeffectco »

colesantiago wrote: post #38
jacobgold wrote: post #16

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…

Agreed. Most of the startups are just wrappers around AWS and significantly more expensive. Agents need sandboxes that are cheaper so that they can run thousands I feel that AWS, GCP and all the other cloud providers can provide this natively. But still it would be nice to self host. The best part of self hosting is that you own it as well, no rug pulls from the laundry list of reselling providers that could go away…

There are plenty of OSS solutions available for your needs. Do you need real isolation, or is Docker hardening sufficient? If hardening is suddicient check out https://github.com/tastyeffectco/sandboxd/ which i'm using internaly for so many use cases

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#159

Post by tastyeffectco »

alasano wrote: post #51

We have this page which compares a whole bunch of sandbox providers in different categories https://engine.build/lab/agent-sandboxes Will add MicroVMs there today (and any others that are missing if you let me know!)

Would love to see sandboxd added — it's the self-hosted open-source option with Docker hardening, built-in coding agents (Claude Code, OpenCode), and live preview URLs. https://github.com/tastyeffectco/sandboxd

Re: MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control

#160

Post by tastyeffectco »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #48

What's the point of microVMs for running agents? Are you guys literally spinning up agents where a 100 ms boot time vs a 3 seconds boot time makes a difference? I'm asking because I understand the appeal of micro VMs but every time the subject comes up people talk about "isolating agents": what's wrong about isolating agents in a regular VM (or in a container which, itself, is in a VM)? FWIW I've got my stuff nicely…

in so many cases, docker is more than sufficient for major agent workloads... with no hostile users of course
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