Shouldn’t the title be “AWS Lambda MicroVMs”? MicroVMs are an existing concept.
ilaksh 6 minutes ago [-]
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.
jacobgold 6 minutes ago [-]
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 feel 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.
mdeeks 9 minutes ago [-]
> MicroVMs support up to 8 hours of total runtime
Does this mean you effectively can't use them as long-lived developer environments? It sounds like even if you suspend them, this is the hard limit on the total time it can run.
mmastrac 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
lab14 6 minutes ago [-]
I'm assuming you can launch them again after 8 hours.
What does the actual startup latency look like? Does it depend on the size of the resulting image?
simonw 4 minutes ago [-]
I tried this a few days ago. Once you have an image built and ready startup time is fast, but building that original image took 5-10 minutes.
I think it's designed for building an image once and then reusing it many, many times.
patabyte 23 minutes ago [-]
This seems roughly similar to Google's Cloud Run gen2 instance types. My understanding is with the second generation, they are running microvms which are bootstrapped from a container image.
yiyingzhang 8 minutes ago [-]
How's this different from Firecracker?
tptacek 7 minutes ago [-]
Presumably it is Firecracker. It's just a different shape of offering, along with Lambda and Fargate, which are also Firecracker.
simonw 5 minutes ago [-]
It's a product that runs on top of Firecracker.
tekla 6 minutes ago [-]
The literal first paragraph has a highlighted link that says this runs on Firecracker
colesantiago 4 minutes ago [-]
How does this compare to Fly.io
Which is more cheaper for me?
Ideally maybe self hosting would be better?
simonw 3 minutes ago [-]
Fly.io doesn't set a maximum of 8 hours of alive time on your instance.
Also, MicroVMs can't be exposed directly to the web. Your code running in them can only be executed via API calls with attached auth tokens - so if you wanted to host a public facing API or website with them you'd need to implement your own additional layer in front.
metadat 20 minutes ago [-]
How does this compare to E2B?
ushakov 54 seconds ago [-]
i’d say what AWS released looks closer to a bare compute primitive. E2B is up the stack and ships everything around VM like snapshots, networking, integrations.
also, there’s no lock-in, E2B is open-source and can be hosted on any cloud (AWS included).
plus also supports bigger machines, more concurrency out of the box.
disclaimer: i work at E2B
zobeirhamid 8 minutes ago [-]
e2b supports UDP and the pricing structure is different.
billconan 32 minutes ago [-]
does it have gpu support?
bitlad 11 minutes ago [-]
It is supposed to be a sandbox that you can invoke from agent, langchains of the world, coding agents etc.
redrove 15 minutes ago [-]
No, it doesn’t seem like it.
esseph 22 minutes ago [-]
Not that I can find in the docs anywhere. Compute only.
Rendered at 16:53:54 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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 feel 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.
Does this mean you effectively can't use them as long-lived developer environments? It sounds like even if you suspend them, this is the hard limit on the total time it can run.
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.
You just have to finish development in 8 hours.
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2026/06/18/1845
https://github.com/rcarmo/pve-microvm
I think it's designed for building an image once and then reusing it many, many times.
Which is more cheaper for me?
Ideally maybe self hosting would be better?
Also, MicroVMs can't be exposed directly to the web. Your code running in them can only be executed via API calls with attached auth tokens - so if you wanted to host a public facing API or website with them you'd need to implement your own additional layer in front.
also, there’s no lock-in, E2B is open-source and can be hosted on any cloud (AWS included).
plus also supports bigger machines, more concurrency out of the box.
disclaimer: i work at E2B