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Posted by justincormack 4 days ago

MicroVMs: Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control(aws.amazon.com)
377 points | 203 commentspage 2
mdeeks 1 day 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.

topspin 1 day ago||
It just a time limit of the life of a single MicroVM.

Using this for a long lived "developer environment" would be extraordinarily expensive anyhow. Scaling the vCPU + RAM cost of these to the same shape compute optimized Graviton On-Demand EC2 instance (16 vCPU x 32 GB RAM) shows about 4x the cost.

So don't do that. Just use an EC2 instance.

tomComb 1 day ago||
But these have near instant suspended/resume, and they even have vertical scaling of the ram, which is a great feature that’s not very common.
mmastrac 1 day 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.

alFReD-NSH 1 day ago|||
In theory, you could set up a process to move data/filesystem between sessions into and out of s3.
fizx 23 hours ago|||
Firecracker doesn't reclaim RAM well, so they put this limit in to make sure you don't suffer from the eventual memory bloat problems.
amw-zero 1 day ago|||
You can use them for dev environments.

You just have to finish development in 8 hours.

lab14 1 day ago|||
I'm assuming you can launch them again after 8 hours.
8note 1 day ago||
lambdas are ephemeral on compute, but couldn't you connect up EFS for your long lived data?

then when you launch the next one, its like you are still there?

mdeeks 1 day ago||
EFS is extremely slow for many workloads. We tried it for builds and various other common use cases for coding agents and the performance just isn't there. I'm guessing lots of small random reads/writes just isn't going to ever work well.
mohsen1 1 day ago||
I’ve been working with AgentCore that uses the same MicroVMs. They are capable in many ways but for coding agents that load a big got repo they get bloated quickly with the git repo.

I’m building this google3 style mounting to address this.

https://github.com/mohsen1/git-lazy-mount

Still work in progress but for now I am seeing promising results

mrud 1 day ago|
ramp i think just prebuilts the image/snapshot with the latest checkout version regularly [0]. do you think putting it into the image would address it?

[0] https://builders.ramp.com/post/why-we-built-our-background-a...

mohsen1 1 day ago||
Nice thing about the microvm is that you can snapshot it and restore it. Keeping the fs minimal is my goal. Snapshots restore much faster if they do not include 5GB of source code
ziyzhu 4 hours ago||
Looks like it only support up to 8 hours runtime so no persistence after that?
pugz 13 hours ago||
I've been kicking the tyres on this. I managed to get Kubernetes (k3s) running across a cluster of MicroVMs. Useful? No. Funny? To me, yes. https://github.com/aidansteele/microvm-fun
ranger_danger 1 hour ago||
I wish docker and friends could integrate microvm support (and not just for AI agents), to the point where I can "docker pull ubuntu" (or whatever other distro) to run them just as easily as we're used to.

The biggest issue preventing me from using microvm more is the lack of easy access to kernel/rootfs combinations of different distros.

ant-kinesthetic 22 hours ago||
I feel like most of these are solely used for RL environments and training, when else are you doing enough rollouts with LLM code writing and execution. Maybe there are some online applications of this but seems like Modal, Daytona, etc. already have this + a much richer feature set tailored to the aforementioned. Wonder if AWS play is going to be swallow one of those whole.
simon84 1 day ago||
I am wondering what type of workload this is for.

They give a tiny example and insist on micro, fast start, but the say it lasts up to 8 hours and is up to 16 vCPU.

What sort of app require faster boot (than lambda or ec2), but only for a limited interval, and with possibly plenty of processing power...

Maybe I am not the right target, but if you have examples so that I can better appreciate, I'd love that

otterley 1 day ago||
It's in the very first body paragraph of the article:

"A new class of multi-tenant applications has emerged that all share the need to hand each end user their own dedicated execution environment in which to safely run code that the application developer did not write. AI coding assistants, interactive code environments, data analytics platforms, vulnerability scanners, and game servers that run user-supplied scripts all fit this pattern."

adobrawy 1 day ago|||
AI agents. Chatbot session of 8 hours is a lot. 16 vCPU might be useful when developing heavy application and agent need run application tests. You can think what infrastructure https://claude.ai/code needs.
leetrout 1 day ago||
SaaS offering the usage of LLMs via API. You want to launch something isolated, as quickly as possible, do the minimal amount of work and not have to throwaway all your state.
stubbi 1 day ago||
Interesting, I have recently started working on a project which is similar and fully open source, maybe interesting to some here. Happy to receive any kind of feedback on it.

https://github.com/mitos-run/mitos

kardianos 1 day ago|
> Didn't mean to highjack for self advertisement. > > As the topic matches, .... my project might be appealing to some here

That's exactly what you intended to do. That is the definition of advertising. It is true, many people might like it, so own it. Don't lie about it, even to yourself.

stubbi 1 day ago||
.
wasting_time 1 day ago||
Can you provide a link to your project? Self-plugs are fairly common around here, and usually appreciated (or at least not frowned upon) when it comes with juicy source code.
stubbi 1 day ago||
https://github.com/mitos-run/mitos :)
ChuckMcM 1 day ago||
Not informational but I kept reading that as 'MicroVMS' which would be a scaled down version of the DEC VMS operating system?!? And I was trying to figure out if they had added containers or something to it.
spullara 1 day ago|
Added support for configuring and running these directly from beamshell (.com). Really cool being able to spin these and use them any mcp client.

beamshell microvm deploy && beamshell microvm run

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