[rbbydotdev]

> The catch is that regular EC2 is already a VM. AWS runs our host inside its own isolation layer, and then we run browser VMs inside that host. In other words, every browser is a VM inside a VM.

yes but i think there is specifically some ec2s which give you hypervisor access and thereby firecracker too - someone correct me if im wrong?

[roboben]

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...

[thundergolfer]

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.

[flaminHotSpeedo]

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

[thundergolfer]

You're talking about AWS Lambda?

- Their use of bare metal isn't necessarily the latest gen hardware - AWS Lambda is part of AWS, and obviously has privileged access to supply

[Natalia724]

The interesting part to me is less the exact hardware generation and more the control plane around placement, isolation, and startup latency. That is hard to copy outside AWS.

[roboben]

also i found them much less stable than metal instances running into weird kvm failures

[Reformedot]

Yes, it is. It was a challenge to make it work smooth without metal. The scaling out speed was one of the main reasons

[torginus]

When we had need of quite big machines (AWS metal instances), we've found the performance differential between metal, and the equivalent size VM was 10-20% for CPU heavy workloads.