[jacobgold]

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 while there's certainly a huge role for async agents in cloud sandboxes, async agents running locally seem more useful in many cases.

[mjb]

AWS AgentCore runtime has been around for about a year: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguid... (spoiler, it's the same underlying technology as the Lambda MicroVMs).

[dofm]

To be fair to jacobgold, at this point there is more or less an AWS services announcement singularity: if you didn't see the announcement when it happened you may never catch up or even find it in the wretched console website.

Though I did know about this one! (Because I saw the announcement.)

[jacobgold]

It just seems pretty different to me? I've lots of similar stuff and yet I still don't understand what it's for and how it works after scanning the docs quickly.

[thundergolfer]

Major Sandbox providers (e.g. Modal) run on non-hyperscaler bare metal not AWS and so don't need to markup on AWS's markup. Thus, prices are comparable or better than AWS.

[jacobgold]

In that case it's still overpriced because they're charging hyperscaler prices without offering a hyperscaler level service in terms of scalability, reliability, security, trust, etc.

[colesantiago]

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 at anytime.

It would be nice to have a one click sandbox agent on a self hosted instance that is, free, fast (can pay a bit more for more intensive operations) and that is open source.