[dbmikus]

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 isolated environments for your own work.

I've been working on some open-core stuff[1] to coordinate sandboxes, and we're making changes to have a library that lets people coordinate any number of remote or local sandboxes using any provider, kinda like how the Docker CLI works for managing containers, git repos, and coding agents. Flue[2] is another player in this space, and is more of a pure framework, while we're building it as an interactive product for using sandboxed agents and workflows.

[1] https://github.com/gofixpoint/amika/blob/main/ROADMAP.md

[2]: https://flueframework.com/

[PeterStuer]

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

[dbmikus]

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

[chrisweekly]

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.

[spockz]

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 at worse performance.

[sureglymop]

Why isn't libkrun good enough for hosted stuff? I use it as a podman backend in a microservice architecture.

[dbmikus]

Firecracker has more tooling for the orchestration layer that manages many sandboxes at once. Stuff like K8S integration, an external REST API control plane, more first-class support for snapshotting, etc.

You'd have to build more of that with libkrun

The core tech of both are great though.

[reinitctxoffset]

What people aren't getting with `firecracker` is utilization. Don't get me wrong, `firecracker` is great software and it's what I'm using for lightweight virtualization, but workloads are really bursty over really short periods of time now, even with the snapshot and restore that you can get if you're willing to hack on `firecracker` substantially, you hit walls where it's like, this is too much against the grain, this thing wasn't designed to bounce from 1 core to 32 to 8 to 16 to 4 to 32 to 1 seamlessly, and that's what it takes to get extreme utilization even with extremely good ML on the prediction.

I am quite sure I'm not the only person working on post-firecracker KVM.

[stubbi]

Thanks for sharing these!