alt Hacker NewsWhat's the point of microVMs for running agents?
Are you guys literally spinning up agents where a 100 ms boot time vs a 3 seconds boot time makes a difference?
I'm asking because I understand the appeal of micro VMs but every time the subject comes up people talk about "isolating agents": what's wrong about isolating agents in a regular VM (or in a container which, itself, is in a VM)?
FWIW I've got my stuff nicely isolated in regular VMs that are regularly up for hours and hours.
It's like the microVMs boots in 100 ms, then the agent does... What? And exits after another 100ms and now you need to launch another one?
What's the use case of "microVMs to isolate agents"?
Replies
I imagine you can have a situation where you let an agent run in a shared env but to access certain tools you spin up a VM just for the tool call duration and then shut it down again. Let’s say you wanna allow the agent to write and run code then you need it to run it somewhere safe
Microvms are better for the VM provider. They use less memory and have a smaller attack surface. Also starting in 100ms means you don't need to add a bunch of async machinery when launching the vms.
This is for people who want both faster execution, and better security isolation for agents/subagents. It is a different use case than yours
in so many cases, docker is more than sufficient for major agent workloads... with no hostile users of course
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I dont get it either - I was going to ask the same question but found this.
We have been doing the exact opposite - instead of micro VM's we are giving agents larger VMs.
Previously we were giving them 1GB RAM VM's - now we have upped to 4 GB RAM VM's. When the agent is working - the real cost is in the inference. There is no reason to keep the agent waiting because your VM is too damn slow. So we moved to larger and faster VMs.
The agent might install a package, or run a script - and now it moves along just faster. Not to mention that if the agent is installing a 'fat' SDK, like maybe android sdk, a thicker RAM just moves along everything smoothly without breakages. The incremental amount we pay for the bigger VM is more than justified by the increase in agent performance.
And all the tooling that has already been built up for standard human operated VM's just works pretty well out of the box. We are able to spin up VM's pretty much on demand and purge them clean once the work is done.
We are moving to 8 GB RAMs/4CPUs sometime this year, and GPU's hopefully sometime next.