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we run ~10k agent pods on k3s and went with gvisor over microvms purely for density. the memory overhead of a dedicated kernel per tenant just doesn't scale when you're trying to pack thousands of instances onto a few nodes. strict network policies and pid limits cover most of the isolation gaps anyway.
Hey @clawsyndicate I'd love to learn more about your use case. We are working on a product that would potentially get you the best of both worlds (microVM security and containers/gVisor scalability). My email is in my profile.
This is a big reason for our strategy at Edera (https://edera.dev) of building hypervisor technology that eliminates the standard x86/ARM kernel overhead in favor of deep para-virtualization.

The performance of gVisor is often a big limiting factor in deployment.

How do you compete with Nitro-based VMs on AWS with 0.5% overhead?
When running on bare metal, the CPU performance is within 1%, so usually quite well! Hardest thing is I/O, but we do a lot to help with that too.
That is quite an involved setup to get a costly autocomplete going.

Is that really where we are at? Just outsource convenience to a few big players that can afford the hardware? Just to save on typing and god forbid…thinking?

“Sorry boss, I can’t write code because cloudflare is down.”

If you believe "costly autocomplete" is all you get, you absolutely shouldn't bother.

You're opting for "sorry boss, it's going to take me 10 times as long, but it's going to be loving craftsmanship, not industrial production" instead. You want different tools, for a different job.

Couldn't you replicate all of your setup with qemu microvm?

Without nix I mean

I was looking for a way to isolate my agents in a more convenient way, and I really love your idea. I'm going to give this a try over the weekend and will report back.

But the one-time setup seems like a really fair investment for having a more secure development. Of course, what concerns the problem of getting malicious code to production, this will not help. But this will, with a little overhead, I think, really make development locally much more secure.

And you can automate it a lot. And it will be finally my chance to get more into NixOS :D

A pair of containers felt a bit cheaper than a VM:

https://github.com/5L-Labs/amp_in_a_box

I was going to add Gemini / OpenCode Kilo next.

There is some upfront cost to define what endpoints to map inside, but it definitely adds a veneer of preventing the crazy…

I there a way to make this work with macOS hosts, preferably without having to install a Linux toolchain inside the VM for the language the agent will be writing code in?
I use shellbox.dev to create sandboxes through ssh, without ever leaving the terminal
I'm working on a shared remote box for AI assisted development, will definitely look at this for some inspiration.
This brings me back to my college days. We had Windows, and Deep Freeze. Students could do anything on the computer, we restart it and its all wiped and new. How long before Deep Freeze realizes they could sell their tool to Vibe Coders, they have Deep Freeze for Mac but not for Linux, funnily enough.