HN user
https://mish.co
i’d say what AWS released looks closer to a bare compute primitive. E2B is up the stack and ships everything around VM like snapshots, networking, integrations.
also, there’s no lock-in, E2B is open-source and can be hosted on any cloud (AWS included).
plus supports bigger boxes, higher concurrency, longer timeouts (24hr).
disclaimer: i work at E2B
the code is not public, so we can't know. i think it's much more nuanced and certain users' comments might get a preferential treatment, based on factors other than the upvote count - which itself is hidden from us.
of course your comment attracts more upvotes - it's at the top.
i don't doubt this. i just find it questionable that one particular poster always gets in the spotlight when AI is the topic - while other conversations in my opinion offer more interesting angles.
i am curious, why are your comments always pinned to the top?
We are running Sandboxes for AI Agents using Firecracker microVMS @ E2B
$1.5M seed bets, maybe. not $60M though
just from looking at it
on Linux it runs Firecracker: https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock/blob/main/pkg/vm/linu...
on macOS uses the Apple's Virtualization.Framework Go wrapper: https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock/blob/main/pkg/vm/darw...
very cool, if you want cross-platform microvms, there's an interesting project called libkrun that powers projects like Podman and Colima.
here's a Go binding: https://github.com/mishushakov/libkrun-go
demo (on Mac): https://x.com/mishushakov/status/2020236380572643720
i think there’s a confusion around what use-case Monty is solving (i was confused as well). this seems to isolate in a scope of execution like function calls, not entire Python applications
we’re not disagreeing here - i meant for general use-case VMs are better, for some application-specific calls Monty this might suffice.
although you’d still need another boundary to run your app in to prevent breaking out to other tenants.
agree. you still need a secure boundary like VM to isolate the tenants in case the model breaks out of the sandbox.
everything that you don’t want your agent to access should live outside of the sandbox.
best answer is probably to have a layered approach - use this to limit what the generated code can do, wrap it in a secure VM to prevent leaking out to other tenants.
there’s no way around VMs for secure, untrusted workloads. everything else, like Monty has too many tradeoffs that makes it non-viable for any real workloads
disclaimer: i work at E2B, opinions my own
Factory, Nvidia, Perplexity and Manus are using E2B in production - we ran more than 200 million Sandboxes for our customers
for personal use, many ways: Vargant, Docker Sandbox, NixOS VMs, Lima, OrbStack.
if you want multi-tenant: E2B (open-source, self-hosted)
we aren’t worried about that.
when we were starting out we figured there was no solution that would satisfy our requirements for running untrusted code. so we had to build our own.
the reason we open-sourced this is because we want everyone to be able to run our Sandboxes - in contrast to the majority of our competitors who’s goal is to lock you in to their offering.
with open-source you have the choice, and luckily Manus, Perplexity, Nvidia choose us for their workloads.
(opinions my own)
we offer secure cloud VMs that scale up to 100k concurrent instances or more.
the value we sell with our cloud is scale, while our Sandboxes are a commodity that we have proudly open-sourced
both Docker and bubblewrap are not secure sandboxes. the only way to have actually isolated sandboxes is by using VMs
disclaimer: i work on secure sandboxes at E2B
10 seconds is actually not that impressive. we spin up Sandboxes around 50-200ms at E2B
why? because there’s a huge market demand for Sandboxes. no one would be building this if no one would be buying.
disclaimer: i work at E2B
we have 100% open-source Sandboxes at E2B
i wonder what the stats look like with U.S companies in Germany. probably much higher, especially in areas like Berlin/Munich
they want to enter the llm observability market and langfuse has already built a convenient wrapper around clickhouse that companies have adopted
https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-raises-400-million-se...
thank you so much, great to hear the thinking behind these considerations :)
We don't spin up a full browser instance for every request (which is slow and expensive)
there's really no excuse for not spinning up a browser every request. a Firecracker VM boots ~50ms nowadays
We respect robots.txt rules.
you might, but most companies in the market for your service don't want this
what does Katakana add on top of Kata?
hey, I work at E2B, anything we can do to improve the setup for you?
the browser looks like it is based on Chromium indeed