AWS Lambda MicroVMs

A new AWS serverless compute primitive: isolated micro-VM sandboxes with VM-level isolation (dedicated kernel, memory, disk) but a serverless operating model (no capacity planning). Built on the same Firecracker virtualization behind Lambda’s “15 trillion+ monthly invocations,” it fills Lambda’s gap — stateful, long-lived, suspendable isolation rather than short stateless functions.

The distinctive shape — stateful scale-to-zero

• Near-instant launch + state-preserving suspend/resume for up to 8 hours; auto-suspends when idle and resumes on demand.
• Suspended MicroVMs incur no charge — scale-to-zero, but with full state preserved (not a cold rebuild).
• Lifecycle control: launch / suspend / resume / terminate; vertical scaling up to 4× baseline at peak.
• Pricing on three axes: per-second compute, snapshot operations/storage, and data transfer.

This is a genuinely new point in the wiki’s cost-model spectrum. The spoke’s thesis is that providers differ mainly by billing shape: raw IaaS (rent a box), managed PaaS that spins down (render) or bills per-second (railway, fly-io), and edge per-request (cloudflare-workers). Lambda MicroVMs adds per-second compute with state-preserving suspend — scale-to-zero like render‘s spin-down, but without losing the running state, and at VM isolation. It’s the “free/cost has a shape” mechanic the synthesis tracks, applied to a stateful sandbox: you pay while it runs, nothing while it sleeps, and resume is warm.

What it’s for — agent sandboxes (cross-spoke)

AWS positions it first for AI coding assistants and agent sandboxes — executing LLM-generated code safely — plus browser-based IDEs, CI running untrusted PR/AI code, vulnerability scanning, and data analytics. That headline use case is the agent-execution substrate the sibling agentic-tooling-wiki tracks: it’s the managed-cloud answer to the sandboxes inside harnesses like DeerFlow and the ephemeral verification environments of Signadot — a hyperscaler selling “safe isolated runtime for agent-written code” as a primitive. Routed here because the dominant substance is an AWS infrastructure offering (compute shape + pricing); the agent-sandbox angle is the cross-spoke link.

Caveats

Vendor product page (T3, freshness volatile): features and the Firecracker/“15T invocations” framing are AWS’s own; no neutral price-performance data (the spoke’s standing sourcing caveat). “Get started for free” suggests GA. Pricing specifics (rates) not captured here — volatile.

Related

aws · render · railway · fly-io · cloudflare-workers · synthesis