splitter VS firecracker

We've been building devtools for years now. We're really passionate about the field. The most recent thing we built is https://usedevbook.com. The goal was to build a simple framework/UI for companies to demo their APIs. Something like https://gradio.app but for API companies. It's been used for example by Prisma - we helped them build their playground with it - https://playground.prisma.io/

Our new project - e2b - is using some of the technology we built for Devbook in the past. Specifically the secure sandbox environments where the AI agents run are our custom Firecracker VMs that we run on Nomad.

You can follow my co-founder, me, and the project on Twitter:

- https://twitter.com/e2b_dev

- https://twitter.com/t_valenta

- https://twitter.com/mlejva

And we have a community Discord server - https://discord.gg/U7KEcGErtQ

Hey, thanks! Not the whole website but parts of it like our SDK for creating VMs on demand and some UI components are open sourced.

we've built this interactive playground of Prisma examples as a showcase of developer hubs made with Devbook. The goal of Devbook si to allow devtools projects and companies to showcase their tool in an interactive without any hassle for the devs. Everything is prepared and configured for you.

The goal of Devbook si to allow devtools projects and companies to showcase their tool in an interactive without any hassle for the devs. Everything is prepared and configured for you.

Every code snippet is runnable and editable. You get your own database thanks to CockroachDB. The code runs in a microVM (Firecracker) that's just for you. You also have an access to the terminal and even Prisma Studio. Go ahead and play with it!

I would love to hear your feedback and I'm happy to hang out and answer any questions!

[0] https://usedevbook.com

This is really really exciting! I hope it enables more product built on top of full VMs with fast UX/DX.

I just wish I knew about this earlier because from what I read, I think we at Devbook [1] built pretty similar service for our product. We are using Docker to "describe" the VM's environment, our booting times are in the similar numbers, we are using Nomad for orchestration, and we are also using Firecracker :). We basically built are own serverless platform. I need to compare our current pricing to Fly's.

[1] https://usedevbook.com

I found DevBook which is quite useful. It doesn't solve the searching issue but it cuts down on the results you get back. Not sure if it'd be useful for you or anyone scouring the comments

Not trying to undermine op here but I've recently been using a tool called Devbooks and it's really cool. It's not a vscode extension though. It lets you search stack overflow and almost any language's/library's documentation without leaving your current window.

I recommend creating a new email account solely dedicated to your journey into coding. I also recommend getting comfortable with MDN Web Docs, Stack Overflow and this nifty software called Devbook will help. (I just hit alt+space and a search engine to stack overflow pops up).

This architecture leverages microVMs for rapid scaling and high-density workloads. But does it work for GPU? The answer is no. You can look at the old 2019 GitHub issue and the comments to it to get the bigger picture of why it is so.

Hi, I'm the CEO of the company that built this SDK.

We're a company called E2B [0]. We're building and open-source [1] secure environments for running untrusted AI-generated code and AI agents. We call these environments sandboxes and they are built on top of micro VM called Firecracker [2].

You can think of us as giving small cloud computers to LLMs.

We recently created a dedicated SDK for building custom code interpreters in Python or JS/TS. We saw this need after a lot of our users have been adding code execution capabilities to their AI apps with our core SDK [3]. These use cases were often centered around AI data analysis so code interpreter-like behavior made sense

The way our code interpret SDK works is by spawning an E2B sandbox with Jupyter Server. We then communicate with this Jupyter server through Jupyter Kernel messaging protocol [4].

We don't do any wrapping around LLM, any prompting, or any agent-like framework. We leave all of that on users. We're really just a boring code execution layer that sats at the bottom that we're building specifically for the future software that will be building another software. We work with any LLM. Here's how we added code interpreter to Claude [5].

Our long-term plan is to build an automated AWS for AI apps and agents.

Happy to answer any questions and hear feedback!

[0] https://e2b.dev/

[1] https://github.com/e2b-dev

[2] https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

[3] https://e2b.dev/docs

[4] https://jupyter-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/messaging.ht...

[5] https://github.com/e2b-dev/e2b-cookbook/blob/main/examples/c...

As far as I know, Fly uses Firecracker for their VMs. I've been following Firecracker for a while now (even using it in a project), and they don't support GPUs out of the box (and have no plan to support it [1]).

I'm curious to know how Fly figured their own GPU support with Firecracker. In the past they had some very detailed technical posts on how they achieved certain things, so I'm hoping we'll see one on their GPU support in the future!

[1]: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/issues/11...

I pass through a GPU and USB hub to a VM running on a machine in the garage. An optical video cable and network compatible USB extender brings the interface to a different room making it my primary “desktop” computer (and an outdated laptop as a backup device). Doesn’t get more silent and cool than this. Another VM on the garage machine gets a bunch of hard drives passed through to it.

That said, hardware passthrough/VFIO is likely out of the current realistic scope for this project. VM boot times can be optimized if you never look for hardware to initialize in the first place. Though they are still likely initializing a network interface of some sort.

“MicroVM” seems to be a term used when as much as possible is stripped from a VM, such as with https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

According to their own FAQ it is indeed: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

What about microVMs like firecracker?

Dynamic memory management - Firecracker's RAM footprint starts low, but once a workload inside allocates RAM, Firecracker will never return it to the host system. After running several workloads inside, you end up with an idling VM that consumes 32 GB of RAM on the host, even though it doesn't need any of it.

Firecracker has a balloon device you can inflate (ie: acquire as much memory inside the VM as possible) and then deflate... returning the memory to the host.

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

Very few things in those companies are being written in Rust, and half of those projects chose Rust around ideological reasons rather than technical, with plenty of 'unsafe' thrown in for performance reasons

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/search?q=...

The fact that 'unsafe' even exists in Rust means it's no better than C with some macros.

Don't get me wrong, Rust has it's place, like all the other languages that came about for various reasons, but it's not going to gain wide adoption.

Future of programming consists of 2 languages - something like C that has a small instruction set for adopting to new hardware, and something that is very high level, higher than Python with LLM in the background. Everything in the middle is fodder.

https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker is the one that comes to mind, but most of these are internal.