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.”
Generally speaking, once you have a working NixOS config, incremental changes become extremely trivial, safe, and easy to rollback.
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.
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
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…
Without nix I mean
I’m curious what gVisor is getting you in your setup — of course gVisor is good for running untrusted code, but would you say that gVisor prevents issues that would otherwise make the agent break out of the kubernetes pod? Like, do you have examples you’ve observed where gVisor has saved the day?
The huge gVisor drawback is that it __drastically_ slows down applications (despite startup time being faster.)
For agents, the startup time latency is less of an issue than the runtime cost, so microvms perform a lot better. If you're doing this in kube, then there's a bunch of other challenges to deal with if you want standard k8s features, but if you're just looking for isolated sandboxes for agents, microvms work really well.
The performance of gVisor is often a big limiting factor in deployment.
I read the thesis on arxiv. Do you see any limitations from using Xen instead of KVM? I think that was the biggest surprise for me as I have very rarely seen teams build on Xen.
