Modal engineer here. This isn’t correct. You can DIY this but certainly not by wrapping EC2 which is using the Nitro hypervisor and is not optimized for startup time.

Nearly all players in this space use Gvisor or Firecracker.

Do you know Eric Zhang by chance? I went to school with him and saw that he was at Modal sometime back. Potentially the smartest person I’ve ever met… and a very impressive technical mind.

Super impressed with what you’ve all done at Modal!

yeh of course I worked with him for a few years! Agree, smartest person I've ever worked with, and there's a smart crowd at Modal.

You can and can’t, at least in AWS. For instance, you can’t launch a EC2 to a point you can ssh in less than 8-10 seconds (and it takes a while to get EBS to sync the entire disk from s3).

Many a time I have tried to figure a self scaling EC2 based CI system but could never get everything scaled and warm in less than 45 seconds, which is sucky when you’re waiting on a job to launch. These microvm as a service thingys do solve a problem.

(You could use lambda, but that’s limited in other ways).

To the commenters here: thanks for correcting me! So AWS is losing AI sandboxing market to GCP due to high cold start times of EC2...very interesting!