AWS Lambda MicroVMs

Looking to give your AI agents a safe space to burn the house down?

Though Lambda itself is a bit of a black box, it's my understanding that with a bit of Docker magic under the hood, Lambda boots up your code in a task whenever the Lambda is invoked. This first boot is often called a “cold boot”.

After that, subsequent invokes are routed to that same Docker container, which has already been “warmed” up.

This means in a normal lambda invocation each request routed to the lambda does NOT get its own private virtual environment.

Requests made from you can hit the same container as requests made from a malicious party.

Therefore there is a possibility that, if the code running in the lambda was flawed, there could be a possibility that data could get contaminated or leaked.

Now allow me to introduce you to AWS Lambda MicroVMs.

MicroVMs’ biggest selling points are that it boots fast(1 second… not that fast) and that it offers isolation for security purposes.

With the 1 second boot-up time, it doesn’t sound like it would work as a web server but more as a worker, and their list of use cases supports that hypothesis.

Their biggest use case is to give a safe space for AI coding agents to set on fire. Technically, you could use it as a remote coding environment for a human, but what caveman is still writing code themselves(That is a joke for those of you that are new to my work).

Human or AI, this would help negate some of the negative consequences of attacks like the NPM package vulnerabilities I have written about previously.

In the end, it sounds like more of a really, really fast-booting EC2 instance or an ECS task than a Lambda but I could see why they use the name for branding purposes.

If you want a deeper dive into security on AWS, you should check out my On Demand Video Course on O'Reilly - Zero to Hero on AWS Security: An Animated Guide to Security in the Cloud