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Comment by phphphphp | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps a dumb question but container breakouts are a problem for all sorts of services which have been addressed in different ways. Since your goal is not to prevent container breakouts but rather securely run third-party code, why did you choose to use EC2 over something like ECS or Lambda or Google Cloud Run which is already dealing with the security aspect on your behalf? Virtual machines seem less secure and less convenient.

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Good question. Our goal is not just to run arbitrary code but to run it fast and cache rework. We are a CI service and speed is important. Brandon may be able to jump in with why not various options but it's hard to beat giving users powerful cloud machines to run their builds on.

I myself did try to run buildkit in a Lambda as I think that would be low cost option. But I found it you couldn't make gRPC calls against a lambda and that is a hard requirement for us.

Some of the reason we went with EC2 over something like ECS is that we would need to run the container in privileged mode for some of our features to work. We also considered options like gVisor, but ultimately the EC2 route was a simple enough implementation that made it easy to manage the user's cache volumes, etc. We're also hoping to use Firecracker VMs in the near future.

Are you concerned about AWS launching a competing service if you get significant traction?

This is an interesting question. Originally we were and had a BSL license. We changed our mind on that and went with a mozzila public license though.

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