Comment by rbbydotdev
5 hours ago
> The catch is that regular EC2 is already a VM. AWS runs our host inside its own isolation layer, and then we run browser VMs inside that host. In other words, every browser is a VM inside a VM.
yes but i think there is specifically some ec2s which give you hypervisor access and thereby firecracker too - someone correct me if im wrong?
yes only c8i, m8i and r8i instance types support it. It is called nested virtualization[1]
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec...
Unfortunately supply is quite limited. If you want to horizontally scale on these instances you need to have a good relationship with AWS so they'll give you a big allocation before c9i is a thing.
also i found them much less stable than metal instances running into weird kvm failures
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When we had need of quite big machines (AWS metal instances), we've found the performance differential between metal, and the equivalent size VM was 10-20% for CPU heavy workloads.