We built a <60ms, open-source alternative to E2B using RustVMM and KVM
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Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting.So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast, ultra-lightweight secure sandbox service from the ground up: CubeSandbox. Today, we are officially open-sourcing it.To balance security and performance, we stripped the underlying OS to the absolute extreme. Here’s what it can do right now:1. <60ms blazing-fast cold start: End-to-end latency is under 60ms, making it 2.5x to 50x faster than traditional secure sandbox solutions.2. <5MB extreme memory footprint: Memory per instance is kept under 5MB. A single 96-vCPU physical machine can easily run 2,000+ sandboxes concurrently, reducing storage consumption by 90%.3. Massive concurrency scheduling: Capable of spinning up hundreds of thousands of instances in minutes.4. True kernel-level isolation: Every Agent gets its own dedicated Guest OS kernel.5. Native E2B SDK compatibility: Just swap a single URL environment variable. Zero code changes required for smooth migration and hosting.Also, a millisecond-level “snapshot rollback” feature is coming soon…Before opening the repo today, CubeSandbox has been running silently behind the scenes in Tencent Cloud, serving massive real-world AI Agent workloads in production. As we open-source it today, it is no longer a prototype, but battle-tested, production-ready infrastructure.Today, we hand it over to the community. Because we believe that high-performance agent infrastructure shouldn’t be exclusive to a few—it belongs to every developer worldwide who demands ultimate security and freedom.The project is still in its very early open-source stages, and we are really looking forward to your hardest critiques and architectural roasts. I’ll be hanging out here all day to answer your questions. The source code and deployment guides are all in the README. Come play with it! https://github.com/TencentCloud/CubeSandbox
HN · launched Apr 22, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 61%) · 0 views
Niche: ai agent execution sandboxes · 137 launches, 6 in the last 7 days ▼ -25% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
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More like this: all 137 launches in ai agent execution sandboxes →
Could you build this?
No Building a custom microVM hypervisor alternative using RustVMM and Linux KVM to achieve sub-60ms boot times requires low-level kernel and virtualization systems programming.
What it would actually take: The system is built in Rust using the `kvm-ioctls` and `rust-vmm` crate ecosystem to interface directly with `/dev/kvm`. It requires writing custom virtual machine monitors (VMM), minimal guest Linux kernels with stripped drivers, pre-configured rootfs snapshots, and fast-path jailer/cgroup isolation to orchestrate microVM memory snapshots in tens of milliseconds. This demands deep systems programming expertise in Linux virtualization, MMIO devices, and operating system kernels.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: existing execution environments (unspecified alternatives)
Concerns raised: massive memory overhead in existing solutions, slow boot times in existing solutions
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 1348 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #830 of 1349 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 175 days after the earliest competitor.
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