Virtual Machines
topic on 4 shows · 12 statements across 11 episodes
Latent Space 
the Neon Show 
the MAD Podcast 
the a16z Podcast
12 statements about Virtual Machines, every show
Xin: Databricks launches 15 to 16 million VMs per day across clouds
“So we, on the analytics side, I think we launched Maybe 50 or sixteen million virtual machines a day across all three clouds, so which are one of the biggest compute orchestrators out there. Stuff for sure for CPU compute.”
Yan: Autonomous agent sandboxes require full VMs instead of Docker containers
“Docker containers, not really a true security boundary for one. But the other is like, if you are running real applications, a lot of times those applications use Docker and then you have to think about Docker and Docker, which is like really weird. And so I t…”
Burazin: Most sandbox providers run Firecracker on preemptible VMs
“Most providers run this on top of the VMs. And also firecracker. Yeah. They run a firecracker on VMs... The common way to do it is that they, one, that the state of the machine or the hard disk is not part of the sandbox itself. And the other thing is they're …”
Kumar: Modern AI data stacks replace VMs with distributed serverless architectures
“Gone are the days that you're going to run, you know, applications sitting in big virtual machines and, you know, attaching storage to it and so on and so forth, right? You know, you're basically going to build an architecture that can, you know, scale up and …”
Dreamer isolates application sub-agents within dedicated virtual machines
“Any application on Dreamer can kick off a sub-agent to do a particular task. So this actually is a powerful agentic harness that runs inside of its own VM.”
Sunil Pai: Cloudflare allows running AI agents without Kubernetes or VMs
“See, bro, the first step was making sure you don't have to use Kubernetes, and that we kind of solved. Now we'll do the rest. Like, that's just it. Like you can run agents without Kubernetes or VMs.”
Horowitz: Early product development years should not count toward GTM maturity
“Like I think years into the company is always tricky because, you know, both at Mongo and VM, they're pretty deep tech companies. So you spend a couple of years up front where you're really pretty heads down building. So I think you can't really count those co…”
Podjarny: Containers are the evolution of the app, not the VM
“The industry has been seeing containers as the evolution of the VM. And they've been trying to retrofit VM patching practices onto containers while we saw containers as the evolution of the app.”
Uretsky: Virtual machines are phasing out as containers become dominant
“The virtual machine, which was essentially the start of DigitalOcean, is now starting to slowly begin to kind of phase, you know, phase out, and you're starting to see containerized applications become much more dominant.”
Levine: Containers outperform virtual machines by standardizing on Linux
“Containers use far less compute resources there. You know, it used to be where I had to support Windows and Linux on a machine, therefore virtual machines are important. Now it's only Linux on both sides. Linux as the base operating system and running within t…”
Chris Dixon: Containers render virtual machines obsolete, though transition takes time
“It seems like one of these, it's a rare thing where it just seems like it's a no-brainer, dramatic improvement over virtual machines, and they're just, VMs are over. . I mean, it's gonna take a while.”
Knaup: Five-second jobs are highly inefficient to run in VMs compared to container isolation
“Launching very, you know, quickly launching very short jobs, like jobs that will only take five seconds to run. You can do that if you're using isolation. It's impossible, or it's not impossible, but it's very inefficient with VMs.”