HN Reader

- as a guy not familiar or in loop with all these sandbox products, i have a quick question for anyone reading this

- what is the difference between docker and modal?

- what does modal do that docker doesnt?

- what is the cold start time comparison between both?

- how do both of these differ from something called "Firecracker VM"?

Is modal running every single service inside gvisor?

I have heard that gvisor isn't recommended to run every single production but rather only some front facing or some other activities but it has some serious performance degradation which is why most end up using firecracker

This is really cool though, does this mean that we could probably have AI models that are snapshotted?

Are the states of checkpoint/recovery encrypted by default or how would that even work? Like what are the privacy aspects of it. I don't think even using something like modal would be the private llm that many people sometimes want on subreddits like localllama but the people dont have gpu. of course nothing beats privacy if you have your own gpu's but I'd be curious to know what people's thoughts are

Looks great

Tried it out, first curl after deploy gave me a 303, but second attempt worked.

This uses Nvidia’s CUDA snapshot API under the hood, but you have to pair it with a host side snapshot as well. Modal uses gVisor for this, which is notoriously high overhead.

Does anyone know of a more efficient alternative if you’re running a trusted container?