AWS Lambda MicroVMs alternative: agent sandboxes in the EU
On 23 June 2026, AWS shipped Lambda MicroVMs : isolated VMs you launch, suspend, resume and terminate through an API, built explicitly for "workloads that execute user- or AI-generated code." Up to 16 vCPUs, 32 GB of memory, 8 hours of runtime, a dedicated HTTPS endpoint per VM. We've been shipping that product for a while. So has E2B, so has Modal. The interesting thing about the launch isn't that AWS caught up - it's that the biggest infrastructure company in the world looked at agent sandboxes, agreed with the design, and then shipped it with one European region and a price roughly three times ours per vCPU . That's the whole post. If you want an AWS Lambda MicroVMs alternative, "can anyone else do this" isn't the question - the isolation technology is literally the same on both sides. The questions are who operates the machine, where in Europe you can put it, and what it costs to leave running. AWS wins some of these outright, and we'll say where. The short verdict Pick Lambda MicroVMs if you're already deep in AWS, need more than 4 vCPUs or 8 GB in a single sandbox, or your agent has to reach private resources inside your VPC. The IAM integration and the size of the fleet are real advantages. Pick orkestr sandboxes if you're an EU company that wants execution, snapshots and logs inside one EU legal entity, you want to pay for CPU you actually burned rather than CPU you reserved, and your sandboxes are small and numerous rather than huge. The same primitive Both products run on Firecracker. AWS says so on the docs page - "Lambda MicroVMs deliver these core capabilities through Firecracker virtualization" - and so do we. Each sandbox is a hardware-isolated VM with its own kernel and rootfs, not a container sharing the host kernel. That distinction matters exactly when an LLM is writing shell commands you haven't read yet. The lifecycle is the same too. Create, exec, read and write files, pause, resume, terminate. Here's ours: from orkestr import Sandbox with Sand