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Comment by wolfgang42 | Hacker News Reader

I was just considering using this service for a side project that needed isolated containers to run jobs in. Anyone have suggestions for similar alternative services?

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To just run a container and have it available over the web?

Azure has Azure Container Instances. AWS has Fargate. Zeit has Docker deploys with v1. GCP is coming soon with Serverless Containers.

No, for short-lived (a minute or two per run) batch jobs. But, it looks like most of the ones you mentioned can also be used for that sort of task. Thanks!

Azure Container Instance billed per second, specifically for short lived tasks.

Me too, ( see thread for my comment ). I decided in the end that using my own ec2 Ubuntu t2 micro was simpler and far cheaper to run than using and configuring Fargate. I assume you want to execute untrusted code (e.g. run CI on behalf of customers or provide a repl.it-like service), like I’m doing? I couldn’t find a good service that did this well ( well I did find hyper.sh ).

Well, in theory the code that's executing is in a sandbox already but I'd rather have that extra layer of protection. I was really looking forward to just having a little bit of glue code to hit a hyper.sh endpoint and not have to worry about any server administration. manigandham suggested a few alternatives that I'm going to look into.

Right now I believe the only major players with isolated vms are Oracle Cloud and Alibaba. There's a lot of movement in the space right now, though, so you'll likely find a number of options next year.

You can add AWS Fargate to the list as well:

"Each Fargate task has it's own isolation boundary and does not share the underlying kernel, CPU resources, memory resources, or elastic network interface with another task."

Official docs on Fargate isolation here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/...

gitlab?

I think "builds" was the wrong term. (I've edited it to "jobs" above.) GitLab CI is great, but I don't know if it fits my use case, which is running intermittent batch conversions. I was planning on using hyper.sh to spin up containers on demand, instead of having to maintain a job server and queue of my own.

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