You absolutely can run agents on a regular VM. But if you want to build multi-tenant and multi-agent systems with strong security boundaries, then having a VM or MicroVM per agent session (or session with a group of agents) really simplifies things.

When we did AWS AgentCore Runtime last year we introduced session isolation, with MicroVMs per session. You can think of Lambda MicroVMs as the same stack, but generalized to fit a larger number of application patterns.

You don’t have to pay that much. I did pay a couple hundred for a while, but not since I switched to Chinese models along with a $20 ChatGPT subscription.

Also, a single VM is pretty limiting.

Isn’t the point that you wanna be able to spin up and down thousands of VM:s on demand (literally a VM just to run a tool and then shut it down until the next tool call)