CreateOS Sandbox vs AWS Lambda MicroVMs

If your team lives in AWS and wants per-session sandboxes inside its own account with IAM, VPC and PrivateLink, Lambda MicroVMs is the natural choice. If sessions must outlast 8 hours, you need fork, or outbound must be limited to named hosts, CreateOS Sandbox fits better. Both use Firecracker and both snapshot memory when a sandbox is suspended or paused.

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Pricing at a glance

CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. AWS Lambda MicroVMs pricing as published on 17 October 2026. Rates billed per GB rather than per GiB, or as bundled sizes, are quoted as published rather than converted.

CreateOS Sandbox

Lower compute rate

Compute: $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
Memory: $0.0116 /GiB-hr

No egress fees, 50 GiB bandwidth budget
vCPU stops billing while paused

AWS Lambda MicroVMs

Compute: $0.0997 /vCPU-hr
Memory: $0.0132 /GiB-hr

AWS lists US East Arm MicroVMs at $0.0000276944 per vCPU-second and $0.0000036667 per GB-second, plus $0.0038 per GB to suspend and $0.00155 per GB to resume, as of 17 October 2026.

Where CreateOS Sandbox fits better

What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where AWS Lambda MicroVMs has the edge.

No lifetime cap, against an 8-hour maximum per MicroVM that AWS says cannot be adjusted.
Fork from a paused sandbox into independent copies; AWS publishes no fork of a running MicroVM.
Lower running rates: $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour and $0.01159025 per GiB-hour, against about $0.0997 and $0.0132 on Lambda MicroVMs.
Hostname and wildcard egress rules, where AWS documents no hostname allowlist and routes filtering through your VPC.

Where AWS Lambda MicroVMs is strong

Firecracker isolation with memory-and-disk suspend and resume, no compute charge while suspended, automatic resume on incoming traffic, and native AWS IAM, VPC and PrivateLink integration for teams already on AWS.

Which to pick

Pick CreateOS Sandbox if

Sessions may run for days or weeks.
You want to fork one prepared sandbox into many.
You want ready images such as devbox:1 with coding agent CLIs on PATH, rather than building a Dockerfile on a Lambda base image.

Pick AWS Lambda MicroVMs if

You want sandboxes inside your own AWS account and VPC.
Sessions end within 8 hours and sit suspended a lot, so free suspended compute matters.
You need sizes up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB (vendor-stated).

Head-to-head comparison

Every dimension side by side, checked on 17 October 2026 against each vendor's own docs and pricing pages. "Not published" means we could not find it on the vendor's pages, not that the feature is missing.

Dimension	CreateOS Sandbox	AWS Lambda MicroVMs
Isolation	Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel	Firecracker microVM per MicroVM; Amazon Linux 2023; ARM64 (Graviton) only
Pause and resume	Yes: disk, memory and CPU state saved; vCPU stops billing, memory and storage still bill	Yes: suspend checkpoints memory and disk; resume manually or on incoming traffic; no compute charge while suspended
Fork	Yes: fork a paused sandbox into many independent sandboxes	Not published; many MicroVMs can launch from one image-version snapshot
Outbound network default	Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM	Open via the INTERNET_EGRESS connector, or routed through your VPC; no hostname allowlist documented
Inbound access	Closed by default; opt-in public HTTPS URL, plus API-authenticated shell and port tunnels	Public HTTPS endpoint per MicroVM, short-lived JWE token required on every request; NO_INGRESS option
Largest size	8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise; 8 vCPU / 8 GB on Pro	16 vCPU / 32 GB memory / 32 GB disk (vendor-stated)
Concurrency	1 / 5 / 20 / 30 concurrent sandboxes on Free / Beginner / Pro / Enterprise; paused sandboxes count	Memory quota of 400 GB per Region by default (1,024 GB in four Regions), adjustable
Session length	No cap; optional idle auto-pause from 60 s to 24 h, off by default	8 hours total, running plus suspended, not adjustable
Billing	Per second while running: $0.03616363/vCPU-hr, $0.01159025/GiB-hr, storage $0.0001584/GB-hr	Per second: $0.0000276944/vCPU-s, $0.0000036667/GB-s; snapshot write and read per GB
SDKs and interfaces	TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C#, Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0), CLI, MCP, REST	AWS CLI, AWS SDKs (boto3, JavaScript), console, CloudFormation

Common questions

What is the maximum lifetime of an AWS Lambda MicroVM?

Eight hours, counting running and suspended time together, and AWS says the limit cannot be adjusted. CreateOS sandboxes have no lifetime cap; a paused sandbox can wait until you resume, fork or destroy it, billing memory and storage while it waits.

Is a suspended Lambda MicroVM cheaper than a paused CreateOS sandbox?

Usually, yes. AWS charges no compute while a MicroVM is suspended, only $0.08 per GB-month for suspended state plus per-GB snapshot fees. A paused CreateOS sandbox stops vCPU billing but keeps billing memory at $0.01159025 per GiB-hour, plus storage.

Can I fork a running AWS Lambda MicroVM?

AWS publishes no fork of a running MicroVM, though many MicroVMs can launch from the same image-version snapshot. CreateOS forks a paused sandbox into new independent sandboxes, each with its own id, IP and bandwidth ledger, while the source stays paused.

Sources

Checked 17 October 2026.

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