AWS Lambda MicroVMs: The Compute Nobody Asked For?

AWS Lambda MicroVMs promise VM-level isolation, persistent state, and millisecond startup times — filling the gap between Lambda and EC2. In practice, the developer experience is far more complex: apps must be packaged as Docker images, converted to MicroVM images, run as HTTP servers, and managed through a full lifecycle of create/start/suspend/resume/terminate. The author concludes that MicroVMs solve a real problem for a narrow audience (secure AI execution environments), but for most engineers the complexity far outweighs the benefits, and plain Lambda, EC2, ECS, or Fargate remain better choices.