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Initial public release - #1

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Oct 2, 2026
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Summary

Initial public release of the companion code for the AWS Compute Blog post
"Scaling RL rollouts with Firecracker on Amazon EC2 metal."

This repository packs dense single-tenant Firecracker microVMs onto EC2 bare
metal for RL rollouts and agentic code execution, with per-microVM CPU pinning
and NUMA-aware placement, and a sweep harness that measures density.

What's included

  • host-agent/ (Go) — topology discovery, cgroup/jailer orchestration, warm
    pool, Prometheus metrics; runs as a systemd service on the lab host.
  • guest-agent/ (Rust) — in-microVM PID 1 speaking a small vsock text protocol.
  • lab/ (Go) — density sweep harness and measurement tooling (labctl, labsweep).
  • scripts/ (Shell) — host bootstrap, golden-image bake, rootfs conversion.
  • cdk/ (Python) — VPC, IAM, results bucket, one metal reference host from the
    golden AMI.
  • analysis/ (Python), examples/ — post-processing and an end-to-end dispatch example.

Testing

  • lab/, host-agent/, examples/dispatch/: go build / go vet / go test all pass; gofmt clean.
  • cdk/: py_compile and env-agnostic cdk synth for both instance types.
  • analysis/, scripts/: py_compile and bash -n clean.
  • Known gap: the Rust guest-agent musl build (cargo build --release --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl) has not been run locally — no Rust toolchain on the
    prep machine. Its first execution is this PR's CI run; expect to iterate on the
    workflow if it's red.

Scope

This is reference code to illustrate the blog's architecture and reproduce its
measurements — not production-hardened. Features exercised in the blog's lab but
not material to this post's story (snapshot restore, hugepages, arm64/m8g,
instance-store placement) are intentionally deferred to follow-up contributions.

Companion code for the AWS Compute Blog post "Scaling RL rollouts with
Firecracker on Amazon EC2 metal."

Dense single-tenant Firecracker microVMs on EC2 bare metal for RL rollouts
and agentic code execution: a host agent (topology discovery, cgroup/jailer
orchestration, warm pool, metrics), an in-microVM guest agent, a density
sweep harness and analysis tooling, host image bake scripts, and a CDK app
that provisions a single metal reference host for the lab.
@kploesser
kploesser merged commit d29eaf0 into main Oct 2, 2026
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@kploesser
kploesser deleted the publish branch October 2, 2026 23:38
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