Modal has a lot of small niceties that made them easy to implement, such as filesystem snapshots and programmatic build images. But I did see that AWS recently launched Lambda MicroVMs, and since we're an AWS house we may transition to using them.

My main issue with Modal is that their autoscaling is not as good as Daytona's. You have to stop the machine, resize, then start it, which takes ~3s and terminates all running processes. Daytona supports scaling up (but not down) without stopping the VM.

Also would recommend checking out ColeMurray/background-agents if you're planning to self host. Very good alternative! And the team behind it are great

Thanks Bence, for your thoughts there. Will definitely take a look.