Performing live migrations of massive VMs at scale
Blog post from Sail Research
Sailboxes is a cloud platform for long-running agents that uses live migration to reduce costs by charging only for active resource use and operating workloads on ephemeral, load-balanced infrastructure. Its migration system preserves open network connections through a persistent Layer 4 proxy and in-VM sidecar, which also buffers packets during brief outages and supports functions such as egress controls, credential injection, and SSH continuity. To move large virtual machines quickly, Sailboxes uses Linux user-space page fault handling to start a VM on a new host with minimal state, retrieve needed memory pages from the previous host or S3, and improve transfer performance with 2 MB memory pages. Firecracker microVMs, virtio-mem hot-plugging, memory-pressure monitoring, and background checkpoints allow instances to expand or shrink memory dynamically while reducing migration data. The company says these mechanisms enable migrations with only seconds of disruption, support pricing of $0.015 per vCPU-hour, and kept a Minecraft server operating through repeated forced migrations, though migrations can add brief latency and are intended to occur only occasionally for host reclamation or fleet balancing.
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