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No CRIU. Snapshots are at the disk layer, not RAM.

`machine0 suspend` takes a full disk snapshot and tears down the compute; you keep paying only for storage. `machine0 start` restores the disk and cold-boots the VM from it. So processes restart, they don't resume mid-execution. Practically: anything that survives a reboot survives a suspend.

Modal is an ephemeral sandbox, whereas machine0 is a persistent VM you own: root, your own driver/CUDA/kernel, GPU passed straight through, and a fixed GPU per size.

Hi! OAuth token refresh is handled within the profile, and will automatically get picked up by agents using it. If you actually want to pull or rotate a credential, you can do that too and re-inject.

The pattern that's increasingly common is having a pilot or orchestrator agent sitting on top of the fleet that manages this.

Hi! No not for every tool call. People are spinning up VMs for tasks that require sustained compute for hours or days. For example, they’ll deploy an agent with tools and a prompt to take an entire feature from spec to PR. Or an auto-research loop to improve the performance of an inference model.

Hi! We're not the cheapest compute on the market. But we are cheaper than most sandbox providers / neoclouds. And customers are happy to pay for agent first DX coupled with the performance and reliability you expect from an established cloud.

Hi! Sure: (1) running agent fleets for software factories, (2) Model training and RL environments orchestrated by agents and (3) as a backend for agentic products and platforms.

Yes, we're building more tooling around fleets, starting with profiles that let you manage named sets of credentials and MCP tools outside of the VM. We're also looking to support more backends and also BYOC.

Hi! You get GPUs, much bigger machines and full control of the VM down to the drivers, kernel etc. It's also a lot cheaper, especially for compute intensive workloads. Also, if you're running agents in the VMs, you get native support for credential and MCP tool injection via profiles. We support NixOS too!

You can totally ask an agent to orchestrate an existing cloud. But their APIs weren't designed for agentic orchestration, so it'll be more expensive in terms of context / turns (machine0 grammar is simple: new, ls, rm...).

The other thing is if you're running large workloads that span many machines (e.g. software factories, model training or RL environments), then over time you'll end up with orphaned artifacts that will need to be maintained (think security groups, volumes, elastic IPs etc).

Ultimately, most of our customers today just want to be able to spin up a powerful & reliable VM without worrying about DevOps or any other kind of maintenance :)

I have a payments background. So maintaining a very high bar on security, reliability and performance as usage scales is super important.

Their machines are good & they have a partnership program that's fast and compatible with the model.

Hi! It sits on top of DigitalOcean. We also have BYOC on the roadmap.

This gives you the best of both worlds: agent native, CLI-first DX with the reliability and performance of a traditional cloud.