Yes, you can and definitely should use Pulumi or other cloud infra for production use cases. The way I envisioned cloudrouter was to give coding agents throwaway VMs, use it to close the loop on its task, and then stop/delete it afterwards...
Re: monolithic tools. I think having template overrides for the user could solve this issue -- although it is a bit tougher to implement. I wanted a monolithic tool because it optimizes for faster startup times and just works but it does sacrifice configurability for the user.
Re: Docker template. I understand the Docker critique. So, the primary use case is an agent uploading its working directory and spinning it up as a dev environment. The agent needs the project files, the dev server, and the browser all in one place. If these are separate containers, the agent has to reason about volume mounts, Docker networking, etc — potentially more confusion, higher likelihood that agents get something wrong. A single environment where cloudrouter start ./my-project just works is what I envisioned.
Re: SSH host keys. SSH never connects to a real host. It's tunneled through TLS WebSocket via ProxyCommand. Also the hostname is fake, we have per-session auth token on the WebSocket layer, and VMs are ephemeral with fresh keys every boot. So, SSH isn't wide-open. We don't expose the SSH port (port 10000); everything goes through our authenticated proxy.
Totally fair point. For me it was just a nice primitive to have -- just one command gives the agent a VM with SSH, file sync, browser, GPU ready to go. Instead of dealing with cloud account setup, security groups, SSH keys, and other shenanigans. For cloudrouter, the dependencies/Docker/VNC/Juypter Lab come pre-baked so you don't need to think about configuring VM environment setups...
Interesting, biotech stocks have been notoriously hard to predict because their business model revolves around science, and it’s hard to know when the science is right. Depending on the situation, I think sentiment could potentially be a misleading/confounding variable here…