Introducing AWS Nitro Sandboxes on Amazon EKS, ECS and EC2 for hardware isolated pods, tasks and VMs

Published
November 9, 2026
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/11/nitro-sandboxes-eks-ecs-ec2/

AWS Nitro Sandboxes Release

AWS Nitro Sandboxes are now available as lightweight VMs managed by the Nitro Hypervisor, providing hardware-isolated virtual machines for Amazon EKS pods, Amazon ECS tasks, and lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs). This allows for the safe execution of untrusted, multi-tenant, or regulated workloads within the resources of a single instance.

Key features include:

  • Isolation: Each workload gets its own isolation boundary.
  • Performance: Near-native EC2 performance with Nitro-hypervisor isolation.
  • Security: Validate workloads through cryptographic attestation.
  • Cost Efficiency: Improve utilization and lower compute costs by sharing a single EC2 instance across multiple workloads.
  • Compatibility: Fully native support for Pod Identity, VPC CNI, EBS/EFS/S3 storage, and CloudWatch.
  • Customization: Run Nitro Sandboxes directly on EC2 with your own AMI, orchestration, and VMMs.
  • Support: Native support for Amazon Linux and Firecracker, with patches available for other options.

What to do

  • Enable Nitro Sandboxes in EKS or ECS with a one-line change.
  • Run Nitro Sandboxes directly on EC2 for full control.
  • Refer to the Nitro Sandboxes documentation for implementation details.

Source: AWS release notes




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