We're thrilled to announce the official launch of our most requested feature: fully private Linux VMs for each NonBioS user. This marks a significant milestone in our journey to provide a comprehensive, secure, and flexible development environment.
Why We Made This Change
During our beta phase, all users shared a common Linux sandbox environment. While this approach helped us validate our concept and gather valuable feedback, several limitations became increasingly apparent:
- Resource Contention: Many beta users were building on the same system packages (like Apache), leading to configuration conflicts and inadvertently overwriting each other's software
- Security Concerns: A shared environment inherently poses privacy and security challenges when multiple users access the same system
- Limited Customization: Users needed more freedom to install packages and configure services without affecting others
These challenges made it clear that to fulfill our vision of providing a truly comprehensive development platform, we needed to give each user their own isolated environment.
What's New?
Each NonBioS user now receives:
- A full Ubuntu-based cloud VM with approximately 30GB of storage
- Complete root permissions for total system control
- A secure, isolated environment where your code and files remain private
- The ability to install any packages and run any services you need
Your VM will remain available as long as you're actively using it, though we will automatically shut down instances after one week of inactivity to optimize resources. This means NonBioS is ideal for development and testing, while production deployments should still utilize your preferred cloud services or infrastructure.
How This Expands What You Can Build
This upgrade dramatically expands the possibilities of what you can create with NonBioS:
- Full-Stack Applications: Build and test complete applications with frontend, backend, and database components
- Microservice Architectures: Develop and test collections of interconnected services
- Database Systems: Install and configure MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Supabase, or any other database technology
- DevOps Tools: Create cloud orchestration layers and automation scripts
- System Administration: Practice and learn Linux administration in a real environment
The private VM approach delivers the authentic Linux experience we promised in our previous post—giving you complete control over your development environment.
Behind the Scenes: Built with NonBioS
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this release is that the service managing these cloud VMs was built using NonBioS itself. Our VM lifecycle management service, which handles cloud provider connections, provisioning, and maintenance, was developed entirely through NonBioS.
Human engineers were only needed during the final integration testing phase and when connecting the service to our core NonBioS chat system. This real-world application demonstrates the power and flexibility of our platform, as we're using NonBioS to build NonBioS!
Getting Started
To access your private VM, simply log in to your NonBioS account. All users will automatically receive their private environment. If you have some files that you would like to access from the previous shared environment, do reach out to us.