Our application needs to run plugins written by users.

My general impression is "just use AWS Lambda", but I haven't found any articles by anyone authoritative who shares this opinion. Articles I've found by anyone not using Lambda describe a nest of VMs and containers that approximate Lambda with greater complexity, cost, and room to mess up.

There's also the option to only run user code on user machines, which may work for us.

Can you share any in depth articles by anyone who has solved this problem at their own company?