Skip to main content

AWS Firecracker


Firecracker is a light-weight virtualization technology that has been open-sourced by Amazon Web Services. Developers can use Firecracker to create and operate micro virtual machines (micro VMs) that host multi-tenant containers and run in conjunction with AWS serverless technologies.

Firecracker allows developers to combine the efficiency and high performance of containers with the security and isolation of traditional VMs and hardware-based virtualization. Firecracker also implements a virtual machine monitor (VMM).

As of this writing, Firecracker cannot be used with Kubernetes, Docker or Kata containers, but AWS says it does have plans to extend Firecracker to other major container ecosystems.

Firecracker specifications

Firecracker is written in the Rust programming language and can currently run on Intel processors, with AMD and ARM processor support expected in 2019. Firecracker is available under the Apache version 2.0 open source license.

Firecracker uses the KVM hypervisor architecture for Linux. AWS developed the virtualization technology with minimal elements to increase boot speeds, reduce attack surface and maximize server utilization. To further optimize performance, a user is only able to boot recent Linux kernels, and Firecracker doesn't support graphics, accelerators or most legacy devices.

In addition, each micro VM created with Firecracker has a memory overhead of less than 5 MiB, which enables a higher density of isolated containers that can run on a single server.

A user can launch micro VMs in as little as 125 milliseconds, and create as many as 150 micro VMs per second per host, according to AWS.

Firecracker and serverless

AWS open sourced Firecracker, which it already used internally to improve resource utilization and user experience for services such as AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate.

With Fargate, for example, Firecracker accelerates the deployment of Fargate Tasks. Previously, those Tasks would consist of one or multiple Docker containers that run inside an Amazon EC2 VM to remain isolated. Now, Fargate Tasks can run on Firecracker micro VMs, which enables faster provisioning times on EC2 bare metal instances.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...
Post a Comment
Read more

What's the difference between two-step verification and 2FA?

  The two terms, two-step verification, and two-factor authentication are synonymous, though the former is now being used more widely by the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple as it better conveys how the actual authentication process works. In the past, two-step verification was used to describe processes that used the same authentication factors, while two-factor authentication described processes that involved different factors, such as entering a password on a website and receiving a numerical code on a mobile device. Today, the two terms are both used to describe authentication that involves a secondary factor that is different from the first. Authentication is a vital element of access control and data security because users can be assigned access rights and be authorized to perform certain actions only after successful authentication is performed. The ways in which someone can be authenticated fall into three categories based on what is known ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Black Swan Event

A black swan event is an incident that occurs randomly and unexpectedly and has wide-spread ramifications. The event is usually followed with reflection and a flawed rationalization that it was inevitable. The phrase illustrates the frailty of inductive reasoning and the danger of making sweeping generalizations from limited observations. The term came from the idea that if a man saw a thousand swans and they were all white, he might logically conclude that all swans are white. The flaw in his logic is that even when the premises are true, the conclusion can still be false. In other words, just because the man has never seen a black swan, it does not mean they do not exist. As Dutch explorers discovered in 1697, black swans are simply outliers -- rare birds, unknown to Europeans until Willem de Vlamingh and his crew visited Australia. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the phrase black swan as a metaphor for how humans deal with unpredictable events in his 2007...
Post a Comment
Read more