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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.


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