Firecracker vs. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Firecracker

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Firecracker	Score 4.0 out of 10	N/A	Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant container and function-based services. Firecracker enables users to deploy workloads in lightweight virtual machines, called microVMs that may provide security and workload isolation over traditional VMs, while enabling the speed and resource efficiency of containers. Firecracker was developed at Amazon Web Services with the goal of improving services like AWS Lambda…	N/A
KVM	Score 7.4 out of 10	N/A	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization solution developed by small Israeli software company Qumranet and supported by Red Hat since that company's acquisition in 2008.	N/A

Pricing

Firecracker

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Firecracker	KVM
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Firecracker	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Top Pros	Pro Virtual machines	Pro Automation tools Pro Licensing cost Pro Multiple versions
Top Cons	Minus Startup time Minus Improve security Minus Open source	Minus Limited support Minus Setting it up Minus Hard to set

Features

Firecracker

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Server Virtualization

Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
	Firecracker 6.4 1 Ratings 26% below category average	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) 9.2 5 Ratings 10% above category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning	6.01 Ratings	9.04 Ratings
Management console	8.01 Ratings	9.03 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup	6.01 Ratings	9.73 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration	7.01 Ratings	9.04 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security	5.01 Ratings	9.53 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Firecracker	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Small Businesses	Proxmox VE Score 9.3 out of 10	Proxmox VE Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10	VMware vSOM (discontinued) Score 10.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Firecracker	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Likelihood to Recommend	4.0 (1 ratings)	9.3 (5 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Firecracker	Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Likelihood to Recommend	Open Source While deploying workloads in lightweight microVMs presents a couple of perks, Firecracker may not be the best software to handle this. Startup times are slow and scalability is quite limited because of the jailer and virtualization barriers. We have had security breaches on isolated EC2 instances while using Firecracker. It however has a silver lining by improving how serverless functions in container ecosystems are run with their VMMs. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Red Hat KVM is the best solution in the case you need to test and turn up any virtual environment with limited vCPU/RAM resources. The obvious area of its use is a network environment when we want to avoid being tied to one type of hardware/vendor and being able to swap from one instance to another with no downtimes. The use of a vSwitch (that supports VLAN tagging) is a significant bonus for network engineers that some other hypervisors do not provide. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Open Source It makes it easy to secure virtual machines as they are segmented into microvms with a minimal attack surface area Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Red Hat KVM is really good at providing fast and reliable virtualization for Linux guests Since KVM is a kernel module, every VM is a Linux process which can be managed by Linux system tools KVM integrates very well with the management framework libvirt, which is why KVM can be integrated in automation tools as well Incentivized Valentin Höbel Senior Consultant IT Infrastructure Read full review
Cons	Open Source Excludes devices unnecessarily Has a slow startup time the basis being to improve security which is quite irrelevant. It has limited functionalities on monitoring VMs despite being an open source. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Red Hat Complex networking GPU processing is not fully supported It's hard to set up without support tools Incentivized Stenio Pereira Filho IT Group manager Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Open Source No answers on this topic	Red Hat Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Open Source Low memory overhead on each microVM We can run workloads from different customers on the same machine. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Red Hat KVM just works and gets out of the way KVM is working great with other open-source technologies like QEMU and libvirt Incentivized RM Robert Munteanu Software Engineer Read full review
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