Firecracker vs. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

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

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

• It makes it easy to secure virtual machines as they are segmented into microvms with a minimal attack surface area

Incentivized

• 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

• 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

• KVM itself doesn't ship with a management interface
• KVM itself is a bit complicated to handle
• KVM needs Qemu to virtualize Windows guests

Incentivized

It does the job and stays out of the way. The specifics of usability relies on the implementation, but with things like Icarus and libvirt, things are standardizing nicely.

Incentivized

It is a very reliable solution that can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with low overhead. It is a free and open source software. Easy to use withOpenStack.

Incentivized

• Low memory overhead on each microVM
• We can run workloads from different customers on the same machine.

Incentivized

• Fast provisioning of new servers.
• Huge drop of the cost of servers compared to bare metal.
• Easy upgrades of resources, sometimes now even requiring a server restart.

Incentivized