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Firecracker

Score4 out of 10

1 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Firecracker?

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 and AWS Fargate. It is open source and available on an Apache 2.0 license, free to use.

Firecracker is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that uses the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and manage microVMs. Firecracker boasts a minimalist design, meaning it excludes unnecessary devices and guest functionality to reduce the memory footprint and attack surface area of each microVM. This is done to improves security, decreases the startup time, and increases hardware utilization. Firecracker is generally available on 64-bit Intel, AMD and Arm CPUs with support for hardware virtualization.

Firecracker is used by/integrated with (in alphabetical order): appfleet , containerd via firecracker-containerd , Fly.io , Kata Containers , Koyeb , Northflank , OpenNebula , Qovery , UniK , and Weave FireKube (via Weave Ignite ). Firecracker can run Linux and OSv guests.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Firecracker has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 1 ratings of Firecracker's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Management console

    Management console for central administration of vm environment

    Category average: 7.9

  • Live virtual machine migration

    Downtime minimization by migrating live vms between hosts and across clusters

    Category average: 7.7

  • Virtual machine automated provisioning

    Automation of virtual machine provisioning through use of vm templates

    Category average: 7.6

Areas for Improvement

  • Live virtual machine backup

    Ability to backup vms without interrupting service

    Category average: 7.7

  • Hypervisor-level security

    Hypervisor-level security including antivirus and anti-malware

    Category average: 8.2

Reviews

What users are saying about Firecracker.
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Firecracker has cracks on functionalities

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used Firecracker to deploy a few workloads in lightweight microVMs. Being an open-source virtualization software, it is able to manage effectively multi-tenant containers and function-based services alike. Although not the best, it works as it's supposed to as a virtual machine monitor but with very limited functions.

Pros

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

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

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

Other Software Used

Prepaze's UNIK LMS, CloudLinux OS