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.