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Firecracker

Firecracker

Overview

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…

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Pricing

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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…

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  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Demos

Fireworks Comparison | Volume Test | Big Fat Ground Bloom Flower Firecracker | Rise in The East

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Wolf Pack Firecracker Demo

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Black Cat v.s M98 firecracker demo

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Fireworks Demo (Firecrackers) - Old Firecrackers (D.O.T. Class C & Early UN0336)

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Poland firecracker in the car demo

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Silver Salute Firecracker | VERY LOUD!

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Product Details

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.

Firecracker Video

How AWS’s Firecracker virtual machines work | Amazon Science

Firecracker Technical Details

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Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

(1-1 of 1)

Firecracker has cracks on functionalities

Rating: 4 out of 10
May 24, 2022
Vetted Review
Verified User
Firecracker
2 years of experience
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.
  • 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.
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.
Server Virtualization (5)
64%
6.4
Virtual machine automated provisioning
60%
6.0
Management console
80%
8.0
Live virtual machine backup
60%
6.0
Live virtual machine migration
70%
7.0
Hypervisor-level security
50%
5.0
  • Low memory overhead on each microVM
  • We can run workloads from different customers on the same machine.
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