Firecracker has cracks on functionalities
May 24, 2022

Firecracker has cracks on functionalities

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Firecracker

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

Do you think Firecracker delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Firecracker's feature set?

No

Did Firecracker live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Firecracker go as expected?

No

Would you buy Firecracker again?

No

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.

Firecracker Feature Ratings

Virtual machine automated provisioning
6
Management console
8
Live virtual machine backup
6
Live virtual machine migration
7
Hypervisor-level security
5