Firecracker is a virtualization technology designed to create and run lightweight microVMs for secure, multi-tenant container and function workloads.
It uses Linux KVM and a minimalist virtual machine monitor that removes unnecessary guest-facing devices and features, helping reduce memory footprint and attack surface while improving startup speed and hardware utilization.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Exposes an API endpoint for configuring and managing microVMs.
- Lets you set vCPU count, memory size, CPU templates, kernel image, root file system, and boot arguments.
- Supports network interfaces, file-backed block devices, vsock sockets, entropy devices, and pmem devices.
- Supports block device rescans, backing file changes, and rate limiting for virtio devices.
- Includes logging, metrics, a guest-facing metadata service, and memory hotplugging.
- Provides advanced thread-specific seccomp filters for enhanced security.
- Includes the Jailer process to apply cgroup and namespace isolation and drop privileges for production deployments.
Website: github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker
Support:
Developer: Amazon Web Services and contributors
License: Apache License 2.0
Firecracker is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Hypervisors | |
|---|---|
| Proxmox | Virtualization management platform |
| Xen Hypervisor | Fastest and most secure infrastructure virtualization solution |
| KVM | Full virtualization solution for x86 hardware |
| oVirt | Virtualization solution for your entire enterprise |
| Firecracker | Create and run lightweight microVMs |
| XCP-ng | High performance enterprise level virtualization platform |
| Lguest | Little hypervisor designed for experimentation with virtualization |
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