Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications
summary
Firecracker is an open‑source VMM built on KVM and forked from CrossVM into a tiny microVM with a drastically simplified device model (no BIOS/PCI/USB) and about ~5 MB overhead per VM. It runs Linux guests, is ~4% the size of QEMU, boots far faster than QEMU and sustains low tail latency when preprovisioned, but concedes some raw IO throughput to QEMU. It powers millions of concurrent workloads in AWS Lambda and Fargate and operates successfully in production.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:34Outline
- 0:51What is Firecracker
- 2:46Firecracker Background
- 4:36Firecracker Support
- 5:17AWS Firecracker
- 5:56Multitenancy
- 7:55Operational Properties
- 8:18Performance
- 8:39Compatibility
- 9:06Soft Allocation
- 9:36KVM vs Linux Containers
- 11:26Boot Time
- 12:11Startup Latency
- 12:44IO Latency
- 13:25throughput
- 14:10Operational Lessons
- 15:09Operational Hygiene
- 16:02The Job is Never Done
- 16:43Opportunities
- 17:54Smart Questions
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