Firecracker
More info
- Creator
- AWS
- Released
- Owner
- AWS
- Type
- Lightweight VMM (micro-VM)
- License
- Apache 2.0
- Website
- firecracker-microvm.github.io
- Source
- github.com/firecracker-microvm
- Wikipedia
- en.wikipedia.org
Minimalist VMM from AWS, written in Rust — boots a KVM-based micro-VM in under 125 ms with a memory footprint under 5 MiB.
Powers AWS Lambda and Fargate. Reduced device set (only virtio-net, virtio-block, serial, keyboard) → enormously small attack surface. No BIOS, no ACPI, no PCI — straight into the Linux kernel.
Useful outside AWS too: Fly.io runs its entire platform on Firecracker, Kata Containers supports it as a backend, and several AI sandboxes (Cloudflare, E2B) use it for isolated code execution. The modern option when containers aren't enough for isolation.