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A full virtualizer and an alternative to containers

Lighting the Fuse

Article from ADMIN 50/2019

By Martin Loschwitz

Firecracker combines the security and isolation of real VMs with the light weight of containers.

For many admins, virtualization is "done and dusted": something you can just leave to run on its own. It is all the more surprising when someone comes along with a genuine innovation – or at least new features. Amazon set off fireworks last November, implementing its Firecracker [1] virtualizer under an open source license. Thus far, the tool had mainly been the driving force behind the AWS Lambda service [2], where it enables basic virtualization of small VMs. However, Firecracker can do far more and looks set to conquer territory, even some that is currently occupied by containers.

Technical Underpinnings

Amazon doesn't often publish an in-house solution used in its AWS environment under an open source license. In the case of Firecracker, the approach makes sense, because Firecracker is closely connected to another open source technology: KVM.

For some time now, Amazon has been offering its Lambda service (Figure 1) as part of AWS, with the aim of providing users with simple virtual machines (VMs) on lean virtual hardware that are significantly cheaper than classic AWS instances.