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.

• 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.

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