The Firecracker virtual machine monitor
The Firecracker virtual machine monitor
Cloud computing services that run customer code in short-lived processes are often called "serverless". But under the hood, virtual machines (VMs) are usually launched to run that isolated code on demand. The boot times for these VMs can be slow. This is the cause of noticeable start-up latency in a serverless platform like Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda. To address the start-up latency, AWS developed Firecracker, a lightweight virtual machine monitor (VMM), which it recently released as open-source software. Firecracker emulates a minimal device model to launch Linux guest VMs more quickly. It's an interesting exploration of improving security and hardware utilization by using a minimal VMM built with almost no legacy emulation.