Amazon releases Firecracker VM

AWS has released a new virtualization software called Firecracker that is aimed at serverless applications. According to Amazon it is already running in production on the AWS Lambda and Fargate services.

Firecracker is based on the Linux hypervisor KVM and optimzed for efficiency and security. A so called micro VM can launch in around 125ms while consuming only 5 MB of memory.

The Firecracker VM is offering only a simple device model in order to minimize the attack surface: a network device, a block I/O device, a programmable interval timer, the KVM clock, a serial console, and a keyboard with a single key to reboot the machine. The Firecracker process is jailed using cgroups and seccomp BPF.

Firecracker is an open source project on GitHub that is looking forward to contributions.