It does not work with Docker, K8 for the moment, but everyone is going crazy for the Firecracker microVMs from AWS • The Register



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re: Invent AWS pay-or-else calculation has turned on the fuse for Firecracker, the virtualization technology used to power its serverless Lambda offering and its container device managed by Fargate.

Firecracker, now available as open source on GitHub, relies on the Linux kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) to create a new version of lightweight VMs. These microVMs strive to combine the security and isolation of virtual machines with the speed and economy of container resources.

"You can launch lightweight micro-virtual machines (microVMs) in non-virtualized environments in a fraction of a second, taking advantage of the security and workload isolation provided by traditional virtual machines and the efficiency of the resources provided by the containers, "said Jeff Barr. , chief evangelist for AWS, in a blog post.

The software represents an attempt to create a virtualization technology that is better suited to event-triggered transient workloads – server-less applications that do not move, and then weld resources before becoming inactive again.

According to AWS, Firecracker can launch a user or application space code in less than 125 ms and microVMs at a speed of 150 per second per host. It also produces fairly compact microVMs, each requiring less than 5 MB of RAM, allowing thousands of people to coexist on a single server. According to the specifications, the performance of the guest processor based on a calculation only reaches more than 95% of the bare metal.

Other virtualization projects such as Kata Containers and gVisor have pursued similar goals.

Firecracker strives to be more minimalist: it only emulates four devices – virtio-net, virtio-block, serial console and a single keyboard to stop the microVM – and the kernel loading process has been optimized. It also includes a RESTful control API, manages resource rate limiting, and supports a microVM metadata service for passing configuration data between the host and the guest.

AWS boss, Andy Jassy, ​​speaking at the AWS SFO Summit 2015

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Firecracker is derived from the Chromium OS virtual machine monitor (crosvm), an open source virtual machine monitor (VMM) written in rust.

The project is perhaps the most important production deployment of Rust, a Mozilla supported programming language, which has become more popular lately.

"In the fall of 2017, we decided to write Firecracker in Rust, a modern programming language that guarantees the security of threads and memory, avoiding buffer overflows and many other types of problems." memory security errors that can lead to security breaches, "said Arun Gupta, director of open source technology, and Linda Lian, senior director of product marketing, in a blog post.

Firecracker is designed to be processor independent, although it currently only runs on Intel hardware, version 4.14 or later of the Linux kernel; AMD and Arm support will arrive in 2019 according to AWS.

It does not currently work with Docker or Kubernetes, the container builder, but AWS has created a prototype code that container, a container run, manage containers as a Firecracker microVM. With further work, Docker and Kubernetes compatibility can emerge.

By releasing Firecracker under an open source Apache 2.0 license, AWS hopes that other developers and organizations will further advance virtualization technology. ®

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