Firecracker: Lightweight virtualization for serverless applications (2020)

We use Firecracker in (actuated.dev) and I've personally noodled with it for OpenFaaS and a few other experiments. There seems to be a growing number of folks jumping into the Slack and asking 101 questions.

I may find that personally quite testing since this info is very easy to find with a Google search - but that's the nature of having a public Slack. Plenty of low-bar folks turning up, mixed in with the more experienced users.

In any case, the AWS team answered a question like "What's the difference between Firecracker and a VM?" by posting a link to this paper.

I hope you like it, even if you think you know what it is, there are some insights into the original creation, the use-case and what it isn't supposed to be.

And if you find yourself needing more than what Firecracker does - i.e. PCI or dynamic resizing of live VMs, check out Cloud Hypervisor, which is essentially a fork that took the code in a different direction.