Firecracker: Secure and fast microVMs for serverless computing

github.com

45 pointspykello5 comments

We’re experimenting with this stuff. So far great. Way better isolation (obviously) than containers. Pretty easy to use so far. Any gotchas?

The virtual devices it implements are fairly limited in number, and you may find bottlenecks with high IO throughput applications.

It uses memory ballooning as its dynamic memory management. Managing this balloon requires some custom implementations if you want to do things like reclaim memory from the guest.

If a large file is created and deleted within the host that disk space stays claimed until the VMs disk is deleted.

No GPU support.

Now that this is open source, I wonder if it could be integrated into Kubernetes (or the like) for everyone to use instead of just AWS.

https://github.com/liquidmetal-dev/flintlock

Appears to be trying just what you ask.

Firecrackers been open source since 2018, I believe. Firecracker-containerd (https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker-container...) has been around quite a while too, which aims to run containers in microvms.

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