What is AWS Firecracker? The microVM technology, explained

AWS Firecracker is an open-source virtual machine monitor designed to efficiently manage lightweight virtual machines, known as microVMs, which combine the security of traditional VMs with the speed of containers. Developed by Amazon Web Services, it underpins AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, enabling high-frequency function executions with minimal resource consumption. Firecracker's architecture focuses on minimalism, supporting only essential emulated devices to reduce complexity and enhance security. It offers significant advantages over traditional VMs and containers, providing strong isolation with fast boot times and low memory overhead, making it suitable for serverless computing, container isolation, AI code execution sandboxes, and edge computing. Although it lacks certain features like GPU passthrough and live migration, its design choices minimize attack surfaces and resource overhead, positioning it as a highly efficient solution for running isolated workloads.