TIL about Firecracker VM, the underlying software powering AWS Lambdas and Fargate.

Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant container and function-based services.

Firecracker enables you to deploy workloads in lightweight virtual machines, called microVMs, which provide enhanced security and workload isolation over traditional VMs, while enabling the speed and resource efficiency of containers.

Firecracker is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that uses the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and manage microVMs.

Firecracker is generally available on 64-bit Intel, AMD and Arm CPUs with support for hardware virtualization. 🤯

Julia Evans has a fantastic post on the same: Firecracker: start a VM in less than a second, you should give it a read!