Overview

Firecracker is an open source virtual machine monitor (VMM) developed by AWS. It’s widely used as part of its Fargate and Lambda services⁠. Firecracker is especially designed for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant container and function-based services. It enables you to deploy workloads in lightweight VMs (called microVMs) which provide enhanced security and workload isolation over traditional VMs, while enabling the speed and resource efficiency of containers.

Firecracker uses the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and manage microVMs. It has a minimalist design, excluding unnecessary devices and guest functionality to reduce the memory footprint and attack surface area of each microVM.

How Should I Read This Chapter

This chapter focuses on the configuration options for Firecracker-based Nodes. Read the installation section to add a Firecracker Node to your OpenNebula cloud to start deploying microVMs. Continue with the driver section in order to understand the specific requirements, functionalities, and limitations of the Firecracker driver.

You can then finish off with the Open Cloud Storage and Networking chapters to be able to deploy your Virtual Machines on your Firecracker Nodes and access them remotely over the network.

Hypervisor Compatibility

This chapter applies only to Firecracker.