Firecracker - Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications

Explore the innovative Firecracker Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) in this 20-minute conference talk from NSDI '20. Dive into the development of this open-source technology by Amazon Web Services, designed to meet the demands of serverless applications. Learn how Firecracker combines strong security with minimal overhead, challenging the traditional trade-off between virtualization and container technologies. Discover its implementation in AWS Lambda and Fargate, supporting millions of production workloads and trillions of monthly requests. Gain insights into Firecracker's specialized design for serverless workloads, its impact on multi-tenancy, operational properties, and performance metrics. Compare Firecracker's capabilities to KVM and Linux Containers, examining boot time, startup latency, I/O latency, and throughput. Understand the operational lessons learned during its development and deployment, and explore future opportunities for this groundbreaking technology in cloud computing.

Introduction
Outline
What is Firecracker
Firecracker Background
Firecracker Support
AWS Firecracker
Multitenancy
Operational Properties
Performance
Compatibility
Soft Allocation
KVM vs Linux Containers
Boot Time
Startup Latency
IO Latency
throughput
Operational Lessons
Operational Hygiene
The Job is Never Done
Opportunities
Smart Questions