Study of Firecracker MicroVM

05/26/2020

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by   Madhur Jain, et al.

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Firecracker is a virtualization technology that makes use of Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM). Firecracker belongs to a new virtualization class named the micro-virtual machines (MicroVMs). Using Firecracker, we can launch lightweight MicroVMs in non-virtualized environments in a fraction of a second, at the same time offering the security and workload isolation provided by traditional VMs and also the resource efficiency that comes along with containers <cit.>. Firecracker aims to provide a slimmed-down MicroVM, comprised of approximately 50K lines of code in Rust and with a reduced attack surface for guest VMs. This report will examine the internals of Firecracker and understand why Firecracker is the next big thing going forward in virtualization and cloud computing.