README

Our mission is to enable secure, multi-tenant, minimal-overhead execution of
container and function workloads.

Read more about the Firecracker Charter here.

 What is Firecracker?

Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built
for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant container and function-based
services that provide serverless operational models. Firecracker runs workloads
in lightweight virtual machines, called microVMs, which combine the security and
isolation properties provided by hardware virtualization technology with the
speed and flexibility of containers.

 Overview

The main component of Firecracker is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that uses
the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and run microVMs. Firecracker
can also run a guest as a Nitro Sandbox,
isolated by the AWS Nitro System instead of KVM. Firecracker has a minimalist
design. It excludes unnecessary devices and guest-facing functionality to reduce
the memory footprint and attack surface area of each microVM. This improves
security, decreases the startup time, and increases hardware utilization.
Firecracker has also been integrated in container runtimes, for example
Kata Containers and
Flintlock.

Firecracker was developed at Amazon Web Services to accelerate the speed and
efficiency of services like AWS Lambda and
AWS Fargate. Firecracker is open sourced
under Apache version 2.0.

To read more about Firecracker, check out
firecracker-microvm.io.

 Getting Started

To get started with Firecracker, download the latest
release binaries
or build it from source.

You can build Firecracker on any Unix/Linux system that has Docker running (we
use a development container) and bash installed, as follows:

bash
git clone https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker
cd firecracker
tools/devtool build
toolchain="$(uname -m)-unknown-linux-musl"


The Firecracker binary will be placed at
build/cargo_target/${toolchain}/debug/firecracker. For more information on
building, testing, and running Firecracker, go to the
quickstart guide.

The overall security of Firecracker microVMs, including the ability to meet the
criteria for safe multi-tenant computing, depends on a well configured Linux
host operating system. A configuration that we believe meets this bar is
included in the production host setup document.

 Contributing

Firecracker is already running production workloads within AWS, but it's still
Day 1 on the journey guided by our mission. There's a lot more to
build and we welcome all contributions.

To contribute to Firecracker, check out the development setup section in the
getting started guide and then the Firecracker
contribution guidelines.

 Releases

New Firecracker versions are released via the GitHub repository
releases page,
typically every two or three months. A history of changes is recorded in our
changelog.

The Firecracker release policy is detailed here.

 Design

Firecracker's overall architecture is described in
t

Top issues

Discussions

Latest release

Added

 5891: Added support for virtio device reset.
 5983: Add two optional metrics fields, set via PUT /metrics or a config file: emit_id emits the microVM instance id under a top-level id field, and properties emits operator-defined key-value pairs under a top-level properties field. Each is opt-in and independent. See metrics documentation.
 6003: Added a new option Transparent for the huge_pages setting. If set, Firecracker will use transparent huge pages for the guest memory via madvise(MADV_HUGEPAGE). Guest memory must be a multiple of 2MB when using this option.
 6013, 6017, 6021: Adde