A Deep Dive into AWS Firecracker

Firecracker is a Virtual Machine Monitor written in Rust that Amazon Web Services use to power it’s Serverless Compute services — Lambda and Fargate. Each worker potentially offers thousands of MicroVMs, each providing a single function and a single process. Each slot supplies a pre-loaded execution environment for a function, including a minimized Linux kernel, userland and a shim control process. The invoke traffic gets delivered via the Invoke API, which authenticates requests, checks for authorization and then loads the function metadata.