firecracker

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

Read more about the Firecracker Charter [here](CHARTER.md).

## 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](docs/nitro-sandboxes/README.md),
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](https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers) and
[Flintlock](https://github.com/liquidmetal-dev/flintlock).

Firecracker was developed at Amazon Web Services to accelerate the speed and
efficiency of services like [AWS Lambda](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) and
[AWS Fargate](https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/). Firecracker is open sourced
under [Apache version 2.0](LICENSE).

To read more about Firecracker, check out
[firecracker-microvm.io](https://firecracker-microvm.github.io).

## Getting Started

To get started with Firecracker, download the latest
[release](https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/releases) 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](docs/getting-started.md).

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 bel