# Seven Years of Firecracker

DevFeed: [Seven Years of Firecracker](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/seven-years-of-firecracker-12577.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/09/18/firecracker.html>)

Author: Marc Brooker

Published: 2025-09-18T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Marc Brooker's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/marc-brooker-s-blog.md>), [Marc Brooker's Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/marc-brooker-s-blog-2.md>)

Topics: [Firecracker](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/firecracker.md>), [virtualization](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/virtualization.md>), [Amazon Web Services](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aws.md>), [Security](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/security.md>), [Open Source](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/open-source.md>), [Amazon Bedrock AgentCore](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/amazon-bedrock-agentcore.md>), [Serverless](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/serverless.md>), [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [Multitenancy](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/multitenancy.md>), [Large Language Model](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/llm.md>), [Python](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/python.md>)

Tags: [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [amazon-bedrock-agentcore](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/amazon-bedrock-agentcore.md>), [aws](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws.md>), [aws-lambda](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws-lambda.md>), [firecracker](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/firecracker.md>), [llm](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/llm.md>), [multitenancy](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/multitenancy.md>), [open-source](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/open-source.md>), [python](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/python.md>), [security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security.md>), [virtualization](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/virtualization.md>)

## AI overview

This article reflects on seven years of Firecracker, an open source technology for creating and managing small virtual machines. It describes Firecracker's role in AWS Lambda, its security and compatibility benefits compared with container and language-level isolation, its use across AWS, and its role in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for running AI agents.

## Source excerpt

Seven Years of Firecracker Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. Back at re:Invent 2018, we shared Firecracker with the world. Firecracker is open source software that makes it easy to create and manage small virtual machines. At the time, we talked about Firecracker as one of the key technologies behind AWS Lambda, including how it'd allowed us to make Lambda faster, more efficient, and more secure. A couple years later, we published Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications (at NSDI'20). Here's me talking through the paper back then: The paper went into more detail into how we're using Firecracker in Lambda, how we think about the economics of multitenancy (more about that here), and how we chose virtualization over kernel-level isolation (containers) or language-level isolation for Lambda. Despite these challenges, virtualization provides many compelling benefits. From an isolation perspective, the most compelling benefit is that it moves the security-critical interface from the OS boundary to a boundary supported in hardware and comparatively simpler software. It removes the need to trade off between kernel features and security: the guest kernel can supply its full feature set with no change to the threat model. VMMs are much smaller than general-purpose OS kernels, exposing a small number of well-understood abstractions without compromising on software compatibility or requiring software to be modified. Firecracker has really taken off, in all three ways we hoped it would. First, we use it in many more places inside AWS, backing the infrastructure we offer to customers across multiple services. Second, folks use the open source version directly, building their own cool products and businesses on it. Third, it was the motivation for a wave of innovation in the VM space. In this post, I wanted to write a bit about two of the ways we're using Firecracker at AWS that weren't covered in the paper. Bedrock AgentCore Back in J