Firecracker 1.0: MicroVMs Ready for Production

Introduction

AWS announced Firecracker 1.0 on November 25, 2019, signaling that the lightweight microVM runtime powering Lambda and Fargate is ready for broader production use. The release focuses on reliability, security, and snapshot-driven orchestration.

Production Hardening

Snapshot/Restore GA: Millisecond-level pause/resume for microVM fleets.
API Stabilization: REST API reaches v1, enabling stable automation tooling.
Performance Boosts: Improved virtio queues and ballooning deliver predictable resource usage.

Security Tightening

Jailer Enhancements: Seccomp profiles, cgroup pinning, and chroot policies hardened by default.
Device Filtering: Minimal device exposure reduces guest attack surface.
Open Source Audits: Community-led fuzzing and CVE response processes.

Kubernetes & Serverless Integrations

KubeVirt & Kata Containers experiment with Firecracker backends for sandboxed pods.
Knative and OpenFaaS prototypes leverage Firecracker snapshots for warm start functions.
Weave Ignite makes GitOps provisioning of Firecracker microVMs accessible to platform teams.

Getting Started

curl -LO https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/releases/download/v1.0.0/firecracker-v1.0.0
chmod +x firecracker-v1.0.0

Launch a microVM via Jailer:

./jailer --id demo --exec-file ./firecracker-v1.0.0 --uid 1000 --gid 1000 \
  --chroot-base-dir /srv/jailer --netns demo-ns

Summary

Aspect	Details
Release Date	November 25, 2019
Headline Features	Snapshot/restore, jailer hardening, performance stability
Why it Matters	Opens Firecracker’s microVM performance and security profile to the wider cloud native community

Firecracker 1.0 blends VM-grade isolation with container-like agility, giving platform teams a new tool for secure multi-tenant compute.