[$] The Firecracker virtual machine monitor

Cloud computing services that run customer code in short-lived processes
are often called 'serverless'. But
under the hood, virtual machines (VMs) are usually launched to run that isolated
code on demand. The boot times for these VMs can be slow. This is the cause
of noticeable start-up latency in a serverless platform like Amazon Web
Services (AWS) Lambda. To
address the start-up latency, AWS developed Firecracker, a lightweight
virtual machine monitor (VMM), which it recently
released
as open-source software. Firecracker emulates a minimal device model
to launch Linux guest VMs more quickly. It's an interesting exploration of
improving security and hardware utilization by using a minimal VMM built with
almost no legacy emulation.