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Cloud Virtualization: Red Hat, AWS Firecracker, and Ubicloud internals
VMs are much harder to understand these days. Linux provides many building blocks for virtualization, but only a select few kernel engineers know how to stitch them together. So, we compiled our understanding into this blog that describes four reference architectures - Red Hat, AWS Firecracker, Ubicloud, and AWS Nitro.
These are: (a) VMM and the kernel have high CPU and memory overhead for VMs, (b) VM startup takes seconds, and (c) hypervisors and VMMs can be large and complex, with a significant attack surface. Filesystems are large and complex code bases, and providing only block IO to the guest protects a substantial part of the host kernel surface area. In summary, Firecracker’s architecture seems to be guided by two principles: (a) reuse Linux components where possible and (b) where resource utilization or the attack surface area (code size) matters, opt for super lightweight alternatives.
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