Is it a container, or is it a VM? Michael Hausenblas of AWS joins Scott to talk about Firecracker, an open-source project launched by AWS and leveraged by a number of their commercial services. Firecracker creates micro-VMs that start up quickly and have a minimal footprint. Serverless computing is a key use case for the software. Along the way, Scott and Michael also touch on things like EKS, Fargate, and Lambda, and how Firecracker was built to support those types of services at AWS. Questions include: * What is Firecracker? * Firecracker and serverless computing * Why Firecracker, instead of other options for adding hypervisor isolation to containers? * How one consumes Firecracker If you’re evaluating serverless technologies, you’ll probably find this discussion useful! Sponsor: ITProTV Grow your IT career with online IT training from ITProTV. From CompTIA, Cisco, and Microsoft, ITProTV has over 4,000 hours of training. Stream courses live or on demand on your favorite device. Get a 7-day free trial and 30% off all plans at itpro.tv/full. Use the promo code “FULL” when you check out. Show Notes Michael Hausenblas (@mhausenblas) on Twitter Firecracker on GitHub Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications NSDI presentation on Firecracker How AWS Firecracker works: a deep dive RustVMM FOSDEM presentation Ignite and Firekube