AWS Boosts Serverless Security With Firecracker MicroVMs

Amazon Web Services is looking to further accelerate the adoption of serverless computing with the announcement on Nov. 26 at its re:Invent conference of its new open-source Firecracker lightweight virtualization technology. There has long been a debate about whether or not it is necessary to run containers within an additional layer of isolation, provided nominally by some form of hypervisor. When it comes to serverless technology, which is essentially an event-driven function running inside of a container, AWS had been isolating its Lambda serverless service within dedicated EC2 virtual instances. The new Firecracker technology provides a different approach, with a lightweight micro-hypervisor that isolates microservices and serverless functions with less performance overhead and improved security.