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Glossary

What is firecracker?

Answer in brief

An open-source virtual machine monitor from AWS, built on KVM, designed to run thousands of lightweight microVMs per host.

By the Agent Sandboxes editors · Updated

Firecracker in agent sandboxes

Firecracker was created by Amazon Web Services to power AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate and was open-sourced in 2018 under the Apache 2.0 license. It is written in Rust, exposes a deliberately small device model (virtio network and block, a serial console, a minimal keyboard controller) and supports snapshotting a running microVM to disk and restoring it.

Several agent-sandbox providers document Firecracker as their isolation layer; the snapshot/restore feature is what makes fast pause, resume and fork possible.

Sources

  1. firecracker-microvm.github.io/
  2. github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

Cite this page

Agent Sandboxes. (2026). What is firecracker?. agentsandboxes.org. Last reviewed November 8, 2026. https://agentsandboxes.org/glossary/firecracker/

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