OpenNebula has recently incorporated a new supported hypervisor: Firecracker. This next generation virtualization technology was launched by AWS in late 2018 and is designed for secure multi-tenant container-based services. This integration provides an innovative solution to the classic dilemma between using containers—lighter but with weaker security—or Virtual Machines—with strong security but high overhead.

Firecracker is an open source technology that makes use of KVM to launch lightweight Virtual Machines—called micro-VMs—for enhanced security, workload isolation, and resource efficiency. It is widely used by AWS as part of their Fargate and Lambda services. Firecracker opens up a whole new world of possibilities as the foundation for serverless offerings that need to deploy containerized critical applications nearly instantly while keeping them in isolation.

OpenNebula is a simple, yet robust, open source platform for building Enterprise Clouds and managing Data Center virtualization. Its integration with public cloud providers offers additional flexibility in creating True Hybrid and Edge infrastructures. By incorporating Firecracker, OpenNebula now provides users with a powerful solution for serverless computing and an alternative, native model for secure container orchestration.

In this talk we will explain the technical details of this integration and will show a live demo on how to easily deploy and orchestrate a composition of Docker Hub images running as Firecracker microVMs on a distributed bare-metal Edge infrastructure.