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Welcome

This website hosts the official documentation for the FirecrackerSharp SDK.

FirecrackerSharp is a C# SDK for the innovative Firecracker microVM hypervisor developed by Amazon. It allows developers to:

  • Boot up and shutdown microVMs
  • Use different virtual machine hosts, bypassing the need for a Linux developer machine
  • Use microVM jailing in order to tighten security without much extra effort
  • Manage the microVM's lifecycle with fine-grained logging capabilities and error handling
  • Connect to the microVM's HTTP server over a Unix domain socket for managing it, with (mostly) complete bindings to the OpenAPI specification and robust static typing and error handling
  • Automate installing, updating and tracking installations of Firecracker via GitHub's API
  • Interact with a microVM through its serial console in a thread-safe manner with:
    • Advanced output buffering, allowing piping out output to different sources and not necessarily into RAM
    • State management via completion tracking, allowing for complete thread-safety and reliable primary and intermittent writes
  • Split up a microVM's serial console into multiple terminals via TTY multiplexing (will be available in 1.0)
  • Automatically spin up host and guest network interfaces via CNI plugins (will be available in 1.0)

To learn what Firecracker is and what capabilities it offers for applications that need virtualization, check out its official website: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/.

To get started with using this (unofficial) .NET SDK for Firecracker, check out the tutorial in order to set up your development environment for Firecracker and .NET.

Why Firecracker

While QEMU, for example, supports (comparative to Firecracker) few VMs with full feature set, Firecracker is a alternative also using KVM internally that focuses on incredibly high amounts of atomic, lightweight and security-proofed VMs for so-called "edge workloads". This is why Firecracker is being used in AWS for the AWS Lambda service, providing real and secure host-to-guest isolation (unlike containers) without the overhead of QEMU, VMWare, VirtualBox or Hyper-V virtual machines.

Stability of this SDK

FirecrackerSharp is already quite stable and offers a variety of thoroughly unit- and integration-tested features, however there are still some things that need to be ironed out and thus it's still in beta. Breaking changes happen regularly, so using it in production is not yet recommended.