microVM
MicroVMs are a class of virtualization technology designed to provide strong isolation for workloads with the fast startup and low overhead often associated with containers. They run a lightweight virtual machine using hardware-assisted virtualization, typically through a small virtual machine monitor. The guest can be a trimmed Linux kernel, a minimal operating system, or a specialized unikernel, depending on the workload and orchestration needs.
Architecturally, a microVM includes a minimal VMM that presents a restricted set of virtual devices to the
In practice, microVMs offer stronger isolation than traditional containers due to hardware-assisted virtualization, yet they aim
Prominent examples include Firecracker, an open-source microVM implementation from AWS, which inspired further projects such as