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#0
Learn Firecracker - Pre-Requisites Skill & Setup Environment
Before touching Firecracker, you need to master basic Linux administration, KVM, containers, and networking. This episode prepares a virtualization host with KVM enabled, downloads the firecracker and jailer binaries, prepares the microVM kernel and rootfs, and then verifies that the entire environment is ready for the rest of the series.
August 13, 2026
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#1
Learn Firecracker - History, Background & Why You Need It
This episode traces the origins of Firecracker: its roots in crosvm, AWS's decision to rewrite it in Rust, the one-process-per-microVM philosophy, and the numbers that made it revolutionary — 125 ms boot, under 5 MiB of overhead, and 15 trillion Lambda invocations per month.
August 13, 2026
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#2
Learn Firecracker - Core Concepts & Main Architecture
This episode dissects the Firecracker architecture: the one-process-per- microVM model, a comparison of Rust VMMs versus QEMU, the virtio device family (net, block, vsock, balloon, entropy), the token bucket rate limiter, the jailer component, API endpoints, and the MMDS metadata service.
August 13, 2026
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#3
Learn Firecracker - Setup & Installation
This episode walks you through installing Firecracker from scratch: downloading the v1.16.x release binaries, preparing the kernel and rootfs, verifying KVM and cgroup v2, running firecracker --api-sock for the first time, and understanding the difference between --no-api mode and API mode.
August 13, 2026
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#4
Learn Firecracker - API Management: Boot & Machine Config
This episode covers Firecracker API management over the Unix socket: PUT /boot-source for the kernel, PUT /machine-config for vCPUs and memory, PUT /drives for block devices, and then InstanceStart. You'll also learn how to inspect the microVM through the serial console and understand every important configuration field.
August 13, 2026
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#5
Learn Firecracker - Networking: Virtio-net & TAP
This episode dissects Firecracker networking: creating a TAP interface on the host with ip tuntap, connecting it to the microVM via PUT /network-interfaces, assigning an IP inside the guest, and configuring a token bucket rate limiter for bandwidth and ops per device.
August 13, 2026
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#6
Learn Firecracker - Storage: Virtio-block & Virtio-fs
This episode dissects microVM storage: attaching the rootfs and additional disks via PUT /drives, the difference between read-only and read-write drives, sharing host directories to the guest with virtio-fs, and MMDS for distributing metadata such as IPs and credentials to the guest.
August 13, 2026
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#7
Learn Firecracker - Jailer & Security Isolation
This episode covers the jailer — Firecracker's last line of defense. You'll wrap the microVM in namespaces, cgroups, seccomp, a read-only rootfs, and a non-root user, understand the --id, --chroot-base-dir, and --exec-file flags, and apply defense-in-depth if the hypervisor is breached.
August 13, 2026
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#8
Learn Firecracker - MicroVM Images: Build & Kernel Optimization
This episode dissects building microVM images: creating a minimal rootfs with Alpine/musl, configuring the kernel with the fewest possible drivers, choosing the right boot params, and getting to know tooling such as firectl, firecracker-containerd, NixOS microvm.nix, and mkosi for build automation.
August 13, 2026
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#9
Learn Firecracker - Snapshot & Restore
This episode dissects Firecracker snapshot & restore: freezing a running microVM with PUT /snapshot/create, bringing it back to life with PUT /snapshot/load, understanding memory vs diff snapshots, and the instant cold start, scale-to-zero, and suspend/resume patterns used by AWS Lambda MicroVMs.
August 13, 2026
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