MicroVM

A microVM is a virtual machine on a minimal monitor such as Firecracker or Cloud Hypervisor, which gives each workload its own guest kernel behind hardware virtualization.

A microVM is a virtual machine on a minimal virtual machine monitor such as Firecracker or Cloud Hypervisor. Each workload gets its own guest kernel behind hardware virtualization. Traditional monitors such as QEMU emulate a full machine, while minimal monitors reduce the device model to a handful of virtio devices and offer no legacy firmware. A microVM can therefore boot in around a hundred milliseconds with a few megabytes of overhead, and the monitor leaves far less code for an attacker to target.