As of November 10 2026, this project is no longer maintained.

TL;DR firecracker-containerd is no longer maintained. Please see alternatives for migrating workloads to more modern, secure alternatives.

We have made the decision to deprecate firecracker-containerd.

firecracker-containerd was created to combine the lightweight, friendly interface of containers with the security of kernel-level isolation. When the project started, this was a novel approach. Since then, the ecosystem has matured: several projects now deliver the same model with more robust implementations and active investment behind them. Amazon has done the same via Nitro Sandboxes, which leverages Nitro Enclaves to achieve hardware-backed isolation for your container workloads.

Given those alternatives, we have archived firecracker-containerd rather than continue partial maintenance. The repository will remain available in read-only form for reference.

If you want to keep developing the project, you are welcome to fork it and maintain your own copy, provided you continue to follow the original LICENSE.

Alternatives

Below are a list of alternatives that achieve the goal of kernel-level isolation for containerized workloads.

• Nitro Sandboxes - for folks who wish to have an Amazon-backed sandboxed container experience, this is the best option offered by Amazon that is currently supported.

All of the below alternatives are not owned or endorsed by Amazon, but they are open-source alternatives to achieve VM-level isolation for containers.

• kata-containers — likely the closest open-source alternative, supports multiple hypervisors including Firecracker
• apple/container — useful for local dev work on Apple silicon machines
• nerdbox — runs on all platforms using libkrun hypervisor
• Lima — used in conjunction with a container runtime to run Linux containers.

firecracker-containerd

This repository enables the use of a container runtime, containerd, to manage Firecracker microVMs. Like traditional containers, Firecracker microVMs offer fast start-up and shut-down and minimal overhead. Unlike traditional containers, however, they can provide an additional layer of isolation via the KVM hypervisor.

Potential use cases of Firecracker-based containers include:

• Sandbox a partially or fully untrusted third party container

• Bin-pack disparate container workloads on the same host,

To maintain compatibility with the container ecosystem, where possible, we use container standards such as the OCI image format.

There are several components in this repository that enable containerd to use Firecracker microVMs to run containers:

• A control plugin managing the lifecycle of the

• A runtime linking containerd (outside the microVM) to the

• An agent running inside the microVM, which invokes

• A root file filesystem image builder that

For more detailed information on the components and how they work, see architecture.md.

Roadmap

To support the widest variety of workloads, firecracker-containerd has to work with popular container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes and Amazon ECS, so we will work to ensure that the software is conformant or compatible where necessary. The project currently allows you to launch a few containers colocated in the same microVM, and we are exploring how to raise the number of containers. We recently added support for configuring networking at the microVM level with CNI plugins and provide a CNI plugin suitable for chaining called "tc-redirect-tap". Our short term roadmap includes constraining or "jailing" the Firecracker VMM process to improve the host security posture. Our longer-term roadmap includes polishing, packaging, and generally making firecracker-containerd easier to run as well as exploring CRI conformance and compatibility with Kubernetes.

Details of specific roadmap items are tracked in GitHub issues.

Usage

For detailed instructions on building and running firecracker-containerd, see the getting started guide and the quickstart guide.

Questions?

Please use GitHub issues to report problems, discuss roadmap items, or make feature requests.

If you've discovered an issue that may have security implications to users or developers of this software, please do not report it using GitHub issues, but instead follow Firecracker's security reporting guidelines.

Other discussion: For general discussion, please join us in the #containerd channel on the Firecracker Slack.

License

This library is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.