Firecracker-Powered Containers Arrive on Cloudflare

(Illustration: Brazil’s largest port, Port of Santos, provides container loading and unloading services. Image source: Photo by sergio souza on Unsplash。)

✳️ tl;dr

• Cloudflare Containers ¹ enters public beta, immediately available for paid users with full Workers integration.
• Region: Earth global deployment, containers start in seconds, developers don’t need to select regions.
• Through Worker→Container binding, dynamically generates isolated instances by ID, suitable for multi-tenant platforms.
• Three instance types: dev/basic/standard covering 256 MiB, 1 GiB, 4 GiB memory requirements.
• 10ms billing granularity with separate CPU, memory, and disk metering, plus free tier included.
• Built-in Metrics/Logs retained for 7 days, supports external LogSink, reducing observability integration costs.
• Upcoming: autoscale = true enables global auto-scaling and latency-aware routing.

• Cloudflare Containers runs on AWS-developed open-source Firecracker microVM ² with KVM isolation, reducing multi-tenant side-channel risks while maintaining startup speed and resource efficiency.
• Firecracker microVM: < 125ms cold start, < 5 MiB memory, balancing security and density.
• Ernest Chiang demonstrated ³ running 4,000 microVMs in 90 seconds on i3.metal at COSCUP 2020 Firecracker workshop.

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✳️ Knowledge Graph

(More about Knowledge Graph…)

graph TD
  Containers["Containers"] -->|deploys via| Wrangler["Wrangler"]
  Workers["Workers"] -->|controls| Containers
  Containers -->|runs on| Firecracker["Firecracker microVM"]
  Firecracker -->|complies with| OCI["OCI"]
  Workers -->|uses| DurableObjects["Durable Objects"]
  Containers -->|stores data in| R2["R2 Object Storage"]

  ContainerRoadMap["Container Roadmap"]
  ContainerRoadMap -->Autoscaling["Autoscaling"] 
  ContainerRoadMap -->LatencyAwareRouting["LatencyAwareRouting"]

  classDef concept fill:#FF8000,color:#000
  classDef instance fill:#0080FF,color:#fff

  class ContainerRoadMap,,Autoscaling,LatencyAwareRouting,DurableObjects,OCI concept
  class Wrangler,Containers,Workers,Firecracker,R2 instance

✳️ Further Reading