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The post states: >"We're not done. You need something to run, right? Firecracker needs a root filesystem. For this, we download Docker images from a repository

The post states: >"We're not done. You need something to run, right? Firecracker needs a root filesystem. For this, we download Docker images from a repository backed by S3. This can be done in a few seconds if you're near S3 and the image is smol." I feel like I am missing something. If an S3 bucket is a requirement and I was interested in the isolation provided by Firecracker why wouldn't I just use AWS Fargate or Lambda which are both powered by Firecracker? If low latency was the concern, I can't imagine there being any lower latency than having my workload and storage being colocated in the same AWS Availability Zone.

mrkurt 4y ago
That is talking about our S3 buckets, when you use these you don't know you're using S3. Fargate and Lambda are not as consistently fast to boot VMs. Fargate, in particular, can take minutes to get a container launched. This is not because they're bad services, it's because they make different tradeoffs than we do. When you ask for a Fargate container (or a new Lambda "instance"), AWS actually moves other containers/lambdas out of the way to get you running. Most of the wait time is their infrastructure doing orchestration magic to match your thing to their available compute. Fly Machines don't do any of this. If you try and start a machine and there's no capacity for it, you get a very fast error response instead. This works well for our early customers. Most of them want to start a process quickly enough for a good UX. Fast errors give them a chance to do that.