Announcing Lambda MicroVMs: serverless compute environments with VM-level isolation and near-instant startup

This article announces AWS Lambda MicroVMs, a new serverless compute primitive powered by Firecracker that provides VM-level isolation, near-instant startup, and state retention for running user or AI-generated code.

• Snapshot-based startup launches MicroVMs from pre-initialized Firecracker snapshots with dependencies already loaded
• Direct HTTPS connectivity enables standard clients, WebSocket, and gRPC connections to individual MicroVM ports
• Lifecycle control supports sessions from minutes to 8 hours with automatic suspend/resume during idle periods
• Vertical scaling up to 4x baseline resources automatically; horizontal scaling to hundreds of MicroVMs within minutes
• Internet and VPC access via Lambda Network Connector for private database connectivity
• Baseline-plus-consumption billing charges only for resources above configured baseline during active use
• Use cases include data analytics platforms, AI coding assistants, interactive development environments, and security scanners

Lambda MicroVMs enable developers to build isolated, stateful serverless environments without managing virtualization infrastructure while maintaining security and performance.