EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceVirtualisation & ContainersHeadquarters: US

Firecracker: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Firecracker is an open-source virtualisation technology for running secure, multi-tenant container and function workloads, such as serverless services. Each workload runs in a lightweight virtual machine called a microVM. At its core is a virtual machine monitor that uses the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and run microVMs, deliberately leaving out unneeded devices and guest-facing features to reduce memory footprint and attack surface. It is software that platform operators run on their own Linux hosts, not a hosted service.

Firecracker was developed at Amazon Web Services, a US company, and is used by services such as AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. It is released under the Apache License 2.0. Because it is software rather than a service, the location of workloads and data depends on where the operator runs it, so a European provider or organisation can use it in its own data centres with inspectable source code.

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Sovereignty score
71 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-210
    Headquartered in the US: CLOUD Act and FISA 702
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    Hosting inside and outside Europe (EU, OTHER)
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-675
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 5, 2026
HeadquartersUS (US)Verified by hand
EU adequacy decisionOnly for companies individually certified under the EU-US Data Privacy FrameworkVerified by hand
Sovereignty modelOpen-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hostingEU, OTHERVerified by hand
Open-sourceYesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliantYesVendor-stated
CategoryVirtualisation & Containers
TypeProduct
Websitegithub.com ↗

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Firecracker

The European alternatives to Firecracker come from our knowledge base of over 6,200 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

20 European Virtualisation & Containers vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Firecracker

Firecracker is headquartered in the United States. US vendors fall under the CLOUD Act and FISA 702: US authorities can compel access to data, even when that data sits in a European data centre. That is the core of the jurisdictional exposure in our model.

Firecracker hosts data in EU, OTHER. Exactly what stays within the EU — and what does not — is defined by the vendor's data processing agreement and sub-processor list, not by a setting you control yourself; check those documents for the precise scope, including backups, logs and support access.

Firecracker is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Firecracker together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Firecracker?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Firecracker include APPUiO (VSHN), Gardener and Giant Swarm. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Firecracker?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Firecracker include Gardener, Giant Swarm, Harvester, IncludeOS, K3s, Kamaji and Kubermatic. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Firecracker GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Firecracker is headquartered in US and hosts data in EU, OTHER. The vendor states it is GDPR-compliant, but the data falls under non-EU jurisdiction. For full EU data residency the EU alternatives on this page usually offer more certainty.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 5, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Cyber Resilience Act

Public signals that relate to the EU Cyber Resilience Act. They do not count towards the score. A missing line means "not found publicly".

Report a vulnerability
github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/security/policy
Supported versions
github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main/docs/RELEASE_POLICY.md

For products in scope of the CRA, CE marking is required from 11 December 2027; this cannot be checked yet.

Checked on October 9, 2026. What is the Cyber Resilience Act?

Digital sovereignty in Virtualisation & Containers

Virtualisation & Containers: Virtualisation platforms, container management, Kubernetes distributions and hypervisors. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to Firecracker — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score