"Firecracker faster than QEmu!" Huh? How? Why?

Recently, I've been reading up on MicroVMs. I've been a long time user of QEMU for its flexibility and open nature. You can run KVM machines with near-native performance as well as emulate completely foreign architectures on an x86 (64-bit) based architecture. Its open source nature also allows developers to tailor feature sets and add new machine configurations within it framework. All good…