> which, for a general-purpose workload, is nearly impossibleThat depends on the workload and the maximum memory allocated to the guest OS.
A lot of workloads rely on the OS cache/buffers to manage IO so unless RAM is quite restricted you can call in to release that pretty easily prior to having the balloon driver do its thing. In fact I'd not be surprised to be told the balloon process does this automatically itself.
If the workload does its own IO management and memory allocation (something like SQL Server which will eat what RAM it can and does its own IO cacheing) or the VM's memory allocation is too small for OS caching to be a significant use after the rest of the workload (you might pair memory down to the bare minimum like this for a “fairly static content” server that doesn't see much variation in memory needs and can be allowed to swap a little if things grow temporarily), then I'd believe is it more difficult. That is hardly the use case for firecracker though so if that is the sort of workload being run perhaps reassessing the tool used for the job was the right call.
Having said that my use of VMs is generally such that I can give them a good static amount of RAM for their needs and don't need to worry about dynamic allocation, so I'm far from a subject expert here.
And, isn't firecraker more geared towards short-lived VMs, quick to spin up, do a job, spin down immediately (or after only a short idle timeout if the VM might answer another request if one comes in immediately or is already queued), so you are better off cycling VMs, which is probably happening anyway, than messing around with memory balloons? Again, I'm not talking from a position of personal experience here so corrections/details welcome!