Today, the open source project Kata Containers issued version 1.0 of the software. Kata Containers provides a way of isolating containerized workloads with security comparable to virtual machines (VMs) without the performance burden of full VMs.
This solution offers a fast and secure deployment option for anything from highly-regulated workloads to untrusted code, spanning public/private cloud, containers-as-a-service and edge computing use cases.
Kata Containers 1.0 delivers the fully integrated code bases of the two technologies contributed to form the foundation of the project: Intel® Clear Containers from Intel Corporation and runV technology from Hyper.sh. By combining two of the leading virtualized container open source code bases, Kata Containers is well-positioned to solve the challenge of providing secure, light, fast and agile container management technology across stacks and platforms.
Launched in December of 2017 as a project managed by the OpenStack Foundation, Kata Containers is designed to be hardware agnostic. The software is compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification and the container runtime interface (CRI) for Kubernetes. Kata Containers 1.0 supports mixed workloads, and the community is looking to expand support for device passthrough and accelerators in releases beyond 1.0.
Kata Containers 1.0 is ready for production workloads. Both Intel and Hyper.sh encourage current Clear Containers and runV users to transition to Kata Containers 1.0 for the most up-to-date version of the respective technologies and assurances of maintenance and innovative enhancements going forward. Installation and developer guides can be found here.
Kata Containers Community Expands
Following the initial code contributions from Intel and Hyper.sh, Arm, Canonical, Dell/EMC, Intel and Red Hat have announced financial support for the project, and the following companies are supporting the project: 99cloud, AWcloud, China Mobile, City Network, CoreOS, EasyStack, Fiberhome, Google, Huawei, JD.com, Mirantis, NetApp, SUSE, Tencent, Ucloud and UnitedStack.
The Kata Containers community has been growing since its launch in December 2017, and open source contributors passionate about container security are invited to get involved. Contributors can expect to work upstream across multiple infrastructure and container orchestration communities, including Kubernetes, Docker, OCI, CRI, CNI, QEMU, KVM and OpenStack. Get started by connecting with the Kata Containers community.
Kata Containers development work – share feature requests for the next release – Thursday, 9 am-6 pm
Kata Containers – Project Onboarding, Thursday, 4:40-5:10 pm
More Kata Containers sessions, including a session from Alibaba on the Pouch project, which plans to transition to Kata Containers
Save the Date: OpenStack Summit Berlin, November 13-15, 2018
