‘Kata Containers’ is the new open source project from the house of OpenStack Foundation. The project aims to unite the security advantages of virtual machines (VMs) with the speed and manageability of containers.
‘Kata Containers’ is designed to be hardware agnostic and compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification for Docker containers as well as the container runtime interface (CRI) for Kubernetes.
Intel is contributing its open source Intel Clear Containers project. And Hyper is contributing its runV technology to initiate the project. Besides Intel and Hyper, 99cloud, AWcloud, Canonical, China Mobile, City Network, CoreOS, Dell/EMC, EasyStack, Fiberhome, Google, Huawei, JD.com, Mirantis, NetApp, Red Hat, SUSE, Tencent, Ucloud, UnitedStack, and ZTE are also supporting the project launch.
The Kata Containers project will initially comprise of six components, including the Agent, Runtime, Proxy, Shim, Kernel, and packaging of QEMU 2.9. It is designed to be architecture agnostic and run on multiple hypervisors. Kata Containers offers the ability to run container management tools directly on bare metal.
The OpenStack Foundation says when compared to running containers on virtualized infrastructure — which is the standard practice today — benefits of running on bare metal include increased performance, faster boot time, and cost efficiencies. Read more…