What is Kata Containers?
Kata Containers is an open source container runtime that launched in late 2017. It focuses on providing strong workload isolation and security guarantees for containerized applications. Some key aspects of Kata Containers include:
- Speed - Uses extremely lightweight virtual machines to minimize overhead vs traditional VMs
- Security - Workloads run in hardware isolated VMs away from the main host and other containers
- Isolation - Each container gets its own dedicated kernel, mitigating noisy neighbor issues
- Flexibility - Supports both Intel and ARM architectures for flexibility
The main value proposition of Kata Containers is enabling container workloads to have VM-level isolation and security without sacrificing too much speed or density versus standard container deployments. This allows organizations to run untrusted or multi-tenant workloads safely while still leveraging the deployment and management simplicity of containers.
Kata Containers combines technology like the open source Intel Clear Containers and Hyper runV projects into a single standardized runtime. It is managed by the OpenStack Foundation and has contributors from major companies including AWS, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and others.