The Kata Containers community project supported by the Open Infrastructure Foundation (formerly OpenStack Foundation) is available as a major release 2.0. The new version of the open source container runtime promises higher performance with a significantly reduced size. To do this, the development team has completely rewritten the Kata Containers Agent in Rust and shrunk the binary code to a tenth of its previous size – around 300 KByte it should only be.

Max out VMs and containers The Originally presented at the KubeCon in December 2017, the project aims to combine the advantages of virtual machines (VMs) with those of containers to on the one hand to be able to use hardware-based virtualization and to achieve higher security through stricter isolation of individual workloads. In order to avoid the typical overhead of VMs, the containers are not executed within the VMs, but in a more compact form directly on the hardware infrastructure. Kata Containers combines Intel’s Clear Containers with Hyper.sh RunV for platforms like x 86 _ 64, AMD , ARM, but also IBM p – and z-Series.

In connection with the refactored Kata Containers Agent, the development team in version 2.0 is also saying goodbye to the previously used gRPC protocol and switching to the ttRPC alternative specially designed for environments with little memory – of which there is also a Rust implementation. The new protocol is not only supposed to contribute to the smaller binary code sizes, but also promises less overhead compared to gRPC. This open source VMM runs directly on KVM and is especially optimized for cloud workloads in environments with limited resources. Cloud Hypervisor is implemented in Rust and is based on the rust-vmm crates.

In-depth information on containers and their orchestration are available on various theme days as part of the Continuous Lifecycle / ContainerConf – including the Kubernetes Professionals Day on November 4th and the Container Deep Dive on November 9th . December 2020.

More insight and overview In order to offer users improved observability, Kata Containers 2.0 provides more metrics in Prometheus format. This allows both the container runtime and the Virtu