DevConf.cz 2021

In this talk we will help you understand why the Kata Containers project impacts so many developers ranging from kernel to user space to OpenShift and more.

Kata Containers enables you to sandbox your container workloads through the usage of virtual machines. Last year, we presented the work done to bring Kata Containers to Fedora. It turns out that this was only the very first step in an ongoing journey. In this introductory session, we will present the work done in 2020, outline a roadmap, tell you how this roadmap touches so many pieces, and give you a broad overview of other kata-related talks submitted by our team.

We will touch on topics ranging from lower level (such as SELinux, cgroupsv2, virtio-fs) to higher level (such as OpenShift/Kata Containers integration, Kata operators and more). Finally, at the core of 2020, Kata Containers went through a major code reorganization and redesign, culminating in the release of Kata Containers 2.0, as well as numerous improvements in processes, issue triaging or continuous integration.

We will discuss some of the problems Kata Containers solves such as being able to run pods with different kernel configuration at low cost, using high-performance hardware-assisted I/O isolation with SR-IOV and DPDK, and in a not-to-distant future, be able to run containers in memory-encrypted virtual machines or migrate long-running containers between hosts.

Xu Wangs comes from Ant Group, one of the creators of the project. Ant have a large deployment of Kata Containers in production clusters. In this topic, the speaker will introduce the practice of Kata Containers in Ant Group and the community contributions in Kata 2.0 based on the experiences in Ant Group.