The Kata Containers project, the system for running isolated container workloads-- and first non-OpenStack project hosted by the OpenStack Foundation-- reaches the version 1.0 milestone.
Kata Containers started as a joint effort between Intel and Hyper to create a container-style environment with the same security and isolation features of a traditional virtual machine (VM). To do so the system implements a lightweight VM for every container, meaning each container gets the hardware isolation of a VM but with less of an overhead.
While being hosted by the OpenStack Foundation, Kata Containers is designed to be platform- and architecture-agnostic. As such it has financial backing from the likes of ARM, Intel, Canonical, Dell/EMC and Red Hat, as well as technical support from cloud vendors including 99cloud, Google, Huawei, Mirantis, NetApp and SUSE.
The 1.0 release enables an Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime and provides seamless integration with the Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI) and Docker. Future releases should increase support for multiple hypervisors, as well as enable accelerator support, including GPUs.