OpenStack Launches Kata Containers – A Move to Build Secure Container Infrastructure

The OpenStack Foundation has unveiled a new open source project, Kata Containers, which brings Intel Clear Containers and the Hyper runV technologies together to provide a secure base for running containers in the cloud.

The project aims to unite the security advantages of virtual machines (VMs) with the speed and manageability of container technologies. It is designed to be hardware agnostic and compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification, as well as the container runtime interface (CRI) for Kubernetes.

OpenStack Foundation was looking to support additional projects that make it easier to run production workloads in the cloud. “At the OpenStack Foundation, we are really focussed on the user community we built and solving their needs — and that’s something that’s bigger than the core OpenStack services,” Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack Foundation executive director said. Mr. Bryce was quoted TechCrunch.

The basic idea here is that containers, for all of their advantages, have long had a few basic security issues, largely because it’s hard to keep containers fully isolated from each other when they are running together on a shared virtual machine. The Kata Containers project solves this by giving each container its own, very lightweight virtual machine and kernel, so that each container or container pod run in its own isolated environment and gets its own allocation of networking, I/O and memory, as well as access to hardware-enforced isolation thanks to the virtualization technologies that Intel now builds into its processors.

In addition to contributions from Intel and Hyper, the following companies are supporting the project at launch: 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.