Kata Containers Demo: A Container Experience with VM Security

You may have heard of Kata Containers since its launch in December 2017, as a way to run virtual machines (VMs) that are fully compatible with container environments. In this demo, Eric Ernst, principal systems software engineer, for Ampere and Bharat Kunwar, software engineer, for StackHPC explain how Kata Containers work, as well as their performance and security advantages. They also describe a use-case scenario and new research. In essence, Kata Containers, managed by OpenStack Foundation, feel and run like containers but are also VMs. Among their advantages is the ability to take advantage of a number of computing benefits containers offer with the isolation and protection VMs offer. The tagline on the Kata Containers home page describes it this way: “The speed of containers, the security of VMs.” In other words, Kata Containers are integrated into container and Kubernetes infrastructures without the performance disadvantages that running containers within virtual machines would otherwise pose.