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The speed of containers, the security of VMs

Kata Containers is an open source container runtime, building lightweight virtual machines that seamlessly plug into the containers ecosystem.
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About Kata Containers

Kata Containers is an open source community working to build a secure container runtime with lightweight virtual machines that feel and perform like containers, but provide stronger workload isolation using hardware virtualization technology as a second layer of defense.

Since launching in December 2017, the community successfully merged the best parts of Intel Clear Containers with Hyper.sh RunV and scaled to include support for major architectures including AMD64, ARM, IBM p-series and IBM z-series in addition to x86_64. Kata Containers also supports multiple hypervisors including QEMU, Cloud-Hypervisor and Firecracker and integrates with the containerd project among others.

The Kata Containers community is stewarded by the Open Infrastructure Foundation, which supports the development and adoption of open infrastructure globally. The code is hosted at GitHub under the Apache 2 license.

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Features

Security
Security
Runs in a dedicated kernel, providing isolation of network, I/O and memory and can utilize hardware-enforced isolation with virtualization VT extensions.
Compatibility
Compatibility
Supports industry standards including OCI container format, Kubernetes CRI interface, as well as legacy virtualization technologies.
Performance
Performance
Delivers consistent performance as standard Linux containers; increased isolation without the performance tax of standard virtual machines.
Simplicity
Simplicity
Eliminates the requirement for nesting containers inside full blown virtual machines; standard interfaces make it easy to plug in and get started.

How to Get Involved.

Kata Containers in Production

Baidu is running Kata Containers in production to support Function Computing, Cloud Container Instances, and Edge Computing. Running or evaluating Kata Containers? Share your feedback in our User Survey.

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