This Contributor Spotlight mini series features the winners of the Kata Containers 4.0 Contributor Awards. In this article the spotlight is on Hyounggyu Choi, the Kata community’s CI Slayer.

Choi is a Software Engineer at IBM Deutschland Research & Development and a contributor to Kata Containers since 2022. While the CI system can sometimes be flaky and finicky, it couldn’t create an obstacle for Choi, who implemented s390x and SE support with stellar CI coverage during the 4.0 release cycle.

I asked him a few questions to learn a bit more about his journey and involvement in the project:

How long have you been contributing to Kata Containers, and what drew you to the project?

I have been contributing to the project since March 2022. System security has long been one of my core technical interests, and I was actively expanding my expertise into the cloud domain. Kata Containers proved to be an ideal intersection of those two areas and has been a strong source of motivation ever since.

What areas of the project do you contribute to?

I primarily serve as the point-of-contact engineer for all IBM Z (s390x) related matters, spanning code, documentation, testing, and broader platform support. I also have a keen interest in CI/CD pipeline improvements that benefit the project as a whole.

What is one contribution you are particularly proud of and why?

I am most proud of enabling IBM Secure Execution for Linux® within Kata Containers. This work carries significant business impact for IBM while delivering meaningful, practical security benefits to users of the platform — a rare combination that makes the contribution especially rewarding.

What has surprised you most about the Kata Containers community?

I have been genuinely impressed by how responsive and open the community is — not only to technical proposals, but to cultural and process improvements as well. The average lifecycle of a pull request is under a couple of working days, which is remarkable for a project of this scale. Many hypervisors have been adopted, tested, released, and deprecated in a disciplined, structured manner, and non-technical topics receive the same level of thoughtful attention.

What are you most excited about in the project right now?

Without question, the collaboration with Confidential Containers (CoCo). Integrating Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) with Kata Containers creates tremendous synergy, particularly in the context of AI workloads on cloud infrastructure. I believe this convergence will elevate the project's visibility and relevance more than ever before.

What advice would you give to someone just getting started?

Start by applying Kata Containers to a real use case of your own and share your experience with the community. The contributors are genuinely welcoming and will go out of their way to help resolve issues and improve your workflow quickly. Through that process, you will naturally discover where and how you can make your own meaningful contributions.

Check out Choi’s GitHub profile to learn more about his work, and don’t hesitate to join the Kata Slack to talk to him and fellow project maintainers and contributors.

About Kata Containers

If you would like to learn more about the project and get involved check out the website for more information or download the code and start to experiment with the runtime. If you are already evaluating or using the software please fill out the user survey and help the community improve the project based on your feedback.