Kata Containers seamlessly delivers the speed of containers with the security of virtual machines. Kata Containers became a pilot project in December 2017, in conjunction with the Open Infrastructure Foundation’s evolution from being the home for OpenStack to becoming the home of open infrastructure collaboration. In April of 2019, Kata Containers was the first Open Infrastructure Foundation pilot project to graduate, becoming an official open infrastructure project. In 2020, Kata Containers achieved another milestone by releasing the 2.0 release during the Open Infrastructure Summit in October.

Kata Containers 2.0 delivers improved performance and observability enhancements as the community continues to address the challenge of providing secure, lightweight, fast and agile container management technology across stacks and platforms. It is a continuous improvement for Kata Containers to keep moving into the cloud native infrastructure fabric invisibly by reducing overhead and improving security, operability and debuggability.

In 2020, the Kata Containers community continues to present its strategic relevance, well-defined governance procedures, commitment to technical best practices and open collaboration, and, most importantly, an actively engaged ecosystem of developers and users.

The project continues to cultivate a global, engaged and growing community as evidenced by the 2020 stats: 4 major releases with 3,016 commits made by 128 authors, representing more than 20 companies.

Kata Containers production deployments continued to expand in 2020, for example:

• In Ant Group, Kata Containers is running on thousands of nodes and over 10,000 CPU cores, and part of the deployment has been upgraded to a 2.0 pre-release version even before Kata 2.0 was officially released;
• IBM Cloud uses Kata Containers to provide a secure environment for their CD Pipeline Service running millions of build containers each month.
• Red Hat intends to provide Kata Containers as a secondary runtime for OpenShift Clusters. This will be enabled through the use of an operator that knows how to install and configure all of the required dependencies needed to run Kata isolated workloads.

The Kata Containers Architecture Committee also went through two election cycles: one in February and another one in September 2020. Now, the project is led by Archana Shinde (Intel), Eric Ernst (Apple), Fabiano Fidêncio (Red Hat), Samuel Ortiz (Intel), and Xu Wang (Ant Group),. The Architecture Committee members ensure that Kata Containers is kept aligned with its goal of open collaboration and innovation around container speed and security.

The Kata Containers community members collaborated with several communities in 2020. Contributors presented seven related topics at the October Open Infrastructure Virtual Summit. Kata Containers also joined, as a featured project, in the Open Source Hackathon in China. The event attracted developers from several companies, such as Ant Group, Alibaba, Intel and Inspur. At the event, participants openly shared their deployment experiences and adoption plans. Kata Containers community continues to work closely with the OCI (Open Container Initiative) and Kubernetes communities to ensure the project’s compatibility.

Looking ahead to 2021, Kata Containers community will focus on improving its integration to the cloud native ecosystem, and continuing to innovate with open collaboration.

Kata Containers’ project code is hosted on Github under the Apache 2 license. Learn about the Kata Containers, how to contribute and support the community at katacontainers.io. Join these channels to get involved:

• GitHub: github.com/kata-containers
• Slack: bit.ly/katacontainersslack
• IRC: #kata-dev on Freenode
• Mailing list lists.katacontainers.io