We’re almost at the halfway point of 2023, & it’s already been a great year for Kata Containers filled with many exciting milestones. Spring 2023 officially marked the expansion of the Architecture Committee from 5 to 7 chairs to better accommodate the rapid growth of the community, during which time 4 new & returning members were (re) elected to the Architecture Committee.

Tao Peng | Ant Group

Tao Peng (a.k.a. bergwolf) is a staff engineer at Ant Group, primarily focused on cloud-native infrastructure related technologies, including both container runtimes and images. In addition to being a foundational contributor to Kata Containers, he also contributed to the original Hyper runV project that provided foundational structure for Kata. A dedicated & active member of the Kata community, Tao has served on the release management team in addition to serving as an Architecture Committee chair.

As a returning member of the Architecture Committee, Tao has outlined several areas of focus to further improve the project including bringing the Rust runtime feature originally released as a preview in Kata Containers 3.0.0 to production readiness, maturing Confidential Container support, & more secure service mesh support to name a few topics. We welcome Tao back to the Architecture Committee & thank him sincerely for his dedication to the community.

Samuel Ortiz | Rivos

Samuel Ortiz is a software engineer at Rivos, specializing in container, virtualization and Confidential Computing related projects & is a foundational contributor to the Kata Containers project. Present since the Hyper runV days, Samuel’s many contributions helped Kata Containers grow into a wide, cross-industry project with a large customer base. In addition to his technical contributions, Samuel made sure that the Kata community was both a welcoming and technologically innovative place for both new & existing members.

Along with contributing to the groundwork for Kata Containers, Samuel also helped to develop Confidential Containers with the goal of making a fairly complex and new technology, Confidential Computing, seamlessly accessible through the Canonical cloud native software stack: Kubernetes and its flourishing ecosystem. Kata Containers was the obvious choice and an almost perfect fit as the foundation for the Confidential Containers project, and it proves to be a very solid base. As both a Confidential and Kata Containers contributor and community member, Samuel desires to continue reinforcing the symbiosis that we created between those 2 projects.

Steve Horsman | IBM UK

As a software engineer at IBM UK, Steve Horsman works on Confidential Computing and Cloud Platforms based on Z mainframe technology.

Steve has actively participated in the Kata Containers project since July 2021, specifically engaging in the development of Confidential Containers. His primary focus has been dedicated to working on the CCv0 branch of kata-containers and conducting thorough tests. Not only does Steve excel as a reliable and attentive code reviewer, but he has also made valuable contributions to numerous Kata and CoCo components. These contributions encompass a range of activities such as introducing new features, writing test code and job scripts, as well as providing assistance during the CoCo release process. Moreover, Steve assumes the responsibility of maintaining the CCv0 branch, ensuring its synchronization with the main branch.

Moving ahead, Steve’s future endeavors revolve around fortifying and nurturing the relationship between Kata Containers and Confidential Containers. Additionally, he plans to persist in seamlessly integrating fresh Confidential Containers code into the main branch of Kata Containers, ensuring that it brings added value without significantly jeopardizing the performance or stability for existing users. Furthermore, Steve aims to contribute to the enhancement of the CI/CD process, drawing from his firsthand experience with the challenges that developers and reviewers encounter when attempting to test and integrate new PRs. By actively engaging in this pursuit, Steve hopes to improve the overall performance and reliability of the CI/CD pipeline.

Feng Wang | Confluent

Feng Wang is a software engineer at Confluent on the compute platform team. Involved in Kata Containers since August 2021, Feng has been an active contributor and community member ever since. Over the past two years, he has contributed extensively to the Kata Containers project, including enabling non-root VMM support, support direct-volume mount, and fixing a number of critical bugs. Through these contributions, Feng has developed a deep understanding of the project and gained valuable experience working with the Kata Containers community.

As a newly appointed Architecture Committee chair, Feng’s primary motivation is to improve production adoption of Kata Containers by making it more stable, performant, production mature and accessible by using experiences in trying to adopt Kata Containers in production for two different companies as reference. Additionally, Feng hopes to increase community focus on improving the production quality, ease of operation, and community support.

We extend our heartfelt congratulations to the committee’s returning chairs, Tao Peng and Samuel Ortiz, for their continued dedication. Additionally, we warmly welcome the newly appointed chairs, Feng Wang and Steve Horsman, to the team. We would also like to express our sincere appreciation to all the Kata Herders who enthusiastically participated and threw their hat into the ring. Their invaluable contributions have greatly enriched the committee’s work, and we are truly grateful for their efforts. If you would like to meet some of the AC chairs in person, join us at OpenInfra Summit & Project Teams Gathering, happening June 13–15 in Vancouver, BC Canada. Kata Containers will have several sessions on the schedule including a forum where you can ask questions of community leaders. Tickets are going fast, so get yours while you can!