We got to talk with a Kata Containers community member, Li Xianzhuang from Inspur, and hear how his team got started with Kata Containers and how they are using it.

What does Inspur do?

Inspur is the world’s second largest server supplier. According to the 2022 Q1 Software-Defined Storage and Hyper-converged Market Report released by IDC on July 15, 2022, Inspur’s hyper-converged market share has entered the top three in China.

How did Inspur get started with Kata Containers?

In InCloud Sphere and InCloud Rail, we introduce Kubernetes as a container orchestration component, and Kata Containers as a secure container runtime.

Describe how you’re using Kata Containers in your environment:

Kata virtual machines share computing, network and storage resources with our traditional virtual machines, and implementing a compute node can provide both traditional virtual machines and container services.

How does Kata Containers add value to Inspur?

Based on InCloud Sphere and InCloud Rail, we provide customers with lightweight and secure container services to meet more customer application scenarios and improve product competitiveness.

How does the team at Inspur contribute to the Kata community?

We participate in community contributions. In the process of productization of Kata Containers, we find problems, solve them, and submit Patches and Issues to the community.

What kind of support do you require to deploy Kata Containers?

After we commercialize Kata Containers, if a new version of Kata Containers is launched, we are concerned about whether it can be upgraded smoothly to reduce the impact on our customers’ business

What challenges did your team run into while deploying Kata Containers and how did you overcome them?

Challenge: At present, we know that the Kata virtual machine is set to the configuration desired by the user by hot-expanding the CPU and memory. However, under some architectures such as the Arm architecture, the community has no hot-expanding solutions. We cannot limit the CPU and memory an application can use.

Solution: Learn from the experience of other products, and solve the problem that the Kata virtual machine cannot be hot-expanded by incorporating relevant patches into QEMU.

Looking to the future, what’s Inspur’s plan with Kata Containers?

First, we will continue to invest deeply in the community and contribute high-quality Patches and Issues. In addition, we will compile and provide Kata installation packages under different architectures to form public components for promotion within the company.