Kata Containers

What Kata Containers is

Kata Containers is a free, open-source container runtime that uses lightweight virtual machines to isolate workloads while fitting into the container ecosystem. Each workload runs in a dedicated kernel, separating its network, I/O, and memory; hardware virtualization can provide another defense layer. The runtime supports OCI container images and the Kubernetes CRI interface, and works with container management layers such as Docker and Kubernetes. Supported hypervisors include QEMU, Cloud Hypervisor, and Firecracker. The project lists support for Nvidia GPU, FPGA, QAT, RDMA, and SR-IOV hardware, along with x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures. Kata runs on Linux and requires nested virtualization or bare metal. Its kata-check utility can check whether a host has the required capability. Installation guides cover CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, RHEL, SLES, and Ubuntu, and listed cloud platforms include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Vexxhost OpenStack Cloud. The project is licensed under Apache 2.0. Only the current monthly release series receives security fixes; earlier releases are unsupported, and there are no long-term-support branches.