Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2018

Kata Containers is an open source project that brings the security of hardware virtualization to containers through lightweight VMs. For security reasons, it is rare for a service provider to schedule containers on bare metal, instead relying on virtual machine infrastructure. With Kata, you can skip the infrastructure step, scheduling container workloads on bare metal nodes while retaining the isolation of a full virtual machine.

Kata Containers can also be used in public cloud machines which support nested virtualization.

As you’re reading this, I can see the fear in your eyes, and can hear you mutter, “Nested virtualization?! But what about performance!”

This talk provides an overview of Kata Containers and focuses on the cloud nested virtualization use-case. We showcase how well Kata performs in a well-tuned nested-virtualization environment, such as KVM on Hyper-V in Azure.