documentation
DISCONTINUED
kata-containers
Our great sponsors
documentation | kata-containers | |
---|---|---|
5 | 11 | |
454 | 4,768 | |
- | 3.6% | |
6.1 | 10.0 | |
almost 3 years ago | about 5 hours ago | |
Shell | Rust | |
Apache License 2.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
documentation
-
Speed boost achievement unlocked on Docker Desktop 4.6 for Mac
Both Kata Containers and UTM support virtio-fs, so this is not strictly true. The former can be used as a stand-in replacement for the runtime used by docker desktop[1]. With the latter, one could use a UTM-backed guest as a docker runtime in macOS[2] or run docker directly on the guest[3].
[1] https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/blob/master...
[2] https://www.codeluge.com/post/setting-up-docker-on-macos-m1-...
[3] https://www.lifeintech.com/2021/11/03/docker-performance-on-...
-
Kubernetes Security Checklist 2021
For services with increased security requirements, it is recommended to use a low-level run-time with a high degree of isolation (gVisior, Kata-runtime)
-
Docker Without Docker
If it's using firecracker, it's probably using KVM virtualization while ensuring that the memory the VM consumes is not pinned... that is, that the VM can be swapped out of memory. For reference, firecracker was created by AWS to run and secure AWS Lambda. The hypervisor is written in rust and uses seccomp to eliminate unnecessary system calls. They open sourced it a few years back.
What you gain is a stronger security boundary. Just FYI, since 2019, you can also do this in Kubernetes using Kata containers which will happily shim firecracker. The setup is not simple though.
https://github.com/kata-containers/documentation/wiki/Initia...
Overall, fly.io building infrastructure on this pattern is fantastic and making it accessible is fantastic. Looking forward to seeing how this continues to evolve and am happy to see more infra build on top of firecracker. Very exciting!
kata-containers
- Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust
-
Fly Kubernetes
Seems like Fly.io Machines are trying reimplement Kata Containers with the Firecracker backend [0].
Kata has a guest image and guest agent to run multiple isolated containers [1].
[0] https://katacontainers.io/
[1] https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/main...
-
Kata Containers: Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers
If you install kata with https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/main...
Then you just use it with:
docker run --runtime io.containerd.kata.v2 --rm -it hello-world
Kara used “DAX” to directly share access of the host filesystem to the guest kernel. I thought this was pretty interesting, but it sounds like a possible spot to start a jailbreak.
> Mapping as a direct access device allows the guest to directly access the host memory pages (such as via Execute In Place (XIP)), bypassing the guest kernel's page cache. This zero copy provides both time and space optimizations.
> Mapping as a direct access device inside the VM allows pages from the host to be demand loaded using page faults, rather than having to make requests via a virtualized device (causing expensive VM exits/hypercalls), thus providing a speed optimization.
> Utilizing mmap(2)'s MAP_SHARED shared memory option on the host allows the host to efficiently share pages.
From https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/tree/main...
> Last time I looked (a few months ago), the documentation was pretty sparse or outdated.
It still is, though it works somewhat seamlessly when installing with https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/main...
Though only one of the hypervisors works well.
-
Kata Containers vs gVisor?
As I understand,Kata Containers
-
Firecracker MicroVMs
Kubernetes using Kata containers as a containerd backend
https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/main...
-
Container security best practices: Ultimate guide
My home k8s cluster is now "locked down" using micro-vms (kata-containers[0]), pod level firewalling (cilium[1]), permission-limited container users, and mostly immutable environments. Given how quickly I rolled this out; the tools to enhance cluster environment security seem more accessible now than my previous research a few years ago.
I know it's not exactly a production setup, but I really do feel that it's the most secure runtime environment I've ever had accessible at home. Probably more so than my desktops, which you could argue undermines most of my effort, but I like to think I'm pretty careful.
In the beginning I was very skeptical, but being able to just build a docker/OCI image and then manage its relationships with other services with "one pane of glass" that I can commit to git is so much simpler to me than my previous workflows. My previous setup involved messing with a bunch of tools like packer, cloud-init, terraform, ansible, libvirt, whatever firewall frontend was on the OS, and occasionally sshing in for anything not covered.
-
Docker Without Docker
I'm really impressed by fly.io, and the candidness with which they share some of their really awesome technology. Being container-first is the next step for PaaS IMO and they are ahead of the pack.
I aim to build a platform like theirs someday (probably not any time soon) but I don't think I'd do any of what they're doing -- it feels unnecessary. Bear with me as I recently learned that they use nomad[0] and some of these suggestions are kubernetes projects but I'd love to hear why the following technologies were decided against (if they were):
- kata-containers[1] (it does the whole container -> VM flow for you, automatically, nemu, firecracker) with multiple VMM options[2]
- linuxkit[3] (let's say you didn't go with kata-containers, this is another container->VM path)
- firecracker-containerd[4] (very minimal keep-your-container-but-run-it-as-a-VM)
- kubevirt[5] (if you just want to actually run VMs, regardless of how you built them)
- Ceph[6] for storage -- make LVM pools and just give them to Ceph, you'll get blocks, distributed filesystems (CephFS), and object gateways (S3/Swift) out of it (in the k8s space Rook manages this)
As an aside to all this, there's also LXD, which supports running "system" (user namespace isolated) containers, VMs (somewhat recent[7][8]), live migration via criu[9], management/migration of underlying filesystems, runs on LVM or zfs[10], it's basically all-in-one, but does fall behind in terms of ecosystem since everyone else is aboard the "cloud native"/"works-with-kubernetes" train.
I've basically how I plan to run a service like fly.io if I ever did -- so maybe my secret is out, but I sure would like to know just how much of this fly.io got built on (if any of it), and/or what was turned down.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26745514
[1]: https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers
[2]: https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/blob/2fc7...
[3]: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit
[4]: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker-container...
[5]: https://github.com/kubevirt/kubevirt
[7]: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/running-virtual-machin...
[8]: https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/6205
-
Checking Your --privileged Container
Kata Containers https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers
What are some alternatives?
firecracker-containerd - firecracker-containerd enables containerd to manage containers as Firecracker microVMs
kubevirt - Kubernetes Virtualization API and runtime in order to define and manage virtual machines.
lxd - Powerful system container and virtual machine manager [Moved to: https://github.com/canonical/lxd]
sysbox - An open-source, next-generation "runc" that empowers rootless containers to run workloads such as Systemd, Docker, Kubernetes, just like VMs.
gvisor - Application Kernel for Containers
ignite - Ignite a Firecracker microVM
cloud-hypervisor - A Virtual Machine Monitor for modern Cloud workloads. Features include CPU, memory and device hotplug, support for running Windows and Linux guests, device offload with vhost-user and a minimal compact footprint. Written in Rust with a strong focus on security.
containerd - An open and reliable container runtime
firecracker-container
lxd - Powerful system container and virtual machine manager
grype - A vulnerability scanner for container images and filesystems
cilium - eBPF-based Networking, Security, and Observability