Kata Containers

Welcome to Kata Containers!

This repository is the home of the Kata Containers code for the 2.0 and newer releases.

If you want to learn about Kata Containers, visit the main Kata Containers website.

Introduction

Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs.

Getting started

See the installation documentation.

Documentation

See the official documentation (including installation guides, the developer guide, design documents and more).

Community

To learn more about the project, its community and governance, see the community repository. This is the first place to go if you wish to contribute to the project.

Getting help

See the community section for ways to contact us.

Raising issues

Please raise an issue in this repository.

Note: If you are reporting a security issue, please follow the vulnerability reporting process

Developers

Components

Main components

The table below lists the core parts of the project:

Component	Type	Description
runtime	core	Main component run by a container manager and providing a containerd shimv2 runtime implementation.
agent	core	Management process running inside the virtual machine / POD that sets up the container environment.
documentation	documentation	Documentation common to all components (such as design and install documentation).
tests	tests	Excludes unit tests which live with the main code.

Additional components

The table below lists the remaining parts of the project:

Component	Type	Description
packaging	infrastructure	Scripts and metadata for producing packaged binaries (components, hypervisors, kernel and rootfs).
kernel	kernel	Linux kernel used by the hypervisor to boot the guest image. Patches are stored here.
osbuilder	infrastructure	Tool to create "mini O/S" rootfs and initrd images and kernel for the hypervisor.
agent-ctl	utility	Tool that provides low-level access for testing the agent.
trace-forwarder	utility	Agent tracing helper.
ci	CI	Continuous Integration configuration files and scripts.
katacontainers.io	Source for the katacontainers.io site.

Packaging and releases

Kata Containers is now available natively for most distributions. However, packaging scripts and metadata are still used to generate snap and GitHub releases. See the components section for further details.

Glossary of Terms

See the glossary of terms related to Kata Containers.