Kata Containers sparks joy with holiday release offering Firecracker support and more

Never deploy on a Friday. Forget about launching during the holidays. The Kata Containers team defied common wisdom (and maybe lost a few hours of egg nog-soaked bliss) by releasing 1.5.0-rc2 on December 22.

It may have been the winter solstice, but the release is definitely a bright spot: this version includes support for Amazon Web Services’ recently open-sourced Firecracker hypervisor, s390x architecture as well as a number of fixes for shimv2 support.

This is so cool. I can’t wait to try it out! Awesome work by the @katacontainers community to get this integrated so quickly! https://t.co/QQQo6swwMe

— Mohammed Naser (@_mnaser) December 22, 2018

Spark it up

“While we do not yet have packages available for Firecracker, we do have the built binary included as part of our release tarball. A Firecracker specific tarball was created which includes all of the configurations and binaries required for running Kata+Firecracker,” writes Eric Ernst, software engineer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, in the documentation.

Firecracker has been tested with CRIO+Kubernetes as well as Docker, with support for multiple network interfaces as well as block-based volumes. A block-based storage driver, such as devicemapper, is required when using Kata with Firecracker. (Read this issue for details on current volume limitations.)

Check out the quick guide to Kata and Firecracker here.

Looking ahead

The Kata team isn’t taking it easy, even now. They’re already working on the next improvements including an update to kata-deploy‘s container image that will allow users a quick daemonset for installing and configuring Kata (with both QEMU and Firecracker) in a Kubernetes cluster that utilizes containerd and/or CRIO. Once the team has accomplished that, they’ll be adding admission controller support to help navigate the spectrum of runtime’s configured with runtimeClass. Stay tuned!