Kata Containers and OpenStack support open container standards

To continue the strategy of cross-community collaboration and supporting standard technologies, today the OpenStack Foundation joined the Open Container Initiative (OCI). OCI was established in 2015 by Docker, CoreOS and other industry leaders to create open industry standards around container formats and runtimes.

The move for the OpenStack Foundation to join OCI was driven by the new Kata Containers project, launched in December 2017, with a mission to combine the speed and performance of containers with the isolation and security of virtual machines.

The Kata Containers project delivers extremely lightweight virtual machine hosted containers that confirm to the OCI runtime specification. The team plans to get involved with OCI-related tooling, compatibility and interoperability testing. The Kata Containers community is currently working on their 1.0 release scheduled for late Q2 and you can learn more about their mission or contribute to their efforts at katacontainers.io .

“OCI is an important place for the container ecosystem to come together and drive common formats across tools and deployments. We’re excited to support OCI specs in the Kata Containers project and look forward to working more closely with the OCI community to support the future of container image standardization” says James Kulina, COO of Hyper and a member of the Kata Containers Working Committee.

Under the OpenStack project, there’s also a team packaging the cloud services as OCI compliant images and industry standard tooling, which makes it easier to deploy and manage the lifecycle of OpenStack clouds using services like OpenStack-Helm and Kolla.

In the future, the OCI community plans to launch a certification program for projects, which will be another opportunity for both Kata Containers and OpenStack to participate.

Get involved

To get involved with OCI efforts, you can join the community mailing list.

To follow the OpenStack community efforts, check out the contributor portal for how to get involved with code and documentation, user groups, users and sponsorship.

If you’re new to Kata, here are some ways to connect with the community.

Code and documentation:
GitHub / How to contribute
Overview deck
Overview One Pager

Communication:
Mailing list
Freenode IRC: #kata-dev and #kata-general
Slack channel or invite
Social:
Twitter
Facebook