April 26, 2019. This update is authored by Kata community member, Graham Whaley.

# Overview

Some of the world were on holiday early in the week, but plenty of stuff still happened in the world of Kata.

One way of getting a feel for progress on the code front is to have a look at the GitHub PR merge history, which can be seen in one form or another by issuing a GitHub query (in the GUI) formed somewhat like "org:kata-containers is:pr is:closed updated:2019–04–19..2019–04–26". Which you can see by following this link.

# What landed?

Apprx 54 PRs landed, depending on how you interpret the Github data ;-)

We landed some PRs related to enabling ‘experimental features’ support (Kata release binaries will have experimental features built in, but disabled by default — you can enable them via the config file).

A PR related to the ‘persistent data’ feature landed, which is a key moving forwards with seamless upgrades in the future.

There was a lot of work recently around making smoother (and less painful and resource hungry) releases, including a PR that improves the documents and scripts to help automate the release process.

We landed the agent trace PR — hooray! — which I believe completes our first round of enabling trace for Kata (working and useful), and enables us to move into the second phase (more interoperability).

We added a nice docs table covering which of our CI jobs covers which piece of functionality:
https://github.com/kata-containers/ci#ci-job-matrix

A slew of other fixes related to:
- document cleanups
- vm template/factory improvements
- some distro fixups (RHEL, SUSE etc.)
- testing with a new version of NEMU, based off Qemu 4.x
- initial testing of integration/move to Qemu 4.x
- some s390 additions (kernel configs, upload Jenkins job configs)

# Outside the repos

Salvador posted an excellent blog post this week covering some of our CI/CD infrastructure, and how we work closely with a lot of external partners and parties to bring that to fruition:
https://medium.com/kata-containers/kata-containers-testing-and-packaging-powered-by-the-cloud-b752de2ee471

There was also a nice post from Mikka about using hardware acceleration under k8s with Kata and RuntimeClass:
https://kubernetes.io/blog/2019/04/24/hardware-accelerated-ssl-tls-termination-in-ingress-controllers-using-kubernetes-device-plugins-and-runtimeclass/

# What’s coming next week?

It is the OSF Denver PTG next week — there are a whole bunch of Kata developers there with some focused discussions and effort. You can see details and links off to the agenda items at https://medium.com/kata-containers/kata-containers-featured-at-open-infrastructure-summit-denver-april-2019-680c7bd3c1c6

If you are in the area or at the PTG, do come along!

# Get involved

Explore Kata Containers on GitHub, KataContainers.io and get involved! Connect with the community via Slack or IRC Freenode: #kata-dev, Mailing List, Weekly meetings and Twitter.