November & December have been busy months for Kata Containers. Following highly popular sessions at KubeCon North America 2022 led by rockstar Kata Herders Eric Ernst & Feng Wang, the community held elections for 3 open seats on the eve of Kata Containers’ 5th anniversary as a project. Read more for a recap of what’s been going on.

Architecture Committee

The Kata Containers Architecture Committee (AC) is composed of five members who are elected twice per year by contributors. The AC elections take place every six months, in Spring (two seats available) and in Fall (three seats available). The AC is responsible for architectural decisions including but not limited to standardization, and making final decisions if Maintainers disagree.

Following a week of debates between 6 candidates, community votes were tallied, welcoming back current AC chairs Fabiano Fidêncio & Eric Ernst as well as electing newly-appointed AC chair Gerry Liu. Read a bit about each of the elected chairs below.

Fabiano Fidêncio — Intel

Fabiano is a software engineer at Intel with a long history of involvement in Kata Containers, as well as a self-professed tattoo canvas for abstract art, music addict & vintage video gamer with an affinity for Instagram accounts dedicated to goats & pigs. Fabiano has dedicated both professional & personal time contributing to the Kata Containers project & community by not only contributing significant code, but also by leading weekly Architecture Committee meetings, participating in mentorship programs, acting as lead during Project Teams Gathering, & always being an open & knowledgeable resource for those with questions.

Before joining Intel, Fabiano worked as a software engineer for Red Hat’s Virtualization team, focusing on helping Red Hat to build a product from the Kata Containers project.

Eric Ernst — Apple

Eric is a senior software engineer at Apple, focused on cloud infrastructure. Since the initial discussions of creating Kata started, he has been an active contributor and advocate for the project, both in code and in the greater Kata community and ecosystem. Over the last couple of years, he has served as a member of the Kata Containers Architecture Committee. Before Kata, he spent time working on Clear Containers, and prior to that spent a few years working on Linux kernel.

Gerry Liu — Alibaba

Gerry is a software engineer with Alibaba Cloud, working on Operating System & Cloud infrastructure-related technologies with extensive development experiences about Linux kernel, container image acceleration, Rust-based micro-vms and Confidential Containers.

Gerry has been working on technologies related to Kata Containers since 2019, & is one of the primary advocates for "Rust-ifying" Kata, in addition to contributing to Kata Containers’ agent-rs, runtime-rs, embedded Dragonball VMM & Nydus image acceleration service.

Gerry already has big plans for his tenure as a newly-elected Architecture Committee chair, primarily centered around increased/improved integration of Dragonball with Kata Containers & Confidential Containers, & most importantly helping to integrate Kata Containers into OpenAnolis Linux distribution to enlarge the user base.

Eric, Fabiano, & Gerry are joined by fellow AC chairs Peng Tao & Samuel Ortiz. We want to extend our congratulations to the new Architecture Committee members, and also extend our gratitude to everyone who participated in the election. Governance by community-elected officials is one of the cornerstones of The Four Opens, and is a major step forward in the maturation of Kata Containers.

If you’d like to know more, please visit the official Kata Containers website for more information on how Kata Containers can build fast, lightweight, & secure virtual machines that integrate seamlessly into the containers ecosystem.

Happy 5th Birthday, Kata Containers

December 5th marked the 5th anniversary of Kata Containers, & we’re celebrating all month. The party officially kicked off on December 6th during the Kata Containers Architecture Committee meeting, where a few Kata Herders gathered for a group photo while sharing stories of how Kata Containers came to be part of their lives.

Get your very own special edition 5th anniversary Zoom background here: https://imgur.com/a/VEZJKbx

As Kata Containers steadily gains momentum, we project nothing but further success in the future for contributors & users alike. If you’re curious & would like to get involved, hop on over to GitHub to explore the code or connect with the community by joining the Kata Containers Slack, reaching out on the official kata-dev Mailing List, or follow for latest updates on Twitter & Mastodon. If you prefer real-time connections, join weekly Architecture Committee meetings held every Tuesday at 1500 UTC. Thank you all for reading, & have a safe & happy holiday.