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Kata Community Updates | Spring 2023

By Kata Containers on 03/04/2023

Greetings fellow Kata Herders! March has been an exciting month for Kata Containers, leading us into an even more exciting summer. In addition to a number of events coming up where Kata will have a presence, our favorite container with a kernel has been making big news — literally. Read more below to find out what’s happening.

Release Updates

Good news, everyone! Kata Containers 3.1.0 was officially released on March 23, 2023 with several improvements including (but not limited to):

  • Support for AMD SEV-SNP VMs
  • Upgrade to QEMU v7.2.0
  • Cloud Hypervisor upgrade to v29.0
  • Several improvements to runtime-rs including addition of support for hugepages

Plus plenty more! Check out the release notes for more details on changes made & to download the package for yourself.

Spring 2023 Elections

It’s that time again, everyone — elections for open chairs on the Kata Containers Architecture Committee are due to begin on April 5, 2023. This year’s elections will be a bit different than those before, as the amount of seats open has been expanded from two to four as a response to the monumental growth of the Kata community over the past 5 years. Any member of the community who has made a contribution to Kata Containers is eligible to run for a seat, which can be done by submitting a text file to the corresponding election folder in the kata-containers/community repo on GitHub. Further details on the candidacy process can be found on the Spring 2023 Etherpad, but if you have any other questions or need help getting started, feel free to reach out on Kata Containers Slack for further guidance.

Kata Containers in the News

Since officially announcing support for Kata Containers for isolation & pod sandboxing on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) at KubeCon US back in fall of 2022, the team over at Microsoft have been busy further innovating & integrating Kata to such an impressive degree that it resulted in an article in Forbes magazine. Those attending KubeCon EU will want to keep an eye out for further announcements on how Microsoft is using Kata Containers. We’ve heard that something amazing is coming.

Project Teams Gathering

In Case You Missed It, Kata Containers recently participated in the OpenInfra Project Teams Gathering where both current status & future plans for Kata Containers were discussed by Kata Herders from around the world. If you weren’t able to make it to the live session or if you were there & need a refresher, check out the recorded session available here on the official March 2023 team Etherpad.

KubeCon EU 2023

Save the date! We’re a little more than three weeks away from KubeCon EU, happening April 18–21 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands & there are a number of sessions, activities, & announcements about Kata Containers on the schedule. Our friends at Microsoft will be kicking off KubeCon with a special pre-event, Azure Day with Kubernetes happening April 18th from 9–5pm CEST. Those who will be attending in-person can register for the event here. If you are unable to attend in-person, you can register to receive a post-event recording.

If you’re still planning your KubeCon schedule, save room for sessions on Kata Containers & Confidential Computing happening on April 19th. A list of Kata/CoCo sessions has been gathered below for easy addition to your KubeCon schedule:

As a note, in-person tickets for KubeCon have already sold out, but virtual passes are still available for purchase on the official KubeCon website. Whether in person or virtual, we hope to see you there!

OpenInfra Summit

Don’t forget — get your tickets to the OpenInfra Summit before they sell out! This year Summit is returning to beautiful Vancouver, B.C. Canada from june 13–15th at the Vancouver Convention Centre, along with the return of the in-person Project Teams Gathering. There will be a number of sessions on Kata Containers during OpenInfra Summit that you won’t want to miss along with opportunities to connect with fellow Kata Herders to discuss the future of Kata Containers live during PTG. Register for your ticket before time runs out!

Upcoming Events

The buzz around Kata Containers is growing, & we need your help to get the word out even more! Below is a list of a few upcoming events where a presentation on Kata Containers would fit that currently have Call for Proposals open. If you have an abstract on hand, send em’ in! You never know what (good) opportunities could be waiting for you.