The Kata Containers community has been focusing on improving not just the code, but also the processes, tools and workflows that contributors have been using to further strengthen the project.

Contributors significantly improved the process to cut minor releases; the suppression of the stable branch greatly simplified the release flow and allowed for a monthly cadence. This was an important change for the vitality of the project because it enables more community members to help out for the long term with releasing new versions of the runtime. The frequent minor releases are allowing users to move forward quickly to pick up bug fixes and feature enhancements as they become available.

The Kata Containers blog was moved from Medium to GitHub, where it will be hosted along with the rest of the website's source code. While this change is visible to readers, the most significant benefit of this move is that it will provide a simple process for contributors to add new articles to the blog.

The community has a staggered election process to allow new leaders to join the project’s Architecture Committee (AC) while ensuring continuity in leadership. In 2024, the community ran two AC elections, during which the committee gained new members and retained established leaders within the Kata Containers community. The AC consists of seven seats and currently represents six organizations around the globe: Ant Group, IBM, Microsoft, Nubificus Ltd, NVIDIA and Red Hat.

As the community works toward a 4.0 release, contributors have made significant progress toward that milestone. They have worked toward feature parity between the original Go runtime and the new Rust-based runtime, cleaned up the code base that implements the integration with the Confidential Containers (CoCo) project, improved CI/CD tooling and test suite, and more.

As in past years, the community also dedicated time to participating in university mentorship programs. In the second half of the year, mentors from the Kata Containers community worked with students from Boston University to create a dashboard for and further improve the project's CI/CD framework. Horace Li, China community manager at the OpenInfra Foundation, organized a Kata Containers meetup, which China Mobile hosted in December 2024, to share use cases and increase awareness of the innovation happening around container security.

If you would like to learn more about the project and get involved check out the website for more information or download the code and start to experiment with the runtime. If you are already evaluating or using the software please fill out the user survey and help the community improve the project based on your feedback.

The Open Infrastructure Foundation just published its 2024 annual report. Learn more about other OpenInfra projects and how you can get involved.