The Kata Containers User Survey opened in April 2020 and has recently undergone an update by the Architecture Committee.

Since April 2020, 26 organizations have completed the survey, spanning industries such as:

• Information Technology (46%)
• Academic / Research (15%)
• Telecommunications (12%)
• Consumer Goods (8%)
• Manufacturing / Industrial (8%)
• Healthcare (4%)
• Government / Defense (4%)
• Gaming (4%)
• Finance (4%)
• Automotive (4%)
• Advertising (4%)
• Other (15%)

Among those organizations, 58% are evaluating Kata Containers, 19% are considering using Kata Containers and 15% are running Kata Containers in production.

When asked which orchestrator an organization is using, 62% indicated Kubernetes, while 19% said Docker. The additional 24% did not specify.

While 57% of organizations said their workloads are a mixture of both short and long-running workloads, 24% said theirs are long-running (greater than 1 minutes) and 10% indicated theirs were short-lived (less than one minute).

Here are some responses from what respondents like most about Kata Containers, besides "free" and "open":

• Ability to provide a container consumption model to the user, yet provide a reduced attack surface. It serves as our base for confidential computing when integrated with AMD SEV and Intel TDX
• Kata can provide the isolation that some workloads require when running on multi-tenanted infrastructure. For Kubernetes, it allows the secure execution of pods in a sandbox, limiting the impact of container escape attacks
• Solves the shortcomings of Docker not being able to perform heavy I/O and heavy network applications
• I think the best thing about the Kata community is that it provides many compiling, building and packaging tools to support a variety of hardware environments and operating systems

Organizations who completed the Kata Containers User Survey include Baidu, Huawei, Qualogy, Federal University of Technology Minna Nigeria, AstroKube, Adobe Advertising Cloud and IBM Research. Additional organizations have requested to remain anonymous.

The Kata Containers User Survey has recently been updated by the community to learn more about operators’ architectural decisions around Kata Containers and how satisfied they are with the project and community.

If you’re evaluating, testing, or running Kata in production, please complete the Kata Containers User Survey by December 31st, 2021!