Guest: Treva Williams (LinkedIn)
Foundation: OpenInfra Foundation (Twitter)

With the recent release of Kata Containers 3.0.0, one of the key goals has been to create a secure container runtime without sacrificing performance. One of the ways they are achieving this is with the Rust-ification of Kata components.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Treva Williams, Technical Community Manager at Open Infrastructure Foundation (OpenInfra Foundation), to discuss Kata Containers and the recent 3.0.0 release. She goes on to talk about the community around Kata Containers and some of the notable use cases. Williams also talks about the progress they are making with Rust and what is next for the project.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Williams talks about her transition from tailor to starting work at Rackspace and taking advantage of their education initiatives to learn Linux. She explains how she came to learn about OpenStack and how that led to her current role as Community Manager.
• Kata containers is a container with the kernel in it, which works like a virtual machine that runs like a container, capable of running on any container platform. Williams talks about the history of the project and the benefits it brings in security and performance.
• Williams describes her role as Community Manager and how she ensures that the community has what they need to meet its goals over the coming weeks and months. She talks about the success of the recently released Kata Containers 3.0.0, which she attributes to exquisite planning and a well-thought-out development process.
• Notable use cases for Kata Containers include Alibaba, who were running Kata 3.0.0 in production in their product under a different name, RunD, for the entire development time. Williams also talks about Microsoft AKS integration with Kata Containers and the progress of the collaboration.
• Williams talks about what the future holds talking about the future releases of Kata Containers and the Rust-ification of Kata Containers. She explains how Kata was able to jump on the trend of Rust.
• To get involved, people can go to www.katacontainers.io, which has a lot of different opportunities to get involved. Williams discusses their university outreach program with NDSU and invites people to join their Slack community or GitHub repo.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.