Open source project Kata Containers has issued version 3.0.0 of the software. Kata Containers is a secure container runtime with lightweight virtual machines that feel and perform like containers but provide stronger workload isolation using hardware virtualization technology as a second layer of defense. This solution offers a fast and secure deployment option for anything from highly regulated workloads to untrusted code, spanning public and private cloud, containers-as-a-service and edge computing use cases.

Kata Containers 3.0.0 builds on software’s most valuable features: security, speed and compatibility with a wide variety of environments and hardware.

Key Features of Kata Containers 3.0.0

• A newly written runtime implementation in Rust and an optional integrated Rust hypervisor, further reducing Kata Containers resource consumption and management complexity.
• Rust removes the overhead of the GO runtime.
• Integrated Rust hypervisor ensures that Kata Containers only spawn one host component for each POD.
• Aligns with the popular trends in the Linux community to rustify core software stack.
• Improved hypervisor support, making Kata Containers more accessible to a wider range of environment configurations.
• Newly added support for GPUs, such as VFIO (Virtual function I/O), which allows safe, non-privileged, userspace drivers and PCI(e) devices in general.
• Upgrade to cloud-hypervisor v26.0 with several improvements to cloud-hypervisor support for Intel TDX.
• Code updates to support the latest stable Linux Kernel release.
• Each deployment of the Kata Container runtime includes its own kernel for increased security & container isolation. The kernel in Kata Containers 3.0.0 has been updated to run v5.19.2.
• Increased compatibility with leading cloud-native technologies.
• Kata Containers supports popular runtimes including (but not limited to) Kubernetes, CRI-O, Containerd and OCI v1.0.0-rc5 Runtime specification.
  Additional security enhancements, including Signature verification support with image-rs and offline filesystem KBC
• Support for static resource management functionality in Rust runtime, significantly improving speed and security
• Support for cgroupv2, adopting the latest Linux kernel cgroups features

While developing the 3.0.0 release of Kata Containers, several members of the community simultaneously aided in development of the first release of Confidential Containers, an open source project currently in the CNCF sandbox, that integrates existing Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) infrastructure support and technologies with cloud native technologies.