Overview of Kata Containers

The Open Container Interface (OCI) is a Linux Foundation initiative that aims to establish principles, standards, and specifications for Linux containers. The OCI runtime specifications are primarily concerned with container life cycle management and configuration for multiple systems, including Linux, Windows, and Solaris. Low-level runtimes are container runtimes that comply with the OCI specification. Container creation and management are primarily the responsibility of low-level container runtimes. Designed by Docker, runC is an example of low-level container runtime and the standard for low-level container runtimes.

Low-level runtimes are native runtimes, which means they run containerized processes on the host kernel. There are also a few sandboxed and virtualized runtimes that provide improved process isolation by not running them on the host kernel. Kata Containers is one of the virtualized runtimes. To run containerized processes, these runtimes...