Greetings everyone, 


Kata Containers has enjoyed a strong presence at KubeCon with 2023 being no different. Following up on momentum gained earlier this year at KubeCon EU, Kata Containers had a full booth at KubeCon North America, which just happened November 6-9th 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. This afforded an excellent opportunity to evangelize the greatness that is Kata Containers the software & community with an audience that has consistently shown significant interest in the project. 


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Both Kata Containers & Confidential Containers have enjoyed rapidly increasing popularity at KubeCon, most recently displayed at KubeCon Chicago where floods of current Kata Herders as well as the Kata-curious came to learn more about containers with their own kernel. 

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Visitors with backgrounds ranging from university students looking for an engaging side project to CTOs looking to harden public cloud infrastructure were enchanted by Kata’s flexibility & especially impressed by its user-friendliness, a direct pay-off of the Kata community’s dedication to making Kata Containers as user-accessible as possible. 

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In addition to numerous current users from companies like Microsoft, Apple, & Northflank stopping by to share updates on how Kata Containers has been working for them, one of the more fun outcomes from KubeCon Chicago were a number of interesting questions that came from those newly introduced to the project, ranging from more traditional use cases such as running Kata Containers on Windows with Gvisor, to pondering the possibility of incorporating Kata into home network setups, to Kata Containers’ current & future usage capabilities in artificial intelligence & machine learning. If you have a few moments free & would like to help out, feel free to grab a question or two from the KubeCon Etherpad[1] to answer, which will be converted into follow-up blog posts. 


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While I’m sure that most of the community is already aware, a visitor from the Containerd[2] folks dropped by to remind us of changes coming in Containerd 2.0[2] - currently in beta - that may have an effect on Kata Containers. If you have follow-up questions regarding these changes, please feel free to reach out to me at any time to discuss further.


While there weren’t as many Kata+Coco sessions accepted this round as there were at KubeCon EU back in April, we were still on the schedule with Kata+CoCo guru Jens Friedman delivering a presentation detailing the importance of securing the Kubernetes control plane with Confidential Containers, supplemented by Moritz Ekhert’s robust overview of use cases that clearly demonstrated the need for the encryption, isolation & attestation provided by Confidential Computing in enterprise environments. Videos of these sessions should be released soon, so please keep an eye out!


Overall, what I saw was the result of 6 years of hard work and dedication from Kata Herders to not only build and maintain an efficient, powerful, lightweight & secure software, but also the outcome of your noticeable desire & passion for assuring a solid learning foundation for new users & developers alike. It is noticed, & it is very much appreciated.


So let’s keep the good vibes going! Call for Proposals for KubeCon EU[6] - held in Paris, France March 19-22 2024 is open until November 26th at 11:59 Central European Time (UTC+1). If you’d like some help with putting together an outstanding abstract or would like to chat through some ideas, feel free to ping me. I’m happy to help. 

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If you would prefer to listen over reading, then please join the next Architecture Committee meeting, happening Tuesday November 28th at 1500UTC where I will give a live recap of KubeCon Chicago for Kata Containers, & please feel free to add any additional topics you would like to discuss to the agenda in the meantime. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out any time either via email, or just ping @trilliams on Slack. Thanks everyone, & Happy Holidays for those of you who celebrate.


[1]: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/Kata_Containers_Questions_from_Kubecon_NA_2023

[2]: https://github.com/containerd/containerd/releases/tag/v2.0.0-beta.0

[3]: https://sched.co/1R2sa

[4]: https://sched.co/1SKcd

[5]: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/r.966bdd54c010a2c4e7c3143ac1b04302

[6]: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/program/cfp/



Cheers,
- trilliams

Kata Containers | OpenInfra Foundation 
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