Open Stack

Name: Samuel Ortiz

Email: samuel.e.ortiz at protonmail.com

Background:

I am a software engineer at Apple, where I work on container and virtualization
related projects.

More than 4 years ago, I attended the foundational meeting between us (I was
working at Intel back then), Hyper and the OpenStack Foundation. We merged
Clear Containers and Hyper Runv into what became Kata Containers a few months
later. Even though I've been working on and contributing to many other open
souce projects since then, the excitement I feel about Kata Containers, its
community and its innovation potential, is intact. Running `uname -a` on a
Kata Containers never gets old to me. Especially when the host operating
system is not Linux ;-)

Over the past year, I dedicated some of my time on a new cloud capability:
Confidential Computing. This is a very disruptive technology, that redefines
and expands the cloud threat model, and I truly believe that Kata Containers
has the potential to become a foundational Confidential Computing software
component. I think that Confidential Computing will eventually become the
default security setting for cloud native applications, and in my mind that
can only happen with the Kata Containers runtime. This is what I want to help
this community achieve over the next couple of years.

Another recent personal source of excitement for me is the ability to run
Linux containers on top of non Linux host operating systems, like Darwin for
example. This does not come easy, as we have spent all those years assuming
we will always be walking on top of a cozy Linux kernel. In the upcoming
months, I want to break that assumption and use the Darwin enablement as a
forcing function to clean our code base through saner, OS-agnostic
abstractions.

Finally, I want to confess something: I love writing Rust code. It's not easy
to admit, especially after initially cursing so much at the borrow checker.
But I listened to it and learned, and my appreciation for the language and
its unique features steadily grew to eventually become a favorite of mine.
That's why I'm very excited about us writing a new Rust runtime, taking this
rewrite as an opportunity to build a more integrated and efficient
architecture. I want to make sure that we learn from both our mistakes and
our victories, to build a new code base that synthesizes those learnings.
And at the same time, knowing how steep the Rust learning curve can be, I
also want to keep this new implementation accessible to our community and
contributors.

Cheers,
Samuel