Baidu and Kata Containers — Sharing Learnings with the Community

Eric Ernst
Nov 4 · 2 min read

I was very excited to read Kata’s first case study from Baidu. After meeting with Yu Bai earlier this year in Denver and listening to his presentation on their use of Kata Containers on the edge to help increase isolation for multi-tenant deployments, I knew that Baidu was keen on Kata Containers. Turns out, the presentation in Denver was just a single data point.


This week the team from Baidu published a white paper, “The Application of Kata Containers in Baidu AI Cloud.” In their words, “This white paper describes Baidu’s journey to offer AI Cloud and Edge Computing services at massive scale by taking advantage of innovative cloud technologies such as Kubernetes, Kata Containers and OpenStack.”

Baidu AI Cloud and Container services, created in 2015, offers: Cloud Compute Engine (CCE), Cloud Function Computing (CFC), Baidu Container Instance (BCI) as well as Baidu Edge Computing (BEC).

In describing their usage of Kata, “As a secure container solution, Kata Containers play a vital role in the container services provided by Baidu by meeting diverse customer use cases through the support of multiple KVM based VMMs.”

Baidu has been incredibly candid and generous in documenting and sharing in detail their use cases for Kata Containers. Even more valuably, Baidu shares the technical challenges they encountered and how they resolved them. This is an incredible contribution back to the community, and we are excited to continue collaborating with the Baidu team.

This paper should be helpful for organizations who are seeking to use Kata in their environment, as well as to the Kata developer community to help focus on optimizations for production use cases.

Baidu white paper:

Thanks again to Baidu for sharing these insights with the community!

If you’re using or evaluating Kata, we would greatly appreciate you taking the User Survey so we can better prioritize our development efforts.

Kata user survey:

Kata Containers

Kata Containers is an open source community building extremely lightweight VMs that perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of adding a virtual machine layer. katacontainers.io

Eric Ernst

Written by

architecture committee member for Kata Containers project, software engineer at Intel's open source technology center, all around cat herder.

Kata Containers

Kata Containers is an open source community building extremely lightweight VMs that perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of adding a virtual machine layer. katacontainers.io

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