We are pleased to announce the General Availability of OpenShift sandboxed containers with version 1.2.

OpenShift sandboxed containers, based on the Kata Containers open source project, provides an additional layer of isolation for applications with stringent security requirements, as well as strong insulation of untrusted workloads or third-party applications.

To run workloads in sandboxed containers, all you need to do after installing the OpenShift sandboxed containers operator is to explicitly set the 'RuntimeClass' in the YAML file of your workload resource (e.g. pod, deployment, statefulset, etc.) to 'kata'. That's it, you have got a sandboxed workload!

If this is your first time reading about OpenShift sandboxed containers, don’t fret, we have been hard at work to provide you with the resources you need to learn and use it, a good place to start is our landing page.

What’s New in OpenShift sandboxed containers 1.2

OpenShift sandboxed containers simplify the onboarding of an OCI-compliant runtime environment that uses a virtualization stack as a backend. There is almost no difference between running sandboxed workloads and normal workloads from a usability perspective. However, the machinery behind the sandboxing process contains more areas where things can go wrong. Therefore, this release introduces the following new features that make it easier for cluster administrators operating sandboxed containers to swiftly identify and report errors.

Pre-install checks for Node eligibility to run sandboxed containers

OpenShift sandboxed containers rely on hardware virtualization to achieve sandboxing. The end result is a lightweight virtual machine that you can seamlessly run your workload on.

If you enable OpenShift sandboxed containers on nodes that do not support hardware virtualization, or on nodes that are generally not eligible for running sandboxed containers, the installation is considered faulty and the process terminates with errors.

More information can be found here.

Additional Metrics

OpenShift sandboxed containers look and feel like regular containers. However, the backing stack is different, subsequently, there are more components to monitor and observe.

In version 1.2, we provide more insights into some additional metrics, such as the total number of lightweight VMs enabled in a cluster and the CPU /memory consumption per VM.

More information can be found here.

Increased Debuggability

In this release, the focus is on taking a step forward towards better observability, not only in monitoring but also in logging. we provide access to detailed logs about the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) QEMU, the Kata runtime environment, 'virtiofsd' (the daemon that allows QEMU to perform filesystem sharing ), and the Kata agent (the process responsible for setting up the container environment).

Additional logs improve the time needed to identify root-cause, which in turn contributes to better user experience in general.

More information can be found here.

Availability on AWS bare-metal (Tech-preview)

In previous releases, OpenShift sandboxed containers were only available for use in baremetal on-premises environments. Based on feedback from our users, we are relaxing this restriction a bit in this release and offering OpenShift sandboxed containers on OpenShift clusters with AWS bare metal nodes. This will only be available as a tech preview while we gather and validate more feedback.

More information can be found here.

What to do Next?

OpenShift sandboxed container is another tool you can add to your security toolbox at no additional cost. To use it, visit our documentation and start deploying sandboxed containers workloads.

For more information, visit our landing page where we gather all the information, including Q&A sessions, blog posts, and other useful references in one place.


About the author

Adel Zaalouk is a product manager at Red Hat who enjoys blending business and technology to achieve meaningful outcomes. He has experience working in research and industry, and he's passionate about Red Hat OpenShift, cloud, AI and cloud-native technologies. He's interested in how businesses use OpenShift to solve problems, from helping them get started with containerization to scaling their applications to meet demand.
 

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