Microsoft adds support for Kata Containers in AKS

Microsoft announced that users may now operate modern applications securely on Azure Kubernetes Service via Kata Containers, according to Forbes. Isolation is a requirement for some SaaS applications and enterprise workloads, and a major drawback for Kubernetes, which currently lacks multi-tenancy features. The cloud native community developed Kata Containers as a solution to this problem, serving as a lightweight virtual machine infrastructure that offers greater security between pods by placing each pod and the containers that comprise them within isolated virtual machines without significantly raising performance overhead. Kata Containers can currently run in host and guest Linux and supports CentOS 7, Clear Linux, and Fedora images out of the box. Microsofts latest update employs its Hyper-V hypervisor and Linux distribution CBL-Mariner Linux to enable Kata Containers to run in AKS at optimum performance, while Cloud Hypervisor, a lightweight container management tool Microsoft developed in collaboration with Intel, Alibaba, and others, manages the Hyper-V VMs. Microsoft is currently offering the feature as a public preview.