Kata Containers: An Emerging Architecture for Enabling MEC Services in Fast and Secure Way

Abstract

New coming applications will be only possible through Mobile Edge Servers deployed in proximity of the mobile users. Due to the user's mobility and server's workload, service migration will be an integral part of the services. For this reason, a standardized architecture should be designed to accomplish a workload migration in a secure and timely manner. Most research done to date has focused on the use of either virtual machine (VM) or container or a mix of both recently. A final solution might be an architecture only having the advantages of both technologies as the security of the VM and the speed of the containers. Custom solutions, actually, by using both technologies, need continuous optimization from case to case and not least, any solution is not standards-compliant. To this purpose, we present a novel architecture, Kata Containers, that is stewarded by the OpenStack Foundation (OSF), which supports industry standards including OCI container format, Kubernetes CRI interface, as well as legacy virtualization technologies. With this work, we highlight its state of the art and the motivations that may make it the right candidate for deployment of new MEC services. Additionally, we make a qualitative analysis against the most used runtime container, Docker runc, to show what features should be still improved or developed from scratch by future research.