KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020

Virtualization must be lightweight to be useful for improving the isolation of container runtimes (e.g., Kata containers): adding traditional (heavyweight) virtualization layers to container primitives would, for example, result in unacceptable boot time and performance for important use cases like serverless computing. Fortunately, the community has made great strides towards lightweight virtualization with new VM monitors (e.g., AWS Firecracker) and associated tooling (e.g., Weaveworks Ignite). However, there has been relatively little attention paid to the guest kernel itself, which remains unnecessarily bloated, affecting both performance and security. We will make the case for guest kernel specialization via kernel configuration and highlight key challenges in applying these techniques in a sandboxed container context.