Snaps provide continued and automatic security updates

Jul 27, 2018 15:24 GMT  ·  By

Canonical and the Kata Containers project announced today the availability of open-source, lightweight and fast Kata Container virtual machines in the Snap Store.

Recently launched, the Kata Containers project combines technologies from the Intel Clear Containers and Hyper runV to provide the Open Source community with extremely lightweight and super fast booting virtual machines that have been designed with the speed of Linux containers and the security offered by virtual machines to seamlessly plug into the containers ecosystem.

Kata Containers consists of six components, including a kernel, the well-known QEMU virtualization software, as well as a runtime, an agent, a proxy, and a shim. Thanks to its agnostic architecture, Kata Containers virtual machines can run on multiple hypervisors and architectures, including 64-bit, PowerPC64, and ARM64, and are compatible with both the CRI specification of Kubernetes and OCI specification of Docker containers.

Kata Containers now available as a Snap package

Today, the Kata Containers project announces the availability of their Kata Containers virtual machine software in Canonical's Snap Store, allowing the Ubuntu Linux community and users of other Snap-enabled Linux-based operating systems to easily install the application on their machines using the universal binary format known as Snap.

"Providing Kata Containers as a Snap enables it to reach millions of Linux users around the world facilitating the use of this application on the cloud," reads today's announcement. "The Kata Containers project is excited to now be available on the Snap Store or installed by running snap install kata-containers bringing the efficient packaging system of Snap to Kata’s users."

Besides Ubuntu, Snaps are known to work on popular GNU/Linux distributions like Debian GNU/Linux, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux, Fedora Linux, OpenSuSE, Solus, and Linux Mint. They provide users with automatic updates, seamless installation, and rollback support. To install Kata Containers as a Snap package right now, all you have to do is to run the following command in a Terminal app.

sudo snap install kata-containers