Kata Runtime and Common Runtime

The most significant difference is that each Kata container (pod) runs on an independent micro-VM, has an independent OS kernel, and is securely isolated at the virtualization layer. With Kata runtime, kernels, compute resources, and networks are isolated between containers to protect pod resources and data from being preempted and stolen by other pods.

CCE Turbo clusters allow you to create workloads using common runtime or Kata runtime as required. The differences between them are as follows.

Category	Kata Runtime	Common Runtime
Node type used to run containers	Bare-metal server (BMS)	VM
Container engine	containerd	Docker and containerd
Container runtime	Kata	runC
Container kernel	Exclusive kernel	Sharing the kernel with the host
Container isolation	Lightweight VMs	cgroups and namespaces
Container engine storage driver	Device Mapper	Docker container: OverlayFS2 containerd container: OverlayFS
Pod overhead	Memory: 100 MiB CPU: 0.1 cores Pod overhead is a feature for accounting for the resources consumed by the pod infrastructure on top of the container requests and limits. For example, if limits.cpu is set to 0.5 cores and limits.memory to 256 MiB for a pod, the pod will request 0.6-core CPUs and 356 MiB of memory.	None
Minimal specifications	Memory: 256 MiB CPU: 0.25 cores It is recommended that the ratio of CPU (unit: core) to memory (unit: GiB) be in the range of 1:1 to 1:8. For example, if CPU is 0.5 cores, the memory should range form 512 MiB to 4 GiB.	None
Container engine CLI	crictl	Docker container: docker containerd container: crictl
Pod computing resources	The request and limit values must be the same for both CPU and memory.	The request and limit values can be different for both CPU and memory.
Host Network	Not supported	Supported