OSS + ELC EU 2026

There is a big difference between getting Kata Containers running in a proof of concept and operating a large multi-tenant Kata environment for years.

This talk is a practical, vendor-neutral look at what becomes hard after the demo works. Once every pod carries a lightweight VM lifecycle behind it, platform teams are no longer operating only Kubernetes. They are also operating guest kernels, guest images, VMMs, hypervisor behavior, virtio devices, runtime and agent version skew, and a second debugging surface under the container platform.

We will walk through production issues that show up at scale: guest kernel CVEs and regressions, host/guest kernel drift, CNI and tap-device networking, virtio-fs and storage durability semantics, fragmented observability, boot storms, vCPU oversubscription, memory accounting drift, NUMA behavior, GPU passthrough, VFIO/IOMMU lifecycle, upgrade matrices, and incident ownership.

This is not a criticism of Kata. Kata solves a real open source isolation problem. The goal is to help operators understand the operational work required to run VM-isolated containers safely and sustainably in production.