[bjconlan]

I believe this work originated at Intel as "clear containers" (which I believe started life from an acquisition (but could be mixing this up...my memory isn't what it used to be). Either way it's great they are being used like this and at Nvidia (I know Alibaba cloud also use this tech)

[fhuici]

Yes, Kata started as clear containers. And yes, the main purpose is compatibility with containers -- though generally speaking, adding layers to the cloud stack never helps to make a deployment more efficient. On kraft.cloud we use Dockerfiles to specify app/filesystem, but then at deploy time automatically and transparently convert that to a specialized VM/unikernel for best performance.