how-to-install-on-aws

This doc describes the steps to install kata-containers + containerd on AWS and running a workload.

1. Since AWS does not support nested virtualization, we will have to use bare-metal instances.

2. For testing purposes, i3.metal instance type with Ubuntu 22.04 x86-64 AMI works the best. This combination is ideal for testing purposes. Allocate high amount of storage (64GB works)

3. Follow these steps to get the kata-containers release (steps borrowed from this link) :

   curl -O -L https://github.com/kata-containers/kata-containers/releases/download/3.5.0/kata-static-3.5.0-amd64.tar.xz
   tar -xvf kata-static-3.5.0-amd64.tar.xz
   sudo cp -r opt/ /
   sudo ln -s /opt/kata/bin/containerd-shim-kata-v2 /usr/bin
   sudo ln -s /opt/kata/bin/kata-runtime /usr/bin
   sudo ln -s /opt/kata/bin/kata-collect-data.sh /usr/bin
   sudo apt install containerd

4. Running a kata-container workload :

   image="docker.io/library/busybox:latest"
   sudo ctr image pull "$image"
   sudo ctr run --runtime "io.containerd.kata.v2" --rm -t "$image" test-kata sh
   sudo ctr c ls

   This creates a container named test-kata, which runs the shell workload (specified using the “sh” at the end of the run command). The final ls command is to view the containers. The hypervisor used is QEMU. The file-system for the guest is read-only in the default setting (which uses images, instead of initrd, the distinction is made clear further in this document)

5. Attaching the debug-console to access the guest VM and exploring the kata-runtime options :

   kata-runtime env

   This command gives information about the configuration file and the OS image used by the guest VM. We need to change the following field in

    Path : /opt/kata/share/defaults/kata-containers/configuration-qemu.toml
    debug_console_enabled = true

   Any containers created after enabling debug-console would have the facility of connecting with the guest VM. The command to connect with the guest VM is :

    sudo kata-runtime exec test-kata