Learn about peer-pods for Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers

What are peer-pods? 

The peer-pods solution extends Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers (OSC) to run on any environment without requiring bare-metal servers or nested virtualization support (yep, it’s magic). It does this by extending Kata containers runtime (which OSC is built on) to handle VM lifecycle management using cloud provider APIs (AWS, Azure, etc...) or third-party hypervisors APIs (such as VMware vSphere). 

Features & benefits

• Extending OpenShift sandboxed containers to hybrid cloud deployments

• Sandboxing CI/CD privileged deployments in public cloud such as OpenShift Pipelines    

• Peer-pods is a key enabler for Confidential containers

Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers: Peer-pods solution overview

Feb 1, 2023 - Ariel Adam, Pradipta Banerjee

In this blog series, we will introduce the Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers peer-pods feature, which will be released as a dev-preview feature in Red Hat OpenShift 4.12. In this post, we will provide a high-level solution overview of the new peer-pods feature. Other posts will document a technical deep dive, as well as deployment and hands-on instructions for using peer-pods... Read full post

Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers: Peer-pods technical deep dive

Feb 1, 2023 - Pradipta Banerjee, Jens Freimann, Ariel Adam

In our first blog post, we highlighted the peer-pods solution and its ability to bring the benefits of Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers to any environment including the cloud and third-party hypervisors. In this post, we will delve deeper into the various components that make up the peer-pods solution, including the controller, networking model, resource model, etc. We will also cover the communication between the different components and how everything comes together... Read full post

Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers: Peer-pods hands-on

Feb 1, 2023 - Snir Sheriber, Bandan Das

In this blog post, we’ll be going through deploying peer-pods on an OpenShift cluster running in AWS or vSphere cloud infrastructure. We will present how to create the virtual machine (VM) image for your peer-pod and demonstrate how to run workload in a peer-pod. The post assumes familiarity with Red Hat OpenShift and the cloud provider which is in use... Read full post

Persistent volume support with peer-pods: Solution overview

August 10, 2023 - Qi Feng Huo, Da Li Liu, Yohei Ueda 

Since peer-pods are separate VMs alongside the Kubernetes node, traditional Container Storage Interface (CSI) cannot function properly within them, and different solutions are required. This blog will dig into these challenges and discuss solutions for overcoming these issues in the context of CSI and peer-pods... Read full post

Persistent volume support with peer-pods: A technical deep dive

August 29, 2023 - Qi Feng Huo, Da Li Liu, Yohei Ueda, Lei Li

Our previous blog discussed the persistent volume challenges with peer-pods and how to resolve them. It also introduced using the CSI wrapper as a potential solution to the persistent volume usage challenges with peer-pods. This post dives deeper into the various components that make up the persistent volume solution in peer-pods... Read full post

Comparing Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers for bare metal and peer-pods deployments

October 25, 2023 - Pei Zhang, Xiangchun Fu

This blog will compare the deployments, configurations, and resources used for OSC/bare-metal vs. OSC/peer-pods... Read full post

Accessing Azure blob storage with Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers peer-pods

February 1, 2024 - Pei Zhang, Pradipta Banerjee, Xiangchun Fu

This article demonstrates how to use Azure BlobFuse to access blob data in your workloads deployed using OpenShift sandboxed containers. The workflow demonstrated in this article is common for all blobfuse versions, but note that the sample commands necessarily specify the blobfuse version (blobfuse2)... Read full post

Accessing Amazon S3 with OpenShift sandboxed containers peer-pods

March 5, 2024 - Pei Zhang, Pradipta Banerjee, Xiangchun Fu

This blog demonstrates how to access object data stored in Amazon S3 in your workloads deployed using OpenShift sandboxed containers... Read full post

Running sandboxed containers on AWS using peer-pods approach (no audio)

This demo shows execution of an OpenShift pipeline job requiring elevated privileges using sandboxed containers  on AWS. The sandboxed containers are created using the peer-pods approach which enables running of Kata containers (VM) using IaaS APIs from the infrastructure provider.

Running protected build pipelines with OpenShift Pipelines and sandboxed containers in ARO

A short demo showing how to run a simple build pipeline using OpenShift Pipelines and OpenShift sandboxed containers in an cluster created in ARO.