Learn about Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers

What are Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers?

Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers, based on the Kata Containers open source project, provide an Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant container runtime using lightweight virtual machines (VMs) running your workloads in their own isolated kernel. This contributes an additional layer of isolation to Red Hat’s defense-in-depth strategy.

Features & benefits

• Isolated developer environments and privileges scoping

• Legacy containerized workload isolation

• Multi-tenancy and resource sharing (CI/CD jobs, CNFs, etc.)

• Additional isolation with native Kubernetes user experience

The peer-pods solution extends 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).

The Dawn of OpenShift Sandboxed Containers - Overview

August 9, 2021 - Adel Zaalouk

Are you a developer, cluster administrator or service provider? OpenShift sandboxed containers provides value on multiple fronts for different personas and use-cases. This post provides examples of where you can…read full post

OpenShift Sandboxed Containers 101

August 13, 2021 - Snir Sheriber, Ariel Adam

Ready for your 101 course on how to play with sandboxed workloads? This hands-on blog will take the reader on a journey to run sandboxed workloads using Kata containers in…read full post

Operator, Please Connect me to Sandboxed Containers

August 4, 2021 - Jens Freimann, Pradipta Kumar

This post provides a high-level overview of the OpenShift sandboxed containers operator, which is available as a tech-preview in OpenShift 4.8. Using the operator, a cluster administrator will be able…read full post

OpenShift Sandboxed Containers Operator From Zero to Hero, the Hard Way

September 22, 2021 - Jens Freimann, Pradipta Kumar

We’re diving deeper into the internals of what the OpenShift sandboxed containers operator does going bottom-up. This post takes you behind the scenes for performing the installation and maintenance of…read full post

Troubleshooting Sandboxed Containers Operator

September 2, 2021 - Jens Freimann, Pradipta Kumar

In this post, we want to show what you can do when things go wrong. An OpenShift cluster is a complex system, and many pieces need to work together. Sometimes…read full post

OpenShift Sandboxed Containers Network Performance

November 16, 2021 - Robert Krawitz

Curious about the performance of sandboxed containers versus containers running in the node's native Linux context? This post focuses on networking performance with sandboxed pods compared with that of conventional…read full post

Isolated CI/CD Pipelines With OpenShift Sandboxed Containers

May 3, 2022 - Bharath N R, Pradipta Banerjee

OpenShift Pipelines  based on Tekton  provides a Kubernetes-native CI/CD framework to design and run your pipelines. You do not need a separate CI/CD server to manage or maintain.... A typical CI/CD pipeline is a...read full post

How to Build Container Images in Isolated Environments using Red Hat OpenShift Sandboxed Containers

June 2, 2022 - Pradipta Banerjee, Jens Freimann

Performing container builds in isolated environments is one step towards defending against this threat while at the same time providing flexibility to the developers.... With OpenShift sandboxed containers, you can safely install software that needs privileged access without affecting the container host or the other containers...read full post

Red Hat OpenShift sandboxed containers for debugging with elevated privileges

April 5, 2023 - Pradipta Banerjee, Jens Freimann, Ariel Adam

When debugging or tracing running workloads in Red Hat OpenShift deployments, there will frequently be a need to run the workloads with elevated privileges. This is not possible or desirable in production deployments, however, due to the risks to the cluster and other running workloads. This article demonstrates how you can leverage an OpenShift route-based deployment strategy in combination with OpenShift sandboxed containers to run such workloads with elevated privileges while ensuring the safety of the OpenShift cluster and other running workloads. Read full post

Run OpenShift sandboxed containers with hosted control planes

May 24, 2024 - Camilla Conte, Adel Zaalouk

Hosted control planes reduce costs and improve productivity for organizations adopting a multi-cluster approach. OpenShift sandboxed containers  provides an additional layer of isolation for workloads through hardware virtualization. When used together, they can offer several benefits including speed, separation of concerns, and the necessary hardening to run multi-tenant workloads with stringent security constraints. This article provides a detailed guide on how to configure and run sandboxed workloads for OpenShift clusters with hosted control planes, maximizing efficiency and workload isolation.... Read full post

The Dawn of OpenShift Sandboxed Containers

In this OpenShift Commons Briefing, Adel Zaalouk, Product Manager of OpenShift & Hybrid Platforms, introduces OpenShift sandboxed containers and gives an overview of the product and technology along with its features.

OpenShift Pipelines with OpenShift sandboxed containers

Demo showing isolating OpenShift pipeline runs using OpenShift sandboxed containers.

OpenShift Sandboxed Containers Operator

In this video, we show how to install the OpenShift sandboxed containers operator on top of the OpenShift Containers Platform.

OpenShift sandboxed containers 101 - Jenkins deployment

Running Jenkins or similar workloads inside sandboxed containers on the OpenShift Containers Platform is quite easy. All it takes is adding a runtime class name to your workload manifest file.

Enable debug log level for OpenShift Sandboxed Containers

In this video we'll present how to increase logs level of the different Openshift Sandboxed Containers to "debug", then, the enhanced logging can be viewed in the node's journal or to be collected by the must-gather tool.

OpenShift Sandboxed Containers Metrics

In this video, we show how to access the OpenShift Sandboxed Containers metrics, and give an overview of the available information that they provide.

Safely run privileged pods with OpenShift sandboxed containers

In this video, we present a use case for running CI workloads requiring elevated privileges. This is done by using the OpenShift sandboxed containers to ensure all privileged workloads the user can create are isolated and are safe to run.