Things for a developer to do after installing Kata

Things for a developer to do after installing Kata Containers

Assumptions

• You're a developer ;)

Introduction

You've installed Kata Containers and tried running some workloads. What do you do now? Here are some suggestions to get you more familiar with the project so you can start thinking about contributing to Kata Containers.

Ideas

Notes:

• These ideas focus mostly on the new rust (runtime-rs) runtime.

  However, it helps to read the golang architecture docs as they are mostly still relevant and provide a holistic overview of a (any) Kata system.

• For tasks that involve changing config files: the recommendation is to not touch the default config files. Instead, create the directory /etc/kata-containers/ and copy the pristine config files into this directory. Kata will read the files in this directory first. So, you can hack around with this version of the files and if you break things, simply delete the config files in /etc/kata-containers/. This is equivalent to performing a "factory reset" as Kata will then use the pristine (and working) config files.

Idea	Rationale	Notes
Read the golang runtime architecture docs	Understand golang system
Read the rust runtime architecture docs	Understand rust system
Read the developer guide
Raise issues / PRs for prooblems found with the developer guide	Helpful to community	That doc probably needs a "refresh" given the amount of recent change in Kata! ;)
Enable full debug for Kata and containerd, and collect some debug logs	Help understand what Kata is doing	See if you can find the log entry to launch the configured hypervisor
Play with the kata-runtime utility command	Useful familiarisation	Try out check, env and exec to login the the VM itself
Change the default hypervisor from QEMU to, say, Cloud Hypervisor	Useful familiarisation	Involves switching the config file
Change the default runtime from the default golang one to the rust one	Useful familiarisation	Careful! Both runtimes have the same name - it's required. Prove to yourself you are using the right one
Change the default image from "image" to an "initrd" (initramfs)	Useful familiarisation	Only requires a change to the [hypervisor.*] section of the config file
Look at the configuration options for your chosen hypervisor and try changing some	Familiarisation
Raise a simple "one liner" PR	Help understand how CIs and review process works	Look at the good first issues list
Build the rust runtime	Required to allow you to make changes and test them
Build the agent-ctl and interact with the agent	Useful to understand the role of and features provided by the agent	Try to break the agent by sending bad data / large messages!
Build the katal-ctl and try out some of the commands		Note you'll need to be using the rust runtime for any commands that talk to the agent!