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gVisor isolates containers by inserting Sentry, a kernel written in Go, between the container process and the real host kernel, shrinking the system-call surface a hostile tenant can reach. Its OCI-compatible runsc runtime drops in where runc used to sit. Use systrap mode, the default since 2023: portable, no special hardware required.
Kata Containers has spent years promising VM-grade container isolation without giving up Docker ergonomics. With the 3.x series now mature under the OpenInfra Foundation, the technical story finally holds together and there is a clear niche where adopting it pays off.
Firecracker is the Rust-based virtual machine monitor AWS uses in Lambda and Fargate: it boots microVMs in under 125 milliseconds with under 5 MB of overhead. Switching from containers pays off when a shared kernel does not give enough isolation, especially for untrusted LLM agent code, and versus gVisor it wins on I/O performance.
