gVisor Container Isolation with Michael Pratt and Yoshi Tamura

Software applications running within a host operating system need to be isolated. Isolation prevents security vulnerabilities, such as one application accessing the memory of another.

In modern cloud environments, a single physical host might be running multiple virtual machines on top of a hypervisor. Those virtual machines might be divided up into containers. The different virtual machines and containers might be operated by different users, or even different companies.

gVisor is a container sandbox runtime open sourced by Google. gVisor runs containers in a new user-space kernel, and provides a container security system with low overhead. gVisor improves on the previous security properties of containers.

Michael Pratt and Yoshi Tamura work on gVisor at Google, and they join the show to talk through the purpose of gVisor and the engineering around the project.

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Transcript

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