Open-Sourcing GVisor, a Sandboxed Container Runtime

Containers have revolutionized how we develop, package, and deploy applications. However, the system surface exposed to containers is broad enough that many security experts don’t recommend them for running untrusted or potentially malicious applications. A growing desire to run more heterogenous and less trusted workloads has created a new interest in sandboxed containers—containers that help provide a secure isolation boundary between the host OS and the application running inside the container.

To that end, we’d like to introduce gVisor, a new kind of sandbox that helps provide secure isolation for containers, while being more lightweight than a virtual machine (VM). gVisor integrates with Docker and Kubernetes, making it simple and easy to run sandboxed containers in production environments.

Source: googleblog.com