Kata

Peer Pods is the deployment model for CoCo (Confidential Containers) designed for public cloud environments where the Kubernetes worker nodes are standard VMs — not bare metal — and therefore cannot host a nested confidential VM for each pod. The fundamental constraint it solves is physical: confidential computing hardware (TDX, SEV-SNP) does not support nested virtualisation, meaning a confidential guest cannot be launched inside another VM. In the conventional CoCo deployment, the Kata Containers runtime asks a local hypervisor (QEMU/KVM) on the worker node to create a micro-VM for each pod; if the worker node is itself a VM, this requires nested virtualisation that the TEE hardware cannot provide. Peer Pods sidestep this entirely by moving the pod’s VM off the worker node and onto a separate, cloud-provisioned instance running directly on bare-metal TEE-capable hardware.