Edera and hardware virtualization

Many clouds restrict access to hardware virtualization (nested virtualization), requiring expensive instance types like AWS metal nodes. Edera Protect runs on 98% of AWS instances—by contrast, Kata Containers supports just 7%.

This was a deliberate design decision to prioritize accessibility and adoption. Without hardware virtualization, gVisor is often the only alternative—but it can incur up to a 40% performance hit. Edera Protect’s worst-case performance hit is <5%, and when virtualization is available, it drops below 1%.

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