Adoption & Ecosystem
Who uses it
The organizations below are listed in the project's ADOPTERS.md (observed 2026-06-27). Only adopters with that citable source are included.
| Organisation | Use case | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Alibaba Cloud | Elastic Algorithm Service and Elastic GPU Service, protecting user data and AI models from the cloud provider | ADOPTERS.md |
| Red Hat | OpenShift sandboxed containers on Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP, and IBM Z | ADOPTERS.md |
| IBM | LinuxONE plus OpenShift, integrated with Secure Execution for Linux | ADOPTERS.md |
| Edgeless Systems | Contrast, running confidential deployments on Kubernetes | ADOPTERS.md |
| ByteDance | Jeddak Sandbox built on CoCo | ADOPTERS.md |
| Intel | Enterprise-RAG and OPEA running on Intel TDX | ADOPTERS.md |
| JDCloud | JoyScale | ADOPTERS.md |
| NanhuLab | Trusted Big Data Sharing | ADOPTERS.md |
| Switchboard | Distributed oracle on AMD SEV-SNP bare metal | ADOPTERS.md |
| Kubermatic | KubeOne on bare metal | ADOPTERS.md |
| KubeArmor | Interoperability with CoCo | ADOPTERS.md |
Adoption signals
GitHub figures from the GitHub API, observed 2026-06-27:
- trustee: 165 stars, 158 forks, roughly 60 contributors.
- guest-components: 125 stars, roughly 78 contributors.
- confidential-containers meta repository: 364 stars.
Trustee ships releases regularly; recent tags are v0.18.0 (2026-03-23), v0.19.0 (2026-04-30), and v0.20.0 (2026-05-19). The project lists sponsoring vendors including Alibaba Cloud, AMD, Arm, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Rivos, per the CNCF project page and Red Hat blog posts.
Ecosystem
CoCo reuses rather than reinvents. It builds on Kata Containers for the VM sandbox, containerd for the container layer, ocicrypt-rs for encrypted images, and Rego (through the regorus engine) for policy. Inside the CNCF, the closest neighbors are Kata Containers (the sandbox runtime CoCo sits on) and SPIFFE/SPIRE for workload identity, though SPIRE issues software identities rather than hardware-backed TEE attestation. The guest side of CoCo (the Attestation Agent, Confidential Data Hub, and image-rs) lives in the guest-components repository and is the counterpart to trustee.
Alternatives
| Alternative | Differs by |
|---|---|
| Edgeless Systems Constellation / Contrast | Productized confidential Kubernetes; Contrast itself is also a CoCo adopter rather than a pure competitor. |
| Enarx / Veracruz | Run WebAssembly inside a TEE; the unit is a Wasm runtime, not an unmodified container. |
| Gramine / Occlum / SCONE | LibOS approaches that place a single process into Intel SGX; CoCo's enclave-cc is closest here, while mainstream CoCo is VM-based. |
| Azure Confidential Containers / Google Confidential GKE Nodes | Cloud-managed and vendor-specific; CoCo is vendor-neutral OSS that spans multiple TEE types behind one attestation and KBS flow. |
The core distinction is that CoCo keeps unmodified Pods on Kubernetes and releases keys or secrets only to confidential VMs that pass remote attestation, while binding Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP, Intel SGX, IBM Secure Execution, Arm CCA, and NVIDIA GPU support behind a single Verifier abstraction.