Posts by: Michael Crosby

We are happy to announce that as of today, containerd, an industry-standard runtime for building container solutions, graduates within the CNCF. The successful graduation demonstrates containerd has achieved the maturity, stability and community acceptance required for broad ecosystem adoption. containerd has already been deployed in tens of millions of production systems today, making it the most widely adopted runtime and an essential upstream component of the Docker platform. containerd was donated to the CNCF as a top-level project because of its strong alignment with Kubernetes, gRPC and Prometheus and is the fifth project to make it to this tier. Built to…

Last month the Linux Foundation announced the 2018 Open Container Initiative (OCI) election results of the Technical Oversight Board (TOB). Members of the TOB then voted to elect our very own Michael Crosby as the new Chairman. The result of the election should not come as a surprise to anyone in the community given Michael’s extensive contributions to the container ecosystem. Back in February 2014, Michael led the development of libcontainer, a Go library that was developed to access the kernel’s container APIs directly, without any other dependencies. If you look at this first commit of libcontainer, you’ll see that the JSONspec…

  We have done a few talks in the past on different features of containerd, how it was designed, and some of the problems that we have fixed along the way. Containerd is used by Docker, Kubernetes CRI, and a few other projects but this is a post for people who may not know what containerd actually does within these platforms.  I would like to do more posts on the feature set and design of containerd in the future but for now, we will start with the basics. I think the container ecosystem can be confusing at times. Especially with…

Intent of containerd effort When containerd was first developed it had two goals. The first was to solve the upgrade problem with running containers and provide a codebase where OCI runtimes, like runc, could be integrated into Docker.  However, as needs change in the container space and after speaking  with various members of the community at the beginning of this year, we decided to expand the scope of containerd and make it a fully functional container daemon with storage, image distribution and runtime. containerd fully supports the OCI Runtime and Image specifications that are part of the recently released 1.0 specifications. Additionally, it was important…

We have done a few talks in the past on different features of containerd, how it was designed, and some of the problems that we have fixed along the way.  Containerd is used by Docker, Kubernetes CRI, and a few other projects but this is a post for people who may not know what containerd actually does within these platforms.  I would like to do more posts on the featureset and design of containerd in the future but for now, we will start with the basics. I think the container ecosystem can be confusing at times. Especially with the terminology that…

Last week, we hosted a containerd summit for contributors and maintainers. Containerd is a core container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness and portability. It is available as a daemon for Linux and Windows, which can manage the complete container lifecycle of its host system: image transfer and storage, container execution and supervision, snapshot storage for container filesystems and a few other things to make the management of containers robust. We started off by getting everyone up to speed on the project, roadmap and goals before diving down into specific issues and design of containerd.  We had a couple…

Resource management for containers is a huge requirement for production users. Being able to run multiple containers on a single host and ensure that one container does not starve the others in terms of cpu, memory, io, or networking in an efficient way is why I like working with containers. However, cpu management for containers is still not as straightforward as what I would like. There are many different options when it comes to dealing with restricting the cpu usage for a container. With things like memory, its is very easy for people to think that , –memory 512m gives the…

In an effort to make Docker Engine smaller, better, faster, stronger, we looked for components of the current engine that we can break out into separate projects and improve along the way. One of those components is the Docker runtime for managing containers. With standalone runtimes like runc, we need a clean integration point for adding runc to the stack as well as managing 100s of containers. So we started the containerd project to move the container supervision out of the core Docker Engine and into a separate daemon. containerd has full support for starting OCI bundles and managing their lifecycle. This…