Today we announced that Docker is extracting a key component of its container platform, a part of the engine plumbing–containerd a core container runtime–and commits to donating it to an open foundation. containerd is designed to be less coupled, and easier to integrate with other tools sets. And it is being written and designed to address the requirements of the major cloud providers and container orchestration systems.

Because we know a lot of Docker fans want to know how the internals work, we thought we would share the current state of containerd and what we plan for version 1.0. Before that, it’s a good idea to look at what Docker has become over the last three and a half years.

The Docker platform isn’t a container runtime. It is in fact a set of integrated tools that allow you to build ship and run distributed applications. That means Docker handles networking, infrastructure, build, orchestration, authorization, security, and a variety of other services that cover the complete distributed application lifecycle.

The core container runtime, which is containerd, is a small but vital part of the platform. We started breaking out containerd from the rest of the engine in Docker 1.11, planning for this eventual release.

This is a look at Docker Engine 1.12 as it currently is, and how containerd fits in.

You can see that containerd has just the APIs currently necessary to run a container. A GRPC API is called by the Docker Engine, which triggers an execution process. That spins up a supervisor and an executor which is charged with monitoring and running containers. The container is run (i.e. executed) by runC, which is another plumbing project that we open sourced as a reference implementation of the Open Container Initiative runtime standard.

When containerd reaches 1.0, we plan to have a number of other features from Docker Engine as well.

That feature set and scope of containerd is:

A distribution component that will handle pushing to a registry, without a preferencetoward a particular vendor.

Networking primitives for the creation of system interfaces and APIs to manage a container’s network namespace

Host level storage for image and container filesystems

A GRPC API

A new metrics API in the Prometheus format for internal and container level metrics

Full support of the OCI image spec and runC reference implementation

A more detailed architecture overview is available in the project’s GitHub repository.

This is a look at a future version of Docker Engine leveraging containerd 1.0.

containerd is designed to be embedded into a larger system, rather than being used directly by developers or end-users; and in fact this evolution of Docker plumbing will go unnoticed by end-users. It has a CLI, ctr, designed for debugging and experimentation, and a GRPC API designed for embedding. It’s designed as a plumbing component, designed to be integrated into other projects that can benefit from the lessons we’ve learned running containers.

We are at containerd version 0.2.4, so a lot of work needs to be done. We’ve invited the container ecosystem to participate in this project and are please to have support from Alibaba, AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft who are providing contributors to help developing containerd. You can find up-to-date roadmap, architecture and API definitions in the github repo, and learn more at the containerd livestream meetup Friday, December 16th at 10am PST. We also plan to organize a summit at the end of February to bring contributors together.