KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019

containerd, a graduated CNCF project, is a widely used container runtime that provides core functionality for Docker. containerd was designed to be small and simple, but also very modular and extensible. This talk covers the architecture of containerd, explains the responsibilities of each component, and dives deep into containerd’s facility for extension. We’ll cover the individual gRPC services that make up containerd and show how they can be extended with proxy plugins, Go plugins, process interfaces (OCI runtimes and process-based logging), thick client implementations, and build-your-own containerd for compiled-in extension. These extension mechanisms can be shown with simple examples and real-world use in the firecracker-containerd project.