For developers working with container solutions, Docker has announced today that it’s open-sourcing one of the prominent infrastructure pieces – containerd (pronounced container-DEE). Thus, enabling the community to work on the development of non-Docker products and container solutions. This will finally enable developers who’re continually tinkering with APIs in an attempt to achieve containerization for their services.
The company had been working on extracting the components of its primary container platform ‘Docker Engine,’ which includes the Docker API, services, and commands all bundled in one package. But taking the core component and donating it to a community project administered by five public cloud providers, namely Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft is sure to benefit the end-user in the long run.
Talking about the benefits of making this major component public, Solomon Hykes, founder, CTO and Chief Product Officer at Docker, says,
This is the result of months of close collaboration and input from thought leaders in the Docker community. containerd will unlock a whole new phase of innovation and growth across the entire ecosystem, which in turn will benefit every Docker developer and customer.
containerd is called the primary component of the Docker Engine because it provides developers with an open, stable and extensible base for building the required solutions for their non-Docker service. Other capabilities of this core component include methods for transferring container images, execution and supervision, low-level local storage and network interfaces for the containers.
The component has been completely designed leveraging the Open Container Initiative’s (OCI) runtime, specifications and reference implementations (runC) to make it as ubiquitous as possible. Docker also plans to certify the said tech, when such an option becomes available.
Docker has always been focused on the benefit of the software community and hs open-sourced numerous other in-house developed technologies. And efforts for making this core component available to all adds to their vision. Talking about the same, Hykes adds,
Docker’s focus has always been on solving users’ problems first and then spinning out the plumbing projects that address those challenges along the way. We are excited by the support that the containerd project is getting from the leaders in the industry and we know their backing of resources will fuel the growth of this collaborative project.
Starting today, users can begin contributing to this “boring infrastructure” plumbing component but the very first version of this containerd will be made available in Q2 2017. The software giant also plans to recognize quality updates to the component in favor of new features and further streamline this complex component. You can access containerd on Github to contribute to the project right here.
