What is Containerd?
containerd is an open source container runtime that is designed to manage the complete container lifecycle for its host system or server. This includes pulling container images, managing storage and network resources, executing containers, monitoring them, and more.
Some key things to know about containerd:
- It is lightweight, portable and runs on Linux and Windows servers
- Allows clients such as Docker and Kubernetes to access its functionality through GO API/RPC
- Focuses on industrial-grade delivery of containers for production environments
- Manages images, containers, storage volumes and networking containers
- Performs health monitoring and event handling
- Integrates with OCI container image format and runtime specifications
- Used in cloud architectures that rely on containers and microservices
Overall containerd is optimized to robustly run production containers at scale across diverse infrastructures and platforms. Its modular open source architecture allows it to power higher-level container tools and platforms.
Docker, Deis, Podman, Apache Mesos, Distrobox, LXC Linux Containers, Chaperone Process Manager, OpenVZ, Turbo.net Client, Stakkr, DataCol, Kata Containers, CRI-O, Arkose are some alternatives to Containerd.