containerd Graduates in the CNCF!

Today is a big day for the CNCF containerd open source project. Today we become the fifth CNCF project to reach graduated status! For completeness, the existing graduated projects are Kubernetes, CoreDNS, Prometheus, and Envoy; you can see the full list of CNCF projects and maturity status here.

There will be plenty of news on today’s graduation, so rather than write a long post myself I’ll update the following list with the official press release, blog posts, and media outlet items as they appear:

• The official CNCF press release on containerd graduation
• IBMCode blog post on containerd graduation
• Docker’s blog post on the containerd graduation announcement from Michael Crosby
• eWEEK article by Sean Michael Kerner
• Ubuntu adds containerd as runtime to Ubuntu’s Kubernetes packaging
• JAXEnter article on containerd graduation by Gabriele Motroc
• The Register’s piece on Ubuntu Kubernetes and containerd graduation, by Richard Speed
• ITOpsTimes article on graduation by Christina Cardoza
• DevClass article on graduation by Joe Fay
• Container Journal: Containerd Comes of Age (8 March 2019) by Mike Vizard
• Zenko: Containerd Graduates and Gets “Boring” (12 March 2019) by Stefano Maffulli
• The original (now-merged) pull request presented to the CNCF TOC for graduation
• The TOC presentation on containerd graduation from 20 November 2018

But maybe you ended up here and are wondering “what is this containerd thing anyway, and why should I care?” Thankfully, the maintainers and contributors to containerd have generated a lot of content on this topic over the past few years and I will highlight a few here that may help you get up to speed:

• Original announcement and Docker blog post declaring the project’s expansion (and future home with the CNCF) beyond the original containerd to be a “core container runtime” for many use cases – December 2016
• A personal perspective on the containerd announcement via this blog – December 2016
• Video and slides from a containerd intro and project update I gave at FOSDEM 2018 – February 2017
• The New Stack article at the release of containerd 1.0 in December 2017
• containerd deep dive by Stephen Day at KubeCon/CloudNativeCon EU 2018 – May 2018
• Another containerd deep dive with new content from Derek McGowan (and myself opening the talk with a brief project update) from KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Seattle – December 2018

A few final thoughts from me in closing—as someone who has been involved since the first hallway discussions about the need for a smaller, less opinionated core container runtime than Docker for the industry. Today represents a significant milestone in the discussion that started with some unhealthy rumors and rumblings about “forking Docker” years ago. I have shown the following slide in several containerd talks to try and represent the flurry of calls for something “boring” to sit underneath higher layers of the stack, including both Docker and Kubernetes, but envisioning much more than simply those use cases:

I think where we are today in the containerd project, with a clear and useful client API and specific features like the v2 shim—now used by Kata Containers, AWS Firecracker, and supporting OCI runc equivalents like gVisor and IBM Research’s Nabla project, is really amazing. It has become a really impressive base layer that I believe will be the underpinnings of a lot of container innovation for years to come. Congrats to my fellow maintainers, reviewers, contributors and all those who have tested, reported bugs, worked with us and made today a really special day in the timeline of containerd!

Resources

• Containerd project: https://github.com/containerd/containerd
• Containerd website: https://containerd.io
• Containerd project stats via CNCF: https://containerd.devstats.cncf.io/
• Containerd project core documents: https://github.com/containerd/project
• Follow containerd on Twitter: https://twitter.com/containerd
• IBM Developer video (1:48) my statement on containerd graduation