All articles tagged #ctr

A container image is a combination of layers where every layer represents some intermediary state of the final filesystem. Such a layered composition makes the building, storage, and distribution of images more efficient. But from a mere developer's standpoint, images are just root filesystems of our future containers. And we often want to explore their content accordingly - with familiar tools like cat, ls, or file. Let's try to see if we can achieve this goal using nothing but the means provided by Docker itself.

Read more

Containers could have become a lightweight VM replacement. However, the most widely used form of containers, standardized by Docker/OCI, encourages you to have just one process service per container. Such an approach has a bunch of pros - increased isolation, simplified horizontal scaling, higher reusability, etc. However, there is a big con - in the wild, virtual (or physical) machines rarely run just one service.

While Docker tries to offer some workarounds to create multi-service containers, Kubernetes makes a bolder step and chooses a group of cohesive containers, called a Pod, as the smallest deployable unit.

When I stumbled upon Kubernetes a few years ago, my prior VM and bare-metal experience allowed me to get the idea of Pods pretty quickly. Or so thought I... 🙈

Starting working with Kubernetes, one of the first things you learn is that every pod gets a unique IP and hostname and that within a pod, containers can talk to each other via localhost. So, it's kinda obvious - a pod is like a tiny little server.

After a while, though, you realize that every container in a pod gets an isolated filesystem and that from inside one container, you don't see processes running in other containers of the same pod. Ok, fine! Maybe a pod is not a tiny little server but just a group of containers with a shared network stack.

But then you learn that containers in one pod can communicate via shared memory! So, probably the network namespace is not the only shared thing...

This last finding was the final straw for me. So, I decided to have a deep dive and see with my own eyes:

• How Pods are implemented under the hood
• What is the actual difference between a Pod and a Container
• How one can create Pods using Docker.

And on the way, I hope it'll help me to solidify my Linux, Docker, and Kubernetes skills.

Read more

containerd is a high-level container runtime, aka container manager. To put it simply, it's a daemon that manages the complete container lifecycle on a single host: creates, starts, stops containers, pulls and stores images, configures mounts, networking, etc.

containerd is designed to be easily embeddable into larger systems. Docker uses containerd under the hood to run containers. Kubernetes can use containerd via CRI to manage containers on a single node. But smaller projects also can benefit from the ease of integrating with containerd - for instance, faasd uses containerd (we need more d's!) to spin up a full-fledged Function-as-a-Service solution on a standalone server.

However, using containerd programmatically is not the only option. It also can be used from the command line via one of the available clients. The resulting container UX may not be as comprehensive and user-friendly as the one provided by the docker client, but it still can be useful, for instance, for debugging or learning purposes.

Read more