Docker on Wednesday announced that it will spin out containerd, a key component of its Docker Engine, for open source use.
The company said Containerd will provide an open, stable, and extensible base for building non-Docker products and container solutions.
According to Docker, some of the top cloud providers, including Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, have committed to contributing to the project, giving it instant credibility within the community.
Containerd enables low-level local storage, container execution and supervision, and the transferring of container images and network interfaces across Linux and Windows. The company said it fully leverages the Open Container Initiative’s runtime, image format specifications, and OCI reference implementation and will pursue OCI certification.
Docker will donate containerd to an independent foundation, which will oversee its governance, trademark, and trademark enforcement by the first quarter of 2017.
Innovation Unleashed
Docker CTO Solomon Hykes said that containerd will unlock a new phase of innovation and growth across the entire ecosystem.
The company has a history of making key components available to the open source community, starting in 2014 with libcontainer.
“If you look at Docker’s history of open sourcing key components over the last two years, containerd is a natural progression of that effort,” noted Patrick Chanezon, chief developer advocate at Docker.
“We have been working on containerd since Docker 1.11, and finally felt the project was at the point where more community involvement was needed, he told LinuxInsider.
Chanezon added that the decision to expand the project was made after speaking with several leaders in the open source community over the last several months so the community could reap the benefits and provide input.
Critics Acknowledged
Jay Lyman, principal analyst for cloud management and containers at 451 Research, said that Docker’s decision is responsive to a couple of specific criticisms.
First, the company has come under fire for broadening its commercial and technical scope far beyond container runtime, which was the company’s original function, he told LinuxInsider.
“Docker is also serving two audiences — enterprise developers, and organizations that do want a more complete package of not only container runtime, but supporting software as well,” Lyman noted.
The other audience includes more advanced operators and platform builders who want to assemble their own platform, either to use internally or to sell, he said.
Paul Teich, principal analyst at Tirias Research, observed that Docker is already a complete operating environment. Therefore, it’s very tough to carve out just the parts of Docker needed to run its containers in an established public cloud, like AWS, Baidu, or Azure.
Docker is essentially donating the core bits of its container code to an open foundation, he told LinuxInsider.
“The foundation’s role is to build a public cloud-neutral Docker container subsystem called ‘containerd,'” Teich said. “The public clouds will slide their own compute, storage and network plumbing below containerd, and they will use their own orchestration schemes above containerd.”
He pointed out that application developers won’t see any of that and will write to the same Docker APIs used in Docker’s product and across all container deployments used in contributing public clouds.
A summit on containerd is scheduled for February 2017 in San Francisco.
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