The tool that really runs your containers: deep dive into runc and OCI specifications

DevOps and Infrastructure Consultant, Cloud, Kubernetes and OpenShift Expert, Platform Builder, Writer, Software Developer.

Best known one is, no doubt, Docker, which sky-rocketed the container adoption. There is also Podman and Buildah, which I explained in a dedicated Dockerless series, showed in Dockerless video, and now I teach on the Dockerless course.

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Once you are serious about running your containers in production, you have multiple other choices, containerd and CRI-O being two examples. These tools are not the most developer-friendly ones. Instead, they focus on other areas, like being the best container manager for Kubernetes, or just being the fully featured runtime that can be further adopted for a specific platform.

It's easy to get lost with so many tools to solve seemingly similar problems. The naming that we have for these tools doesn't make it any better. What is container runtime? What is container manager? What is container orchestrator and container engine? Does container orchestrator need a container manager? Where is the line between container runtime and container manager?

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