nerdctl VS bottlerocket

Direct use of containerd? containerd? turns out I didn't know anything about container technology. containerd was originally developed by Docker in 2015 as a daemon that provided basic container management capabilities under Docker. containerd's scope has gradually expanded and now seems to cover almost everything in the Docker Engine. For example, nerdctl is a CLI for containerd; the UX is almost identical to the Docker CLI, and Docker Compose is also supported (nerdctl compose).

Nerdctl[1] (for containerd) works fine with docker-compose.yml for my purposes (which are not much). The only issue I encountered was with environment variable substitution not working the same as docker-compose, but I didn't look hard for a solution and edited my compose file

1. https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl mine came bundled with Rancher desktop, and 'nerdctl compose up' is all I've needed

I haven't tried it personally but you might be able to export the tar from docker host with docker cli and then load it on containerd host using nerdctl - https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl

It looks like the real nice thing here is having a formula for QEMU with the ARM patch applied: https://github.com/simnalamburt/qemu/tree/hvf

With this I believe you could also used [nerd](https://github.com/containerd/nerdctl) instead of podman but I haven't tested it yet.

One area, where containerd didn't had a first class support was CLI. the default containerd CLI "ctr" has a very naive implementation. The reason for that I believe is, containerd as a system was never meant to be consumed by humans, and was designed to be consumed by higher layers e.g. orchestration systems like nomad or k8s. However, with the deprecation of dockershim in k8s, and users moving to containerd, a new docker compatible CLI came out:

https://github.com/AkihiroSuda/nerdctl

If you just have containerd running on your system (with no docker daemon running), you can just install nerdctl and add

alias docker="nerdctl"

to your ~/.bashrc file.

Then you can just run any docker commands the way you used to with docker, and it will run those commands against the containerd API giving you the same CLI experience that you used to have with docker.

Don't overlook Bottlerocket, which despite coming out of AWS is not (AFAIK) AWS-centric: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#readme

It's also super handy for writing out static Pod manifests to have replace the brain-damaging Ignition as a less stupid alternative to cloud-init

According to this discussion - starting with Bottlerocket 1.13.0 (Mar 2023) new distributions will default to using Cgroups v2 interface for process organization and enforcing resource limits.

Well, the link I provided references the Bottlerocket docs which explains the control container and the admin container and also how you can configure Bottlerocket via the User Data field when launching it as an AMI. All the information appears to be in the docs

https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket/blob/develop...

On the server-side, there's Bottlerocket OS [1] (Amazon). They use A/B partitions for upgrades, and the idea is that you just run containers for anything non-base. Boot containers are used to do custom configuration at boot, and host-container (or DaemonSet, if you run K8S) is used for long-running services.

[1] https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket

Bottlerocket OS.

To add to the other excellent answers, I would recommend adding Bottlerocket to your reading list: https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket#readme

I'm also aware of (but haven't used) https://github.com/siderolabs/talos#readme

I just realized your question may have implied a desktop os, whereas Bottlerocket, Flatcar, and likely the others in this specific thread are server-side. I don't have much experience with trying to solve that problem on the desktop except for the horror-show that is snap

https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket/issues/2855 soon for bottlerocket, maybe you’ll see Amazon Linux 2023 for eks nodes soon too?

I think open sourcing for free labor is a common misconception. Most corporate led open source projects (eg, https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket from AWS or https://github.com/facebook/relay from Facebook) still require a team of employees.