The What, Why and How of Containers

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • runtime-spec

    OCI Runtime Specification

  • > Well, no. When people say "containers", they always mean "Docker".

    Not really/necessarily. https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec

  • nix-snapshotter

    Brings native understanding of Nix packages to containerd

  • Excellent info! I started head-deving a project similar to nix-snapshotter[0] and I was thinking "ok, I can probably just build CRI impl that builds a rootfs dir with nix and just shell out to bubblewrap to make a "container".

    But once I went through that mental exercise I started reading code in containerd and cri-o. Wow, these are _not_ simple projects; containerd itself having a full GRPC-based service registry for driving dynamic logic via config.

    One thing I was pretty disappointed about is how deeply ingrained OSI images are in the whole ecosystem. While you can replace almost all functional parts of runtime, but not really the concept of images. I think images are a poor solution to the problem they solve, and a big downside of this is a bunch of complexity in the runtimes trying to work around how images work (like remote snapshotters).

    [0] https://github.com/pdtpartners/nix-snapshotter

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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