Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces containerd Graduation

Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Cloud Foundry, Docker, Google, IBM, Rancher Labs and more support promotion of ecosystem’s most-widely adopted container runtime

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., February 28, 2019 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which sustains open source technologies like Kubernetes® and Prometheus™, today announced that containerd is the fifth project to graduate, following Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and CoreDNS. To move from the maturity level of incubation to graduation, projects must demonstrate thriving adoption, diversity, a formal governance process, and a strong commitment to community sustainability and inclusivity.

“After being accepted into CNCF nearly two years ago, containerd continues to see significant momentum – showcasing the demand for foundational container technologies,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “A lot of work and collaboration from the community went into the development and testing of a stable, core container runtime, the community worked hard to broaden its maintainer and adoption base, on top of going through a external security audit so I’m thrilled to see the project graduate.”

Born at Docker in 2014, containerd started out as a lower-layer runtime manager for the Docker engine. Following it’s acceptance into CNCF in March 2017, containerd has become an industry-standard container runtime focused on simplicity, robustness and portability with its widest usage and adoption as the layer between the Docker engine and the OCI runc executor.

“When Docker contributed containerd to the community, our goal was to share a robust and extensible runtime that millions of users and tens of thousands of organizations have already standardized on as part of Docker Engine,” said Michael Crosby, containerd maintainer and Docker engineer. “It is rewarding to see increased adoption and further innovation with containerd over the past year as we expanded the scope to address the needs of modern container platforms like Docker platform and the Kubernetes ecosystem. As adoption of containerd continues to grow, we look forward to continued collaboration across the ecosystem to continue  to push our industry forward.”

“The IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) is focused on providing an awesome managed Kubernetes experience for our customers. To achieve this, we are always looking at streamlining our architecture and operational posture in IKS,” said Dan Berg, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. “Moving to containerd has helped to simplify the Kubernetes architecture that we configure and manage on behalf of customers. By adopting containerd as our container engine, we have reduced an additional layer in the architecture which has both improved operations and increased service performance for our customers.”

containerd has had a variety of maintainers and reviewers since its inception, with 14 committers, 4,406 commits and 166 contributors currently from companies including Alibaba,  Cruise Automation, Docker, Facebook, Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, NTT, Tesla, and many more. containerd project statistics, contributor stats, and more can be found on DevStats.

“Since its inception, Alibaba has been using containerd and we are thrilled to see the project hit this milestone. containerd is playing a critical role as an open, reliable and common foundation of container runtimes. At Alibaba Cloud, we take advantage of simplicity, robustness and extensibility of containerd in Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes Service and Serverless Kubernetes.” said Li Yi, Senior Staff Engineer, Alibaba Cloud. “Alibaba team will continue our commitment to the community to drive innovation forward.”

To officially graduate from incubating status, the project also adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct, executed an independent security audit and defined its own governance structure to grow the community. Additionally, containerd also had to earn (and maintain) a Core Infrastructure Initiative Best Practices Badge. Completed on September 1, 2018, the CII badge shows an ongoing commitment to code quality and security best practices.

containerd Background

• containerd is an industry-standard container runtime with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness and portability. containerd is available as a daemon for Linux and Windows.
• containerd manages the complete container lifecycle of its host system, from image transfer and storage to container execution and supervision to low-level storage to network attachments and beyond.
• For downloads, documentation, and how to get involved, visit https://github.com/containerd/containerd.

Additional Resources

• CNCF Twitter
• containerd Twitter
• CNCF Blog
• Join the CNCF Conversation on Slack
• CNCF Newsletter

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of cloud native software stacks, including Kubernetes and Prometheus. CNCF serves as the neutral home for collaboration and brings together the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors – including the world’s largest public cloud and enterprise software companies as well as dozens of innovative startups. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit www.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Media Contact

Natasha Woods

The Linux Foundation

nwoods@linuxfoundation.org