Things could have gone horribly wrong. Docker was already the de facto standard when Kubernetes adoption was starting to begin. Docker was also backing its own Swarm orchestrator. The need for an industry standard for container runtime was apparent. This lead to the creation and subsequent graduation in February of containerd within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, joining the ranks of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy and CoreDNS.

“It’s containerd not just being creative but its donation of the CNCF was part of answering that call for kind of a stable boring core runtime that would stay underneath Kubernetes and have the right lifecycle support — to not cause those frictions between Kubernetes just wanting a stable layer that just runs containers without anything else,” Phil Estes, a distinguished engineer and CTO for Container and Linux OS Architecture Strategy for the IBM Watson and Cloud Platform division.