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Interactive Explainer

Container Runtimes: containerd, CRI-O & runc

How container runtimes work: OCI specification, containerd, CRI-O, runc, and the container execution stack.

🎯Key Takeaways
containerd: default runtime for most K8s distributions
CRI-O: Red Hat/OpenShift preferred, minimal footprint
runc: OCI runtime that creates the actual containers

Container Runtimes: containerd, CRI-O & runc

How container runtimes work: OCI specification, containerd, CRI-O, runc, and the container execution stack.

~1 min read
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What you'll learn
  • containerd: default runtime for most K8s distributions
  • CRI-O: Red Hat/OpenShift preferred, minimal footprint
  • runc: OCI runtime that creates the actual containers

Container Runtime Stack

Kubernetes communicates with container runtimes via CRI (Container Runtime Interface). containerd (derived from Docker) and CRI-O (Red Hat) are the main runtimes. They both call runc (OCI-compliant low-level runtime) which creates containers using Linux namespaces and cgroups.

Key takeaways

  • containerd: default runtime for most K8s distributions
  • CRI-O: Red Hat/OpenShift preferred, minimal footprint
  • runc: OCI runtime that creates the actual containers

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