KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017

The containerd project, one of the youngest in CNCF, is purpose-built to be an embeddable container runtime expected for use within higher layer container systems like the Docker engine and the Kubernetes orchestrator. Of course, the intent is that it will be used and embedded within a variety of software systems and has been designed for easy consumption via a gRPC API and client library.

In this talk we'll walk through a straightforward example of building up a container "client" written in Go, using today's containerd client library and API. Similar to how the Kubernetes CRI uses the containerd endpoints or how the Docker engine's libcontainerd operates, our small client will have access to all the same capabilities of container lifecycle management and registry interactions provided by containerd.

To finish our tour of building a fully functioning containerd client, we will pair our new sample application with LinuxKit and the Moby tool project. Using these tools, we'll build a simple virtual machine that embeds containerd and our sample client to test interesting aspects of containerd's capabilities in our own customized Linux OS image.