DevOps · Flashcard
What is containerd?
- AA high-level container runtime that manages the full container lifecycle — image transfer, storage, execution, and supervision
- BA low-level runtime that directly creates the container process — setting up namespaces, cgroups, and the init process itself
- CAn image builder that assembles layers from build instructions — producing OCI images and pushing them to registries
- DA command-line client that talks to a background engine — sending container commands over a local API socket
Why this is the answer
containerd is a high-level runtime that handles the complete lifecycle and delegates actual container creation to a low-level runtime. It is not runc, which spawns the process with namespaces/cgroups; not an image builder like BuildKit; and not a CLI frontend like the Docker/nerdctl client.
Official docs