github.com/containerd/containerd ↗

About containerd/containerd

containerd is an industry-standard container runtime written in Go that emphasizes simplicity, robustness, and portability. It operates as a daemon on Linux and Windows systems and manages the complete container lifecycle including image transfer and storage, container execution and supervision, low-level storage and network attachments. The project is a graduated member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and is designed to be embedded into larger systems rather than used directly by end users.

The runtime has minimal external dependencies, relying on runc and OS-specific libraries like hcsshim to handle most container feature interactions. It supports any registry compliant with the OCI Distribution Specification and includes extensive documentation for operators, administrators, and developers. containerd features a native Kubernetes container runtime interface (CRI) plugin that has reached general availability status, passing all CRI validation tests and node end-to-end tests, making it a viable container runtime for Kubernetes clusters version 1.10 and above.

The project actively welcomes community contributions across documentation, outreach, security advisory roles, and development work. Nightly builds are available for both Linux and Windows, and official binaries for various architectures are provided through distribution packaging and the project's releases page. The codebase is released under Apache 2.0 license, with governance, maintainers, and contributing guidelines shared across the broader containerd organization.