It has been about 4 years since Docker exploded into the scene of Cloud Infrastructure. With that came a shift in cloud applications from monolithic to microservices. Containers made it easy for developers to deploy directly to production mostly caring about the scope of her/his microservice.
Enter container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos, AWS ECS, GKE, Azure Container Service which allow cloud operations to manage containers at scale. Setup these tools with a redundant masters as quorum systems (k8s, mesos) and add hundreds of nodes or slaves and automatically scale your containers up and down depending on demand.
This introduced another challenge where organizations have been trying to figure out what is the best way to run their workloads in these container orchestration tools. Docker has been the default for years but then came runtimes like rkt that tried to create a simpler approach. Then came OCI to try to standardize the future of runtimes started initially from the same Docker/Rkt folks.
Furthermore, Kubernetes had to add support for rkt because of priorities and the request from the community. Afterward, they figured that they didn’t want to add specific support for a new container runtime so they created the CRI (Container Runtime Interface) to talk to OCI compliant runtimes.
This has fueled the creation of more OCI compliant runtimes as seen in KubeCon/CloudNativeCon North America 2017. In particular, CRIO, Kata containers and crun each with their unique capabilities, advantages and disadvantages.
Hear more about the different containers in my talk at KubeCon/CloudNaticeCon EU next month.