Docker

What's up with CRI-O, Kata Containers and Podman?

The container ecosystem is moving rapidly. A lot happened in 2019! It seems the container ecosystem has arrived at the “consolidation” stage of the hype cycle: Docker Inc. sold off its enterprise business and had a bunch of restructuring. They shelved Docker Swarm saying “The primary orchestrator going forward is Kubernetes.” Twitter joined Spotify in moving away from Mesos-based container orchestration to Kubernetes. This was a huge blow to Mesos given Twitter was its original developer. The Cloud Native Compute Foundation archived rkt. Canonical doubled down on Kubernetes with MicroKubernetes for local development and Charmed Kubernetes for production setups and introduced support for Kata Containers to improve the security and isolation of containers. Red Hat released RHEL8 without Docker support, pointing customers towards their own Podman and CRI-O project. Kubernetes is the clear winner here, but how do Podman, CRI-O and Kata Containers relate to this ecosystem? The diagram below gives a simplified overview.