Kubernetes is one of the most popular projects around container orchestration but it’s quite interesting that Kubernetes itself has no code to run or manage Linux/windows containers. So, what is running the containers within your Kubernetes pods?
Yes… Kubernetes doesn’t run your containers
It’s just an orchestration platform sitting above container runtimes. No code to run a container and to manage the container’s lifecycle on its own, instead, dockershim was implemented (in kubelet ) for talking to Docker as container runtime. I will talk about dockershim in the later section of the blog.
Also, docker has grown and matured over the last few years and has gained a stack of components like runc (open container initiative), containerd (CNCF project). OCI (est. in June,2015) splits docker into two parts:
1) to handle docker cli & processing requests and
2) to handle container running functions i.e runC.
