Getting started with containerd

General
1

Short question

I’m interested in trying out containerd and I’m wondering if there is any advice on how to get started besides the https://containerd.tools/ website and the source code itself.

Longer question

I’ve been using the checkpoint/restore mechanism for Docker that was introduced in this pull request. Ultimately the pull request was closed in favor of integrating this feature with containerd in the future. The code is still available but no longer maintained. I’ve been running into some bugs, so I’m interested in exploring alternatives.

I’ve downloaded the 0.0.5 alpha release of containerd. But I haven’t seen much information about how to use it (does it need to be started as a service?).

I’ll probably try experimenting with it and see what I can figure out. But I thought I’d ask here too in case anyone knows of a good resource for getting started. Or has information about the status of containerd working with checkpoints (which is the use case I’m interested in).

2

I’m assuming https://github.com/docker/containerd/tree/master/docs wasn’t helpful to you?

Honestly (and I know this answer isn’t ideal), what I would do is read the containerd source code (and source code of the parts of Docker which use it) to learn how to use it. It’s intimidating, it seems time consuming, but in the end the expert knowledge you get out of it is worth it IME.

I would highly encourage you to submit whatever you learn, no matter how small, back to the containerd project as a pull request. The maintainers greatly appreciate this from contributors (and hey, someone has to write the first docs – here’s your chance to shine :slight_smile: ).

That said, it’s a young feature of a young project, so if you sit tight for a while, it’s likely that better documentation will emerge eventually.