after further digging i see
- the containers spun up as nodes for kubernetes (spun by Docker Desktop) run containerd process
- the images pulled are stored in containerd registry on these nodes. verified by ctr and crictl commands.
I was able to see the logs for kubelet and containerd showing ImagePullErr when a pod deployment requesting the image pull .
from the K8S node (container itself spun by Docker desktop) i manually ran “ctr --namespace k8s .io image pull docker .io/library/alpine:latest” (extra spaces for readability here) … and it did pull the image from public docker hub registry
so im not sure why K8S Pod requesting the same container would fail.