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Containers

Technology for packaging an application along with its runtime dependencies.

Each container that you run is repeatable; the standardization from having dependencies included means that you get the same behavior wherever you run it.

Containers decouple applications from underlying host infrastructure. This makes deployment easier in different cloud or OS environments.

Container images

A container image is a ready-to-run software package, containing everything needed to run an application: the code and any runtime it requires, application and system libraries, and default values for any essential settings.

By design, a container is immutable: you cannot change the code of a container that is already running. If you have a containerized application and want to make changes, you need to build a new image that includes the change, then recreate the container to start from the updated image.

Container runtimes

The container runtime is the software that is responsible for running containers.

Kubernetes supports several container runtimes: Docker, containerd, CRI-O, and any implementation of the Kubernetes CRI (Container Runtime Interface).

What's next

Last modified September 10, 2020 at 4:30 PM PST: Update _index.md (dee4a58df2)