Published Work

How Containers Work!

Creator
ISBN
  • 9781990323041
Place of publication
  • Montreal, Quebec
Publisher
Publication date
  • 2020
Pages
  • 23 pages
Illustrations
  • illustrations
Note
  • Access is restricted to staff and students of the University of Strathclyde.
Subject
Resource Type
Official URL
Abstract
  • When you first start using containers, they seem really weird. Is it a process? A virtual machine? What’s a container image? Why isn’t the networking working? I’m on a Mac but it’s somehow running Linux sort of? And now it’s written a million files to my home directory as root? What’s HAPPENING? And you’re not wrong. Containers seem weird because they ARE really weird. They’re not just one thing, they’re what you get when you glue together 6 different features that were mostly designed to work together but have a bunch of confusing edge cases. This zine explains EXACTLY what happens when you run a container on your computer. It turns out that there are only a few big ideas you need to understand what’s going on (images! overlay filesystems! capabilities! pivot_root! cgroups! namespaces! seccomp-bpf!). Once you understand these fundamentals, you’ll be able to go from “um, my container got killed??? why??? help!!!” to “oh, we set the cgroup memory limit too low! I’ll just look up how to adjust it!”
Alternate identifier
  • (OCoLC)1417157433
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