Red Hat announced the official 1.0 general availability release of CRI-O on Oct. 16, providing a competitive alternative to running the Docker runtime in Kubernetes deployments. The news comes as the DockerCon EU conference gets underway in Copenhagen, Denmark from Oct. 16-19.
CRI-O makes use the Container Runtime Interface (CRI) within Kubernetes that makes it easier for organizations to choose a container runtime, rather than just relying on Docker as a default.
Mrunal Patel, principal software engineer, Red Hat explained that CRI-O implements the CRI interface using Open Container Initiative (OCI)-based components such as runc. He added that Kubernetes can be run with CRI-O without running docker at all.
“It’s important to also note that Kubernetes does not cover the building of container images,” Patel said. “If customers want to create/build container images, they would still have to use a tool like Docker for this.”
To that end, Red Hat is also building a package called `buildah` to give users another option for developing container images that conform to the OCI standard.
In contrast to other container runtimes that can be called from CRI, Patel said that CRI-O is dedicated to being a Kubernetes container runtime.