containerd 1.5.0 was released today and now works on a new operating system: FreeBSD! This new release includes a series of patches (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) which allow containerd to build, enable the native and zfs snapshotters, and use a compatible runtime like runj. I’m really excited about this! It’s awesome that only a small amount of work was needed to make containerd compatible with FreeBSD and that so much of it worked straight out of the box. And with a runtime for jails, containerd’s powerful APIs can now be used to manage FreeBSD’s native process isolation capability. In the rest of the post, we can take a look at how to use containerd on FreeBSD!

Today, I open-sourced runj, a new experimental, proof-of-concept OCI-compatible runtime for FreeBSD jails. For the past 6.5 years I’ve been working on Linux containers, but never really had much experience with FreeBSD jails. runj (pronounced “run jay”) is a vehicle for me to learn more about FreeBSD in general and jails in particular. With my position on the Technical Oversight Board of the Open Containers Initiative, I’m also interested in understanding how the OCI runtime specification can be adapted to other operating systems like FreeBSD.

Note: This post was originally published on the AWS Containers Blog. On March 10, 2020, we introduced Bottlerocket, a new special-purpose operating system designed for hosting Linux containers. In this post, I want to take you through some of the goals we started with, engineering choices we made along the way, and our vision for how the OS will continue to evolve in the future.