containerd 2.0 will be the first new major release of containerd since the initial stable release of 1.0 in December, 2017. After six years of iteration, development, and refinement, 2.0 will encapsulate the learning we’ve had building and supporting containerd at large scale (and as the default container runtime for a number of managed container offerings). With that, 2.0 brings some major refactorings of core services (CRI, image management), new functionality (sandbox plugins, transfer plugins, image verifier plugins), improvements (better user namespace support, NRI updates), and removals of deprecated functionality.