By Allen Sun, Alibaba Group

PouchContainer is an open source container project created by Alibaba Group to be enterprise ready and promote OCI container standards. The project is a fundamental piece of software in Alibaba’s infrastructure, it helps process transactions smoothly on millions of containers.

To become a general container engine for every scenario in production, PouchContainer seeks ways to support several OCI-compatible container runtimes. This action makes container service totally out of box:

• runc: container runtime based on Linux cgroups and namespaces;
• katacontainers: container runtime based on hypervisor; and
• runlxc: container runtime based on LXC especially on legacy kernels.

Architecture Based on OCI and Open Source Components

Three OCI-compatible runtimes are listed in the middle right part of architecture.

Features

PouchContainer’s most important features are:

• Rich container: Besides the common ways of running container, PouchContainer includes a rich container mode, which integrates more services, hooks, and many others container internals to guarantee containers running like usual.
• Strong isolation: PouchContainer is designed to be secure by default. It includes lots of security features, like hypervisor-based container technology, lxcfs, directory disk quota, patched Linux kernel and so on.
• P2P distribution: PouchContainer utilizes Dragonfly, a P2P-based distribution system, to achieve lightning-fast container image distribution.
• Kernel compatibility: Enables OCI-compatible runtimes to work on old kernel versions, like linux kernel 2.6.32+.
• Standard compatibility: PouchContainer keeps embracing container ecosystem to support industry specifications such as CNI, CSI and so on. Kubernetes Native: PouchContainer has natively implemented Kubernetes Container Runtime Interface (CRI).

Learn more about PouchContainer

PouchContainer brings many additional features to end-users. Want to learn more? Please visit the PouchContainer GitHub, where the PouchContainer community is currently busy preparing the 1.0.0 GA release.