Container manager for multiple container runtimes

Abstract

Container technology has been around for a couple of decades now; however, it is only recently that containers got more attention from the tech world. As one of the first tools for managing containers, Docker played one of the major roles in popularity of containers, providing an easy and meaningful way to use them, by utilizing its advantages over traditional virtualization tools as virtual machines. As containers gained in popularity, more developers took interest in creating container runtimes and managers to facilitate the process of containerization. Today, more than a few container managers exist on the market, each aiming at a single container runtime, which makes switching to another runtime time-consuming and unintuitive, having to use a different container manager. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative implementation of container manager, that will enable presence of multiple container runtimes, by creating a common interface and combining it with existing runtime APIs. Ideally, this container manager can be used for starting different containers using container runtime which suits the current environment better than the rest and can easily follow the development of new container runtimes.