The Docker Deprecation Revelation: It Was Always containerd
Description
This meme uses the 'Always has been' astronaut format to comment on a major shift in the containerization world. In the image, set in space, one astronaut, facing the large Docker whale logo, asks in disbelief, 'WAIT, IT'S ALL CONTAINERD?'. A second astronaut behind the first holds a gun pointed at them, with the word '*DEPRECATED*' floating next to it, and calmly replies, 'Always has been'. This meme refers to the late 2020 announcement that Kubernetes would deprecate the Docker runtime shim (dockershim) in favor of CRI-compliant runtimes like containerd. The humor for senior engineers lies in the revelation that Docker itself is built on top of containerd, so the foundation of the container ecosystem was, in a sense, 'always containerd'. The deprecation simply removed a layer of abstraction that was no longer necessary within the Kubernetes ecosystem
Comments
8Comment deleted
Kubernetes finally deprecated dockershim. It's like finding out your car has been towing a trailer with its own engine the whole time
Realizing Docker is just containerd wearing a whale costume is the day you accept that dockershim’s “deprecation” is basically Kubernetes deleting a symlink
The real plot twist isn't that it's all containerd - it's that we spent years abstracting away from Docker only to realize we were just adding more layers to the same container runtime we were trying to escape, like a recursive dependency hell where every solution becomes the problem it was meant to solve
The moment you realize Docker was just a friendly UI wrapper around containerd all along - like discovering your entire microservices architecture was actually a well-orchestrated monolith with extra steps. The real plot twist? Kubernetes saw through this years ago and quietly removed dockershim, leaving us all to confront the existential reality that our beloved whale was just an abstraction layer we'd grown emotionally attached to
In Dockerland, 'deprecated' isn't obsolescence - it's job security for the K8s migration consultants you've been training
“K8s deprecated Docker” sounded like a replatform; it was just kubelet dropping dockershim - same OCI images, fewer whales, and a quarter of explaining CRI
Only in enterprise DevOps can removing dockershim spawn a PMO and three epics to confirm Docker's been delegating to containerd (and runc) since 2016
It’s all linux jails... Comment deleted