This document provides description of items that the project decided to prioritize. This should serve as a reference point for Moby contributors to understand where the project is going, and help determine if a contribution could be conflicting with some longer term plans.
The fact that a feature isn‘t listed here doesn’t mean that a patch for it will automatically be refused! We are always happy to receive patches for new cool features we haven‘t thought about, or didn’t judge to be a priority. Please however understand that such patches might take longer for us to review.
Short term objectives are listed in Issues. Our goal is to split down the workload in such way that anybody can jump in and help. Please comment on issues if you want to work on it to avoid duplicating effort! Similarly, if a maintainer is already assigned on an issue you'd like to participate in, pinging him on GitHub to offer your help is the best way to go.
The roadmap process is new to the Moby Project: we are only beginning to structure and document the project objectives. Our immediate goal is to be more transparent, and work with our community to focus our efforts on fewer prioritized topics.
We hope to offer in the near future a process allowing anyone to propose a topic to the roadmap, but we are not quite there yet. For the time being, it is best to discuss with the maintainers on an issue, in the Slack channel, or in person at the Moby Summits that happen every few months.
We introduced runC as a standalone low-level tool for container execution in 2015, the first stage in spinning out parts of the Engine into standalone tools.
As runC continued evolving, and the OCI specification along with it, we created containerd, a daemon to control and monitor runC. In late 2016 this was relaunched as the containerd 1.0 track, aiming to provide a common runtime for the whole spectrum of container systems, including Kubernetes, with wide community support. This change meant that there was an increased scope for containerd, including image management and storage drivers.
Moby will rely on a long-running containerd companion daemon for all container execution related operations. This could open the door in the future for Engine restarts without interrupting running containers. The switch over to containerd 1.0 is an important goal for the project, and will result in a significant simplification of the functions implemented in this repository.
A lot of work has been done in trying to decouple Moby internals. This process of creating standalone projects with a well defined function that attract a dedicated community should continue. As well as integrating containerd we would like to integrate BuildKit as the next standalone component.
We see gRPC as the natural communication layer between decoupled components.
We have been prototyping the Moby assembly tool which was originally developed for LinuxKit and intend to turn it into a more generic packaging and assembly mechanism that can build not only the default version of Moby, as distribution packages or other useful forms, but can also build very different container systems, themselves built of cooperating daemons built in and running in containers. We intend to merge this functionality into this repo.